Moodle Version 3.9 Long Term Supported (LTS) summary of improvements and enhancements.
Long Term Support (LTS)
Moodle 3.9 is a LTS release. What this means is that it is a version release that will be maintained for a longer period of time than the usual major version release (6 months) and support cycle (generally up to 18 months from the date of release).
Version 3.9 support dates are as follows:
- Bug fixes for general core bugs in 3.9.x will end* 10 May 2021 (12 months).
- Bug fixes for security issues in 3.9.x will end* 8 May 2023 (36 months).
* Currently under evaluation, final support dates to be decided soon. The candidates above can be considered absolute minimums.
Activity Chooser Overhaul
The activity chooser in 3.9 has been redesigned and improved to include the following:
- The activity chooser page has been revamped to support the categorization of activities into three tabs: "Starred", "Recommended", "Activities".
- Course creators and instructional designers can now indicate their favourite activity(-ies) with a 'star' listed in the activity chooser. Any item starred is then displayed in the "Starred" tab.
- The ability to search through all of the activities on the recommended activities admin page to narrow it down to a reasonable number. The selected items will then be displayed on a separate "Recommended" tab in the activity chooser page.
H5P Updates & Improvements
Version 3.9 has improved and updated its support for H5P.
- This version has added a new feature: the ability for content creators and instructions designers to create H5P content as an activity type. They will also be able to define activities standard options such as Availability, Restrict access and other common module settings.
- The addition of duration, completion and success to H5P activity attempts.
- Content creators and instructions designers can now create and add new H5P content directly into the content bank.
- An H5P editor, with all its functionality as well as support for content-type translations, has been integrated. This gives course creators and instructional designers the ability to create a new or modify an existing H5P content in the H5P editor.The addition of H5P Activity backup and restore options.
- Admin UI improvements to manage and delete existing H5P libraries, as well as give information about H5P tools' status.
Content Bank
A new Content Bank repository feature has been added.
- When enabled by the admin, the content bank is an area where content, currently H5P may be accessed, stored, searched, edited and created.
- During course backup and restore process, there is the option to backup and restore course-level content bank content with the rest of the data.
Course Copy
There is now a dedicated UI (page) for copying of courses, This simplifies the process of copying courses as it avoids having to manually start a course backup and restore.
The workflow is similar to the backup / restore wizard, but streamlined for copying a course.
The following function options are available to admin, manager, and teacher user types in the course copy page:
- The option to select whether or not to copy the user data.
- Date fields to specify: Course start date & end date.
- A field to enter a course ID number (not displayed on the course/site and only used to match against external systems).
- A field to select whether the course is hidden or visible.
- A field to select whether manual enrolments are to be copied across in the new course for: Manager, Teacher, Non-editing teacher, and Student.
- Course copying progress tracking: a progress bar is shown on a separate page. Once the process is complete, the user is able to navigate to and display the copied course. A notification can also be sent via message / email.
- A warning will be displayed when an attempt to copy or edit a course while it is being copied.
This reduces the required steps for copying a course from 2 to 1. This will also result in less data clutter (i.e. the forgotten .mbz files of backup/restore-process on the server) to purge. The same counts for creating a course and importing some content.
Safe Exam Browser (SEB) Integration
- What was once a plugin, the Safe Exam Browser (SEB) has been integrated into the standard package release.
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As part of the deeper integration of SEB, new settings have been introduced to allow some flexibility and let admins to enable/disable username display and language selection. The latter functionality will allow students to change language when solving a quiz restricted by SEB.
Quiz & Questions Improvements
- Improvements have been made to the drag-and-drop onto image, drag-drop marker and the drag-drop into text question types to make them more responsive and printable.
Badges
- This version supports Open Badges 2.1.
- Improvements have been made on how admins manage (add/edit/remove) available backpacks.
Accessibility Audit Improvements
- Improvements to the following font formatting tags to comply with accessibility requirements:
- Bold <b> to <strong>.
- Italics <i> to <em>.
- Strikethrough <strike> to <del>.Change the bold plugin to use strong tags instead of b for accessibility
- Improved support of colour contrast and consistent behaviour (mouse and keyboard focus) for link focus with different browsers.
- Improvements to accessibility have been made so that when text is resized up to 400% and user is without assistive technology, there is no loss of content or functionality.
Usability Improvements
- A new feature has been added so that course creators and instructional designers are now able to summarize one or all forums in a specific course.
- Improvement to "My private files" repository to enable users to bulk delete files.
- A convenient new capability has been added to the Atto HTML editor to allow users to copy images from a desktop program (paint / powerpoint / word / gimp / fireworks etc...) and paste them directly into the text editor without having to manually save the file and upload it.
- Improved support internationalized domain names (IDN) in URL resources that contains characters from non-Latin alphabets, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Tamil, Hebrew or the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics or ligatures, such as French or Swedish.
- Addition of a "Go to top" link when users scroll down in Boost theme.
- Make calendar manage subscription form more user friendly
- The navigation in the Book activity has been improved to reduce confusion and making it easier to distinguish it from the general activity navigation.
- The progress report download in Excel-compatible format has now been improved to allow sorting based on dates.
Mobile
- A great feature that simplifies the way users can login into the mobile app via QR code. If mobile services are enabled and this feature is not disabled, a QR code for a URL in the user profile will be generated that will auto-login the user.
For more information on the latest and greatest updates in the all-new Moodle 3.9, check out our exclusive webinar - Watch Now
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