Moodle 3.3 Has Come Up with New Features for The Educators and Students: A Look!
Moodle is one of the most popular open source learning management system that helps you to build a perfect education solution that meets your organizational needs. The platform has helped educators to develop and manage courses online so that education doesn’t become restricted to the physical location.
If you are using Moodle LMS for your institute, then you must have heard a lot of buzz around the latest 3.3 version. As with all the major releases, comes new features and improvements, here in this blog we will look at the main features available in Moodle 3.3.
New course overview block: This is one of the most exciting features of Moodle 3.3. The new overview block makes the visit to the dashboard relevant by allowing the students easily relate with Moodle and the improved course delivery. The new course overview lists all the activities of the courses in which a particular student is enrolled. Teachers will also have a dashboard that will have grades by dates if they use the new feature that allows them to add reminders.
Research has stated that timely notifications, personalized information always has a positive effect on the student’s final performance, specifically on performers at the lower end.
Integration with Google G-suit and Microsoft office: The latest version means faster and easier access to all the tools that the students and teachers need. They can now open documents from other systems when present on the Moodle website. They will need only one login to access multiple accounts and the objective of this feature is to improve the online learning experiences of the users.
Font awesome: This is a popular tool for the web designers. It allows you to replace the icons in the Moodle site that are image files having characters from the open source type. This helps for a faster loading and offers a more homogeneous look to the sites and also the countless places on the web that is already using it. It is compatible with most of the themes and is recommended for accessibility purpose.
More control and faster updates: This enables the teachers to create clear course details for the students and make the course overview dashboard present complete progress of the studies and the work. Teachers will also have greater control over the type of files that the students submit in assignments either in the readable format or specified according to the assignment requirements. This feature helps in grading the assignments easily.
Online communication is enhanced: More support for emoji characters make Moodle 3.3 work naturally for a wider variety of languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. More support for emoji characters mean that you can use it anywhere that text can be entered like the forum posts and in messaging on the web as well as on Moodle mobile app.
Upload media files by dragging and dropping: The latest Moodle version allows to easily upload media files faster by dragging and dropping directly into the course pages. You can also add images in the similar manner and this allows to display the files as a clickable file source or even as a label so that the students can access immediately.
In addition to all the above features, there are also other improvements that users, especially administrators and the developers can enjoy. They include:
Project inspire: The learning analytics project helps to identify and validate indicators of the teachers, students and institutional engagement in various educational activities for developing analytics software features. Project Inspire is Moodle’s Analytics Plan and it has these functions:
- Description of learning engagement and progress
- Prediction of the learning progress
- Diagnosis of learning engagement and progress
- Prescription for improvements of the learning progress.
Collapsible PDF annotation: Plugins for document conversion and the Google Drive document converter is also available. Now the plugins make it easy to configure and install the “Annotate PDF” feature for the assignments. This improvement will allow PDF comments to be collapsible in assignments so that the users will have the ability to add more content.
Activities would be available but not visible on the course page: This is one of the most important features that is used my Moodle users and also the community. There may be cases when teachers or administrators would like to structure the quizzes, courses and even other activities and at the same time want to guide the students through a step by step course. This feature helps with that and also includes:
- Reduces the scrolling of pages by removing the number of sections or orphaned activities
- Instructors and educators have more control to construct a better and orderly way of presenting the courses.
Thus to conclude, we can say that Moodle 3.3 has a long list of new features along with many other fixes and improvements that helps to empower the educators and benefit all the Moodle users.