If you have any questions about these new Moodle features please contact Digital Education by email servicedesk@ucl.ac.uk or on  020 7679 5000 (Ext: 25000 within UCL).

November 2016 

Please see Moodle release notes for details. 

Key features include; an upgrade to Turnitin and the addition of the recycle bin.

July 22nd - 27th 2016

Please as the Moodle 3.1 Summer Upgrade page for more details. 

June 2016

New resource- Lightbox- an image display resource.  This will supersede the slideshow activity.

April 2016

Moodle Plugins updated. No core Moodle code version change (v2.8.10). 

Editor plugin

Atto Pastespecial

Block

Quickmail       - can now specify external email addresses 

choicegroup

hotpot

Local

mass_enroll    - Bulk enrolments/unenrolments has been intergrated into the Settings block.  Can be accessed via Users > Bulk enrolments

Question type

wordtable

algebra

ddmatch

gapfill

multichoiceset 

January 2016

No major changes, mostly behind the scenes maintenance. Upgraded to version 2.8.10 on the 26th January. See the Moodle 2.8.10 release notes for full details

December 2015

Upgraded to version 2.8.9 on the 8th December. See the Moodle 2.8.9 release notes for full details

November 2015

Upgraded to version 2.8.8 on the 10th November. See the Moodle 2.8.8 release notes for full details

Highlights

• Forms on settings pages are no longer auto-populated with passwords and usernames by the browsers

August 2015

Upgraded to version 2.8.7   See the Moodle 2.8.7 release notes for full details

Improved text editor functionality

• Allows selection of font colour, size and face
• Improved HTML view
• Drag and drop of image files directly into the editor

Please also look at the very useful accessibility checker buttons in the editor.

Improved default colours for the Collapsed Topics format
The colours now meet accessibility guidelines and match the colour scheme for the UCL Moodle theme

July 2015

See the 2.8 upgrade page

April 2015

Feedback activity

Moodle Feedback activity is now enabled. This allows you to create your own feedback surveys within Moodle. (the survey tool within Moodle has fixed questions and isnt useful for general feedback)

More details are available at the Moodle.org feedback page

February 2015

Upgraded to version 2.6.7 - there is no new core functionality with 2.6.7, just security patches.       Moodle 2.6.7 release notes

GeSHi text highlighting

You can now highlight software code snippets in the Text editor using the GeSHi - Generic Syntax Highlighter. If you or students are pasting code in Moodle this should help with making sense of it.

Embed UCL Reading List items

You can now include automatically-generated reading list content directly in the central sections of your Moodle course (rather than stuck in a sidebar, as before).

January 2015

Portico Enroments

There is now a block in Moodle, available to everyone with Tutor or Course Administrator access rights on a course. This means you are able to take control of your own enrolments via Portico, without needing to go through the Digital Education team. Existing Portico mappings have been preserved and will be seen by course tutors and administrators in the new block which is viewable when editing is turned on.

See the blog post

http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ele/2015/01/12/a-new-way-to-enrol-to-moodle-via-portico/

and the Moodle resource centre

M06a - Portico enrolments

for more information.

Portico 'Student Code' in Moodle

For students, the 'ID number' field in a users Moodle profile now contains the students Portico 'Student Code' .

If you are exporting from the Gradebook, you can now exportStudent codes with the grades, which will make the uploading to Portico much easier than in the past.

For members of staff, or anyone without a student code, the ID number field will continue to contain the user's UPI number.

December 2014

• The HTML block has been renamed as the Free Text block
• The preview of templates in the Moodle Questionnaire is now working

October 2014

New Turnitin Assignments

New submission inbox

The submission inbox is now a combined view of the assignment settings at the top (containing links to the Rubric Manager, the Quickmark Manager and the Peermark manager) plus the student submissions below. This gives you all your Turnitin assignment functions on one place.When creating a Turnitin Assignment, you now only enter the start, end and post dates in one place in the settings (rather than having duplicated 'Moodle' dates and 'Turnitin' dates in the old version)

PeerMark

PeerMark is the new peer review assignment tool. Instructors can create and manage PeerMark assignments that allow students to read, review, and evaluate one or many papers submitted by their classmates. With the advanced options in PeerMark instructors can choose whether the reviews are anonymous or attributed, decide if students should be excluded from reviews, or pair students to assign students specific papers to review.

