Moodle 2.8 introduces advancements for Gradebook, Forums, Analytics, Usability and much more.
Moodle, the world’s open source learning platform, today announces the availability of their latest release, Moodle 2.8, bringing significant evolutionary improvements to the Gradebook tool, forums, analytics and usability in many areas.
“Moodle 2.8 contains a lot of improvements that have been requested by our worldwide Moodle community, but in this release we spent the most time on the Moodle Gradebook. We approached this in a new way, by bringing together a large group of experienced users in a face-to-face workshop over two days to collect a detailed specification for our core developers to implement. Many of the features have been prototyped in the community for a while.” said Martin Dougiamas, Moodle’s founder and CEO. “We also ran a series of surveys for our wider community to help with decision-making. This direct involvement of more key users in our core development process is something we’ll be doing a lot more of in the future.”
Moodle’s Gradebook collects grades from all the activities in a course, allowing the teacher to manage them in one place, and also provides students with an overview of all their grades. Moodle 2.8 fixes a long list of issues in previous versions, by providing a more modern Grader interface that scrolls well on all devices including touch screens, a new “single view” of any row or column, simplified setup using “natural weighting”, a detailed history of grade changes and more.
Forums within Moodle are a key communication tool with the online learning platform for educators and students. Moodle 2.8 has multiple forum enhancements to give users greater control and accessibility with the ability to subscribe to individual discussions, improved navigation and a new ability for participants to reply directly to forum messages via email.
The user experience in Moodle 2.8 is significantly improved with many small features such as text autosave in the standard Atto editor, a new user menu, simpler use of site-wide cohorts and the ability to email private files direct into Moodle.
Moodle is also taking another step towards analytics-based computer-aided education with the addition of a new Events Monitor tool that can notify teachers and admins when certain patterns of behaviour are detected. These notifications can be received via email or via the official Moodle Mobile app.
This release shows another confident step forward in providing the open source tool that educators around the world are asking for to manage their learning experience.
Availability
Moodle 2.8 is available to download free from Moodle online http://download.moodle.org/. Alternatively, users can seek the support of certified Moodle Partners for services including hosting, installation, customisation and many more.
