Current major works in Moodle 3.4 place a high level of importance and focus on usability

July 4, 2017

It’s busy times behind the scenes at Moodle HQ!

On Monday 10 July, Moodle 3.3.1 will be released along with versions 3.2.4 and 3.1.7. Security issues and bugs were addressed as part of these minor releases.

We’ve also been working on our next major release – Moodle 3.4 – which is scheduled, as per our development process, on the second Monday in November.

If you follow our @moodleorg Twitter online or subscribe to some of the relevant forums on our moodle.org community site, you will also know that we’ve listed some of our major works for Moodle 3.4.

You can view all the current major works on our Roadmap.

At the moment, the Roadmap shows only the projects that we have already started or completed. We have more projects coming and will update the roadmap accordingly.

A focus on usability is big for Moodle 3.4 as we take a quick journey to highlight what some of the current major works are.

Usability improvements for course overview/dashboard

One of the major features of Moodle 3.3 was an improved dashboard, a project voted by the Moodle Users Association.

The improved dashboard gave our users access to a timeline of activities, direct links to activities, and a courses tab – all aimed to clearly display course progress and easy links to start learners’ studies!

Moodle HQ along with a our generous community of developers are working on further improvements to the dashboard based on feedback after the 3.3 release.

Some of those improvements include:

  • Better navigation from the activity’s course from the dashboard timeline;
  • A better look of the overview when designed to appear as a block or a docked block;

You can view all the current work and its progress on our Moodle Tracker.

Promoting the Mobile App in Moodle Core

Mobile learning trend continues to rise with over 70% of internet access, including learning, made through mobile devices.

It goes without saying that making sure that we let all Moodle users know that they can access their learning, courses and their site through the Moodle Mobile app is important.

We’re working on making sure that there is increased visibility of the app in Moodle core through improvements such as:

  • A hint for users accessing their profile page (and mobile is enabled on the Moodle site) that they can log in via the app;
  • A warning in the notifications page when Mobile services are disabled to encourage users to configure them;
  • Adding a footer promotion of “Get Moodle on your Mobile” in all footers on themes just like Moodle Docs.

Check out all the other improvements and work to promote Moodle Mobile in Moodle sites!

Add Inspire Analytics to Core

Phase 1 of Project Inspire has involved collection of data for analysis for the first rollout of the Descriptive and Predictive analytics feature.

This is now available as a plugin – called Inspire – with the recent release of Moodle 3.3.

We are now working to incorporate the Inspire system as part of Moodle core in our 3.4 release scheduled for November.

Stay up to date with the progress through our Moodle Tracker!

Usability improvements to our Moodle Calendar

The next project from the Moodle Users Association to be accepted is improvements to our Moodle Calendar as proposed by Moodler, Stephen Bourget.

Our developers, community and our UX team are working together with the Moodle Users Association to make sure that our improved calendar interface is user-friendly and updated to support many of the modern features, such as “drag and drop,” that are found in many other places throughout Moodle.

You can follow the conversation about Moodle Calendar through our Moodle Tracker.

Let’s merge participants and enrolled users!

Currently, in your Moodle sites, you might have noticed that there are two user lists with almost identical content, in different locations.

We are working on merging both lists seamlessly so that they are easy to find, can be filtered through a variety of criteria for quick search and results and allows for important actions such as messaging, enrolling, unenrolling and many more in the one location.

Check out the specs for this major work.

For all developers: we are making improvements to dynamic scss compilation / caching

As indicated on our Moodle Tracker for this piece of major work in Moodle 3.4, dynamic SCSS compilation is a heavyweight process and we, and our community, recognise that there are improvements we can do to make it work better for users and developers.

All the technical specifications can be found and watched on our Moodle Tracker.

And that’s our six major works for Moodle 3.4 quickly summarised. We look forward to showcasing and releasing all of these usability improvements in our upcoming version.

Stay up to date with all the progress of our Moodle 3.4 works by adding yourself as a watcher to the Moodle Tracker items highlighted above or by joining our Moodle Development community forum!