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

For a detailed look at the changes to Moodle please see the Moodle 3.1 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 if you have any questions please contact the ISD Service Desk.

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