The basic stages of the peer review process:
• Instructor creates a TurnitinUK paper assignment
• Instructor creates a PeerMark assignment and sets the number of papers students will be required to review, and creates free response and scale questions for students to respond to while reviewing papers
• Student papers are submitted to the TurnitinUK assignment
• On the PeerMark assignment start date, students begin writing peer reviews
• For each assigned paper students write reviews by responding to the free response and scale questions
• Once the PeerMark assignment due date passes no more reviews can be written, completed, or edited by the writer
• On the PeerMark assignment post date, reviews of the students’ papers become available for the papers’ authors to view

Please see the Peermark section of the Turnitin Instructor Manual: http://pages.turnitin.com/rs/iparadigms/images/en_gb_instructor_manual.pdf

for details on how to set up a Peermark assignment

Automatic creation of test accounts

There is now a link in the Settings block that allows you to create up to 15 test accounts to use in your course. Find out more.

Enhanced CBM plugin

Allows you to more effectively evaluate questions based on CBM results. There are two new entries under the question behaviour dropdown in the quiz settings page.

August 2014

Moodle 2.6.4 release notes

Group choice plugin

This module allows students to enrol themselves in a group within a course. The teacher can choose from which groups the students can chose, and the maximum number of students allowed in each group. Depending on the activity settings, the students can view the members of each group before making a choise, and change their selected group until the deadline.

The Word table quiz import/export tool

This now allows image exports     

July 2014

See the 2.6 upgrade page

February 2014

Slideshow
The Slideshow activity now works properly again. More information on the Slideshow is on the Activities page

Smart People Search
When you are searching for people to add to a course via manual enrolments, the search will now automatically include any matches with middle initials or names. E.g. a search for 'Jane Hughes' will find 'Jane Hughes', 'Jane L Hughes' and 'Jane Lloyd Hughes'

Plus - all the other changes that came with Moodle version 2.4.7

October 2013

Turn off drag and drop

Recently some users have experienced problems when trying to use drag and drop to re-order topics on their Moodle page. In the light of this it is now possible to turn off the drag feature, technically referred to as AJAX. 

Display file type and size

The file size and type will be displayed by default alongside uploaded files. These can be turned off by going into the settings for the file

Assignment notifications

Due to a change when in Moodle 2.4 all students will receive notifications when any feedback is given in a Moodle assignment, even if it was not their work that was marked. This has caused a number of issues and so the Digital Education team decided to turn off the default setting that mail notifications are sent.

However, this will also effect Tutors and Course Administrators who wish to receive notifications when a new submission is made.  We recommend you turni notifications on during the period you are expecting submissions.

You can find guidance on how to change your individual message preferences in the Moodle Resource Centre guide M07 - Personalise your Moodle.

August 2013

Advanced Forum

The Advanced Forum activity module enables participants to have asynchronous discussions with the additional option of allowing anonymous forum posts.

The anonymous posting setting can be enabled in the Advanced Forum settings and students and staff can then choose whether or not to post anonymously. They can also go back to posts at any point in the future, and change their post to reveal their identity or make it anonymous.

Other advanced features include the ability for teachers to bookmark posts and mark posts as substantive (important or meaningful). Students can not see or mark their own bookmarks or substantive posts.

A 'View posters' page allows tutors to see how many posts each student has started, how many posts they have replied to, as well as how many have been marked as substantive by a teacher.

All other settings are similar to the standard Moodle forum ( see Forum miniguide )

July 2013 - 2.4 Upgrade

Information on the 2.4 upgrade

July 2013

Bulk Enrolment Block

Course admins and tutors can now bulk upload students into their Moodle course using just their student's UCL email address   or   UCL userids.

See the Bulk Enrolment block miniguide

June 2013

New Features

• Add an activity / resource being combined
• Drag and drop files and edit titles on the page
• New Moodle assignments
• Offline marking
• Conditional activity, restricted by user details. 
• Add or remove topics from the page
• Group access to topics

Known Issues/Changes in Functionality

• Topic/Section names and summaries
• Assignments

Read more...
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