As a continuation of its long-term stewardship of the Moodle Quiz, the Open University in the UK is pleased to announce the release of a set of ten new question types for Moodle 2.1 onwards. All are available for download from the Moodle Plugins directory.

The new question types include:

• Variable numeric - allowing random numbers, variables and expressions within questions
• Drag and drop into text - enabling words to be dragged into sentences, lists and tables
• Pattern match - providing sophisticated response matching features
• Marker - enabling markers to be placed on images
• Opaque - allowing the connection of external question engines

The question types were designed by Phil Butcher at the Open University and developed mainly by web programmer Jamie Pratt, with Quiz module maintainer Tim Hunt overseeing their implementation.

For further details of the new question types, see Phil's OpenLearn site on eAssessment at the Open University with open source software and Tim's forum post New question types.

Apologies to everyone who has tried to access moodle.org recently and found the site down. The reason is that moodle.org has been experiencing very heavy usage and denial-of-service attacks.

Please rest assured that we're doing everything we can to find a solution and ensure moodle.org remains available to provide support for Moodle users around the world and around the clock.

I'm pleased to announce that Moodle is now being translated into over one hundred languages!

Recently started language packs include Romansh Sursilvan (spoken in southern Switzerland), Wolof (spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania), Nepali (the official language of Nepal) and Faroese (spoken in the Faroe Islands, Denmark and Norway). Many thanks to all our translation pack maintainers for their ongoing work.

If you'd like to help with translating Moodle into your language, please see the Translation documentation for further information.

If you'd like to install additional language packs on your Moodle site, login as an administrator and go to Settings > Site administration > Language > Language packs.

To assist us with testing at Moodle HQ, we are keen to know what infrastructure you run Moodle on. If you're a Moodle system administrator, please help us to help you by completing this short survey:

Survey for Moodle system administrators

Many thanks for your help.

Moodle 2.2.1, Moodle 2.1.4, Moodle 2.0.7 and Moodle 1.9.16 have been released.

In addition to a number of bug fixes and small improvements, security vulnerabilities have been discovered and fixed. Thanks to the reporters and to all the people responsible for fixing these security issues.

As always, we recommend that you upgrade your sites to these latest versions as soon as possible. All admins of registered Moodle sites have been notified previously.

Upgrading should be very straightforward. Full details about the releases can be found in the release notes:

• Moodle 2.2.1 release notes
• Moodle 2.1.4 release notes
• Moodle 2.0.7 release notes
• Moodle 1.9.16 release notes

The releases themselves are available via the Moodle download page, either as packages or direct from our CVS and Git repositories.

Please note that Moodle 2.0.7 and Moodle 1.9.16 are no longer fully supported. They are supported for security fixes only.

Happy New Year to everyone in our Moodle community!

If you'd like to meet up with other Moodlers in person in 2012, there are plenty of Moodle conferences coming up:

• MoodleMoot Japan 2012 - Mie, Japan, 22-23 February
• MoodleMoot Austria 2012 - Linz, Austria, 23-24 February (#mootAT12)
• Louisiana MoodleMoot - Shreveport, Louisiana, USA, 6-7 March
• German MoodleMoot 2012 - Münster, Germany, 13-16 March
• Ireland and UK MoodleMoot 2012 - Dublin, Ireland, 2-4 April (#mootieuk12)
• Australian Schools Moodle Conference - Brisbane, Queensland, 12-14 April
• iMoot 2012 - Online, 21-24 April (#imoot12)
• Mountain MoodleMoot - Helena, Montana, USA, 30 May-1 June
• French MoodleMoot - Nîmes, France, 20-22 June (#mootfr12)
• Ohio MoodleMoot - Mansfield, Ohio, USA, 21 June
• MoodleMoot Australia 2012 - Gold Coast, Queensland, 1-4 July (#mootau12)
• US West Coast MoodleMoot - Los Angeles, California, USA, 31 July-3 August
• MoodleMoot Brazil 2012 - São Paulo, Brazil, 19-21 September (#moodlemootBR)

If you're organising a Moodle event and would like it added to the moodle.org calendar, please let me know and/or post in the announcements forum in the Moodle Conference Centre.

(Edited by Helen Foster to add additional dates - original submission Monday, 2 January 2012)

Hi!

We're looking for more feedback from Moodle users about the features that our core developers should be working on during 2012.

If you have a spare couple of minutes could you please take part?  There's only four required questions and two of them are multiple choice. 

Moodle AAARRGH! survey for 2012

Cheers!
Martin

Moodle is one of the top 10 tools for learning in 2011!

Over 500 learning professionals from around the world shared their top 10 tools for learning recently in the 5th Annual Survey of Learning Tools organised by Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT).

Moodle came 8th in the list of 100 tools for learning, up from last year, when it was 10th. See Top Tools 2011 C4LPT for the full list.

In addition to the Moodle 2.2 release announced earlier today, Moodle 2.1.3, Moodle 2.0.6 and Moodle 1.9.15 have also been released.

In addition to a number of bug fixes and small improvements, 13 security vulnerabilities have been discovered and fixed. Thanks to the reporters and to all the people responsible for fixing these security issues.

As always, we recommend that you upgrade your sites to these latest versions as soon as possible. All admins of registered Moodle sites have been notified previously.

Upgrading should be very straightforward. Full details about the releases can be found in the release notes:

• Moodle 2.1.3 release notes
• Moodle 2.0.6 release notes
• Moodle 1.9.15 release notes

The releases themselves are available via the Moodle download page, either as packages or direct from our CVS and Git repositories.

Hi!

I'm very pleased to announce the release of Moodle 2.2 (just a few days later than our strictly planned schedule because of a particularly tricky last-minute bug with blocks that took us into the weekend). 

