Moodle 3.5: GDPR and continued focus on usability for a better user experience

May 17, 2018

Moodlers: we are very pleased to announce that Moodle 3.5 is now available for downloading on our community site at moodle.org.

This release has also focused on assisting Moodle sites located in the European Union (and other sites with users in the EU) to be GDPR compliant through a number of standard, new and important features.

As we mentioned in our “What’s up with Moodle 3.5?” and improvements updates previously, our Moodle 3.5 release continues our work on improving the Moodle user experience based on the in-depth background research, stakeholder analysis and design work from our UX team.

Let’s take a look at the top new features and improvements now available in Moodle 3.5:

Standard settings to help Moodle users meet GDPR compliance are now available.

Moodle 3.5, offers as standard essential features to help organisations be GDPR compliant. (These features are also available as plugins for Moodle 3.3.6 and 3.4.3)

A new site administration area in the Users tab – Privacy and policies – now presents a Moodle administrator with a number of options.

In Privacy settings, an administrator can request an age check before a new user can access the site, and can provide a link to contact the organisation’s Data Protection Officer.

In Policy settings, the administrator can specify how to handle user agreements to site and privacy policies.

Further privacy functionality available under privacy settings and policy settings includes features to handle data requests, define and maintain a data registry, review data scheduled for deletion and define, manage and track policies and user agreements.

More attractive and accessible display and images in the course overview are now available through Bootstrap 4.

Bootstrap 4 is the newest version of Bootstrap, which is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile-first websites.

Moodle 3.5 now has Bootstrap stable as standard.

Improvements include:

  • enrolled courses enhanced by images
  • coloured patterns appearing if no image has been uploaded to the course settings
  • new icons for courses link and highlights on links when clicked on
  • new fonts including -apple-system, system-ui, “Segoe UI”, Roboto, “Helvetica Neue”, Arial, sans-serif, “Apple Color Emoji”, “Segoe UI Emoji”, “Segoe UI Symbol”

Filtering questions in the question bank is now easier than ever by using tags.

Educators can now filter questions in the question bank more easily through the provision of additional tag functionality in Moodle 3.5.

This improvement is made possible through funding from the Moodle Users Association.

Moodle users can now record sound and video easier by using the Atto editor.

The Atto editor in Moodle 3.5 now has options for recording audio and video, meaning educators and learners can easily embed media into their learning materials.

Simple global search in Moodle 3.5 means you can find everything without an external search engine.

With simple global search, the contents of a Moodle site may be searched without the need for an administrator to install an external search engine.

To enable this feature, administrators only need to check the box in advanced features and then select “simple search” and go through the relevant steps, including indexing the site.

New badge criteria in Moodle 3.5 mean you can make awarded badges even more special.

Moodle 3.5 brings new badge criteria:

  • Profile pictures may be uploaded
  • Badges may be used as criteria for other badges
  • Membership of a cohort may be also be used as a badge criterion.

Cohort themes in Moodle 3.5 gives administrators options to select a specific theme.

If you are using cohorts in Moodle 3.5 you can assign a specific theme to them.

The administrator now has a new option in the Theme settings page – allow cohort themes. When the administrator accesses the Cohort area of Site administration, they can edit the cohort and select a theme.

Improvements to Quiz and Choice make them more accessible to teachers and students.

Quiz:
In the Essay question, teachers can now specify required file types and include files when grading manually.

Choice:
Students can be made aware of whether and how their selected choices in a Moodle course will display.

Many more improvements are available in Moodle 3.5!

Including:

  • LTI advantage extensions
  • messaging back end improvements
  • bulk edit and unenrol of users who previously self-enrolled
  • and more!

Please refer to our release notes for all the details.

As with all our major releases, all of the improvements you will find in Moodle 3.5 are made possible through the countless hours of collaborative work between our dedicated team of core developers at Moodle HQ and hundreds of key developers and other contributors who are members of our amazing global Moodle community.

Thank you all for supporting our open source project and mission to empower educators to improve our world.

—–