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Table of Contents

The Moodle Summer upgrade will take place between the 22nd - 27th July 2016. It will see us upgrade to Moodle 3.1, which is a more recent version of the Moodle software.

During any Moodle upgrade there will always be improvements to the system. Many of these might be behind the scenes and so difficult to see. Some changes are visible but relatively small, although they can still have a big impact.

With our bigger summer upgrades there will always be highly visible and fairly significant changes, and the Moodle 3.1 upgrade is no different. A new Moodle platform was rolled out in the summer of 2018. This was due to changes made by the Academic Model Project that meant that all modules now have new codes, making the module code data held on Legacy Moodle out of date.  To ensure a smooth set up of Moodle courses for 2018-2019, it was pertinent that a new instance of Moodle was rolled out to host the new module codes and new courses.

The roll out of a New Moodle also gave us the opportunity to make some improvements to the system including updating the version of Moodle and making changes to the theme to make Moodle more accessible.

Although Moodle still works the same as before, and you should not find a significant learning curve with the changes, there are some really nice improvements to the new version. 

Below you will be able to access more information about what has changes, and what are the best improvement to look out for.

Overview

You will find a nice improvements - some may of which may not be visible to end users e.g. changes to help make Moodle GDPR compliant.

Overview

An overview of the key new features , broken down in a friendly way for tutors and course administrators can be found on the Moodle.org website new features page.

For a detailed look at the changes to Moodle, please see the Moodle 3.1 4 Release notes on the Moodle.org official website.

Highlights of these new features are:

  • New Moodle Assignment grading interface (annotate PDF assignments online).

    • NB - Initially this will only be enabled for PDFs at UCL, however other formats will be enabled soon. 
  • New Turnitin Assignment grading interface (Feedback Studio replaces GradeMark, with similar functionality, but the menu items now appear to the right).

  • Competency based frameworks (these are set up centrally so please contact Digital Education)

  • Pinned forums discussion topics (to keep important topics at the top)

    • Staff can check the ‘pinned’ checkbox when adding/editing a post and these will appear before all the other posts at the top of the discussion forum, with a pin icon alongside the title.

Other changes

  • LightBox Gallery replaces the SlideShow tool, and allows you to easily display multiple images. 
  • Single version of Turnitin, mean that now only one version of Turnitin is available in Moodle, this is the most recent version 2 of the plugin. 

As always from Moodle 3.4:

  • Better Calendar management: See Moodle docs for an overview and demonstration video -  https://docs.moodle.org/34/en/Calendar
  • Smoother participant management: See who is enrolled on your course, and enrol them, all within the same screen. 

We've also made some improvements based on feedback from our community and UCL's priorities.

Highlights from UCL improvements:

  • Viewing options: The option to switch between 'Standard’ and ‘Full screen’ view: this allows a user to personalise the way they navigate within Moodle.
  • Quicker adding of Lecturecast recordings: You can now add Lecturecast recordings via 'Add and activity or resource' link in your Moodle course, without using the Lecturecast Connector block. 

Changes

As with any new system, you will notice a few changes/ improvements within New Moodle. These include:

  • New landing page: allowing access to Legacy Moodle and New Moodle 2018/19
  • New Course Overview: upon login, you’ll see courses you’re enrolled on listed under either In progress, Future and Past tabs. Courses appear under each of these tabs based on the start and end dates within settings for each course in Moodle, so do check under each of these.
  • Colour scheme, layout and view options have been updated to improve navigation and accessibility.
  • ‘My courses’ and ‘This Course’ tabs have been added to  the top of each Moodle course page to improve navigation.
  • The ability to ‘Dock’ and ‘Undock’ blocks . The "docked" blocks appear as vertical tabs along the left margin attached to the page.
  • Functionality:
    • Moodle Rubric: This should now display large and complex rubrics without users having to make changes to the coding of the Moodle page.
    • Category enrolments: Category enrolments now align with the data structure prescribed by the Academic Model Project. If you had access to all courses in a category in Legacy Moodle, you should have similar access in New Moodle, though the listing of categories may be slightly different due to changes in SITS. Note that you may need to search for a course and enrol yourself on it for it to show in your Course Overview when you log in
    • Lecturecast: The process of adding and mapping to a Lecturecast recordings has slightly changed. Please refer to our guidance on Create a Link on a Moodle Course to a Lecturecast Section

*This page will be updated through the summer.

As always, if you have any questions please contact the ISD Service Desk.