Michael G

by Marie Achour.  

Hi Moodlers,

The Moodle Products team recently completed our 3-monthly increment planning process during which we reviewed our priorities and formalised our delivery plans for the quarter ahead as well as reviewed our longer-term roadmap.

This increment is going to be a busy one, with the MoodleMoot Global and the release of Moodle LMS 4.3 taking centre stage in our priorities list.

Our 4.3 release is scheduled for the 9th of October and will likely contain more than 300 bug fixes, improvements and new features which the LMS teams and our community developers have been working on over the last 6 months.

Highlights for the release are forecasted to include:

1. Game-changing new ‘In Course’ Communication options – Empowering better collaboration, the launch of our new integration with the Matrix Messaging system will provide access to a modern messaging interface directly in the heart of Moodle. Additional functionality will also make working with other messaging systems (e.g. Slack or Teams) more seamless. These new in-course communication options will help educators and learners stay better connected, engage more regularly and work more closely together!

2. Sleeker than ever activity card designs – Empowering our educators and learners to achieve better outcomes, our refreshed activity cards will be more streamlined and provide educators easier access to manage groups, access restrictions and activity completion conditions. These improvements will help reduce the time and effort it takes to manage activities in courses and help reduce the scroll length of courses, making them easier to navigate for students.

3. Time-saving default site-level settings for activity completion – Empowering administrators and educators to get their jobs done faster, this new functionality will enable the management of completion criteria for a whole site, reducing the time and effort required to manage these settings. We are very grateful to the MUA for proposing and helping us design such a valuable improvement!

4. More ways to tap into the power of external tools – Empowering our educators to be more creative with LTI tools, our new functionality will include the ability to add and manage pre-configured tools at a course level, providing educators the choice to show these tools in the activity chooser and making the creation of external tool activities easier with a simplified form.

5. And much much more – including further Gradebook improvements, new functionality in Quiz and Question Bank, improved integration with MoodleNet, further enhancements to Report Builder and more capabilities in our Text Editor.

Plus, it will be our most secure version of Moodle yet, with a ton of new security enhancements due for release!

Our plans for the increment will also see us – amongst many other things – progress the Learning Catalogue functionality in Moodle Workplace, add new analytics capabilities in the Moodle Mobile App and make the journey for new MoodleCloud users easier than ever. 

To see the full details of our updated plans, please visit our Public Roadmap.

 

Until next increment!

The Moodle Products Team

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In a first for any OS/2-based distribution, ArcaOS 5.1 supports installation on the latest generation of UEFI-based systems, and includes the ability to install to GPT-based disk layouts. This enables ArcaOS 5.1 to install on a wide array of modern hardware. ArcaOS 5.1.0 can be used for new installs or to upgrade any prior version of ArcaOS 5. If installing from USB stick, the USB install stick may be created using any major operating system at hand (Windows, Linux, MacOS, and of course, OS/2, eComStation, and ArcaOS). Once built, the USB stick can be inserted into any USB port in the target system to boot into the ArcaOS installer/updater in either UEFI or traditional BIOS mode (alternatively, the DVD image may be burned to physical media and also booted to either UEFI or traditional BIOS systems). This release, and the support for UEFI and GPT-based drives in particular, is a massive achievement by the ArcaOS team. They’re most likely a rather small team, serving a small market, and I’m not even sure how much access they really have to the source code of the various parts that make up OS/2 – is anything known about the license between Arca Noae and IBM? – and this release has taken them quite a few years. However long it took, and however much work was involved, ArcaOS can now be used on modern hardware for a long time to come.