Moodle Moot UK 2010 – Day 2 Welcome

Welcome to day two by Martin Dougiamas

Moodle 2.0 Overview

Over past ten years code has grown, features been added, and came to the time  when it needed an overhaul. By 1.9 was inevitable to go to 2.0 rather than 1.10. Been working on 2.0 for about two years now.

Have resisted all sorts of features that sit outside of a VLE, instead woorking to make it easy for people to integrate it with their own peripheral systems.

Moodle has 49,000 registered verified sites in 210 countries. Registered sites contain 34 million users, 3.4 million courses, and 1.2 million teachers. At least 500 sites have more than 10,000 users. Interface translated into 75 languages and there are 54 specialised Moodle partners.

UK has 3rd most Moodle sites in the world (US 1st and Spain 2nd).

Moodle 2.0 has some major rewrites and some major new features.

New flag to mark courses as complete (will be useful for our archived modules).

Cohort enrollments (will this be like enrollment streams?)

Files 2.0 will move from on-disk normal storage to database storage. 1.* to 2.0 upgrade process will take hours if you have a  lot of files.

Files have a licencing system where it can store and keep track of licence information on files (e.g. will automatically pull in flickr licence information when adding files from a flickr repository).

Greater flexibility on the design – as design and functionality more divorced from each other. Can change design via PHP templating as well as just CSS.

New roles 7 permissions system. Far more visually understandable permissions overrides.

New comments block that can be stickied on every page in a course to allow back and forth commenting/feedback between students and teachers.

Web services API. SOAP, XML-RPC, REST, AMF

External systems can now remotely control Moodle. Bridge could now use the API to do enrolments rather than DB injection?

Community Hubs: every Moodle comes with a hub that can be turned on, and will turn it into a course repository that can feed into other Moodles.

Moodle 2.1 won’t have code refactoring, will instead focus on pedagogy, education, and usability.

Thoughts on Moodle 3.0 flying around, and some quite radical, but too hazy to go into details. 🙁

Beta release end of April, rough but usable for testing and trying out themes. Full release will be in July, even if they have to cut features.

Book tool is very popular, but possibly won’t be ready for integration in Moodle 2.0, worst case will be updated to work with Moodle 2.0 even if not integrated. Will be in Moodle 2.1 as standard module.

Moodle 2.0 plans to use the tango icon set which is open source and has clean naming scheme so easy to add more icons to it.