This Monday, Moodle 3.7 was released, the first major update of Moodle in 2019. As always we’ll take a look at the newest Moodle features, and provide you with a quick run through of everything that you need to know. If you’d like a more in-depth look at the latest version of Moodle, feel free to contact us for a quick online demonstration.
Forums – The feature that has received the most changes this update is Moodle Forums, which includes improvements to the back-end refactor and better accessibility as well as a range of completely brand new features such as in-page reply, star/favouriting discussions, manually locking a discussion, the ability to sort your discussions and private replies within forums.
In every Moodle update, one section is decided and supported by the MUA. This year their choice was Forum updates, more information on the MUA can be found on the MUA page and in the tracker.
A New Theme – Moodle 3.7 sees the introduction of a brand new theme for Moodle Core. Based on Bootstrap 4 (further to its introduction in Moodle 3.5) and inspired by the Clean Theme, the new theme will come with a series of design and functionality improvements, including a 3 columned structure allowing you to place blocks to the left and right of the main content and vast improvements to how you design your platform, allowing you to easily change background images and brand colours of the links, buttons and navigation bar, giving your platform a much more unique feel.
With the introduction to the new Classic Theme, we start to see the depreciation of Bootstrapbase and Clean themes.
Support for LTI 1.3 – In the last two major Moodle updates, improvements for LTI support has been a key feature, and this is true again for Moodle 3.7, which introduces support for LTI 1.3 making Moodle one of the earliest adopters of this standard.
Further Support for Open Badges v2 – Competencies has been something we’ve taken a key interest in at Titus Learning, even doing a presentation on the subject at the 2019 UK and Ireland MoodleMoot (also, see our downloadable competencies guide here). That’s why we were thrilled when we found out that in Moodle 3.7, you will now have the ability to award badges to users based on competencies.
Moodle will be adding support for the Badgr.io backpack.
Learning analytics improvements – Analytics has always been an important feature of Moodle, but perhaps an area that was lacking compared to other alternatives. Moodle 3.7 addresses these issues with new features that allow you to create new learning analytics models based on already existing targets, new indicators and time splitting methods (for example, splitting students at risk into different categories with different reasons) and finally the ability to import and export your analytics definitions and models.
Messaging Improvements – New improvements to the messaging feature, allowing you to send group digest emails, the ability to mute conversations, your own personal messaging space to draft different messages and store links and notes to access later, and course tutors now have the ability to delete messages for everyone. Finally by clicking a ‘see all’ button at the bottom of your messages will be taken to a brand new messaging section.
This article offers an introduction to Moodle 3.7, but only covers the highlights of what’s new – there’s a long list of further tweaks, patches and updates also included.
The full list can be found in the Moodle 3.7 release notes over on the Moodle website.
As always, we’ll be testing the new version over the coming weeks and will be in touch with each of our clients to discuss individual upgrade schedules. If you have any questions about Moodle in the meantime, please feel free to get in touch with us or book an online demo:
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