You can get new packages from the Moodle download page or access the code directly from our main git repository or via one of our many CVS mirrors.

For a full description of Moodle 2.2 start at the Moodle 2.2 release notes, but here are some of the headline features:

• Rubrics - You can design and use rubrics to grade things in Moodle.    Rubrics are actually the first plugin of a new 'Advanced Grading' plugin type: we expect developers will develop many other advanced grading interfaces and integrations.  This feature was developed by David Mudrak and Marina Glancy at Moodle HQ as the first stage in a lot of grading improvements that we have planned.
  
  
• External tools - The IMS LTI standard is a simple but promising way for e-learning tools to interoperate. Our support of this standard allows us to embed learning objects (or full-blown tools like forums) from other web sites into courses so that Moodle can pass user data to the tool, and the tool can send grades back to Moodle's gradebook.  This gives both teachers and developers an unprecedented amount of freedom. This feature was originally developed as a Basic LTI module by Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, then improved and extended to IMS LTI 1.1 by Moodlerooms, with lots of support and suggestions from Chuck Severance of IMS and Eloy Lafuente of the Moodle HQ team.
  
  
• Common Cartridge - IMS Common Cartridge is a standard for packaging learning content (courses) in a platform-independent way. For example it is used by publishers to publish simple courses to go with their textbooks, in a way that works on a variety of Learning Management Systems. Moodle did have support for importing CC packages in Moodle 1.9, and thanks to the work primarily by Darko Miletic at Moodlerooms, this is now available for Moodle 2.2 and later. Exporting to CC will come in 2.3.
  
  
• Mymobile theme - Moodle 2.1 introduced the ability to select different themes for different devices, and now with 2.2 we have a standard theme in core that is custom-designed for smartphone browser screens. This means that when users visit your Moodle site on a small screen they'll see a completely different layout, but one that is suitable for small touchscreens. Big thanks to John Stabinger for his great work on this theme.

There are many many other smaller improvements too, including new features for our mobile app that allow it to download whole courses for offline use (coming soon to an App store near you), but as I said, see the Release Notes for details.

Thanks again to all the developers involved in fixing things large and small in Moodle 2.2 (roughly 100 developers and many more testers).  Every feature in Moodle takes a coordinated effort from users, developers, reviewers, integrators and testers, and they are all reflected in the final result.

The HQ team are now focussed on implementing bug fixes for our stable branches until the end of the year, before we start work on a variety of projects to improve moodle.org and of course, exciting things in Moodle 2.3 (due in June next year)!

Cheers!
Martin

Our Moodle Books database now contains over 50 books and manuals in various languages.

Recently added titles include MOODLE, Administrare, Utilizare, Evaluare by Liliana Ursache, George Vaju, Cătălin Donici and Cosmin Herman, Moodle for Dummies by Radana Dvorak and a number of books from Packt Publishing:

• Moodle 2.0 Course Conversion by Ian Wild
• Moodle 2 Administration by Alex Büchner
• Moodle 2 for Teaching 4-9 Year Olds Beginner's Guide by Nicholas Freear
• Moodle 2.0 E-Learning Course Development by William Rice
• Moodle 2.0 Multimedia Cookbook by Silvina P. Hillar
• Moodle 2.0 for Business Beginner's Guide by Gavin Henrick, Jeanne Cole and Jason Cole
• History Teaching with Moodle by John Martin Mannion
• Moodle JavaScript Cookbook by Alastair Hole

Packt Publishing are offering Moodlers 20% off the price of all of their Moodle books sold this month and 30% off all of their Moodle eBooks. See Moodle Month - Festive Fun for details.

Buying a book from the Moodle Books database is a nice way of helping support Moodle development, as a percentage of all book sales goes to the Moodle Trust.

The Neil Squire Society (NSS) is a Canadian not-for-profit organization that supports and empowers people with physical disabilities.

Online learning programs provided through Moodle are helping train people to reach their employment goals and long-term dreams.

Crystal, who has had to deal with a brain injury and other disabilities, is learning new skills through training on Moodle. "I have become more direct, stronger, and less fearful," says Crystal. "My feelings about finding work have changed. This program has given me more confidence and determination to never give up."

In addition to the online learning programs, the NSS is also using Moodle to provide in-house training for staff and volunteers.

Moodle Partner Lambda Solutions is providing hosting and support for the NSS. All Moodle Partners contribute directly to the ongoing development of Moodle software via funding and/or expertise, so by making use of Lambda Solutions' services, the NSS is helping support Moodle development.

For further details of how the Neil Squire Society are using Moodle, see the Lambda Solutions case study How Moodle Helps People With Disabilities Learn.

I'm pleased to announce that Moodle 2.2, due for release on 1st December 2011, will include the new feature rubrics for grading assignments.

A rubric consists of a set of criteria, each with several levels. A grade is calculated based on the levels selected.

Rubrics is part of the advanced grading methods feature developed by David Mudrak and Marina Glancy from Moodle HQ. Thanks to everyone who joined the discussion Request for comments: Advanced grading methods (like Rubrics) in Moodle 2.2.

It is hoped that in future versions of Moodle, rubrics will be available for grading other activities, such as glossaries and databases.

For further details of rubrics, see the documentation Advanced grading methods and Rubrics and also the screencast by Mary Cooch.

If you're interested in Moodle development, you'll most likely want to visit and/or subscribe to Planet Moodle.

Planet Moodle collects and displays blog posts from Moodle developers and users around the world. Recent posts include an explanation by David Mudrak of how advanced grading methods in Moodle 2.2 was developed, white papers from Gavin Henrick on Moodle 2 themes and repositories, and a useful series of posts by Mike Churchward on converting Moodle 1.9 plug-ins to Moodle 2.

In addition to the RSS feed, you can be notified of new posts by following @moodle on Twitter.