What I am looking forward to in Moodle 2.0

Ah, the smell of Moodle 2.0 is in the air. Birds are chirping, flowers are blooming, and pure awesomeness is right around the corner.

I have been using Moodle since version 1.4 and have loved it the entire way. I have recently been playing with the yet-to-be-released version and it is certainly going to be worthy of the shiny new 2.0. Even though Moodle 2.0 isn’t even in beta yet (currently the beta is scheduled for a February 2010 release) the development version shows the direction the project is headed and there are many new things that Moodle users are going to love. I thought I would share some of the features I am most excited about.

Technical note: I am running my testing environment using the wonderful XAMPP software from Apache Friends. Moodle 2.0 is a major release and is going to require a few updates on the back-end. The major ones are: 1)PHP 5.2.8 is the minimum version of PHP as there are new features that rely on the newer versions 2)MySQL 5.025 – many of you may still be running on version 4. Time to upgrade guys. You can still run on PostgreSQL, Oracle, and MS SQL but I can’t speak to those as I only use MySQL.

Repositories

In short, the new Repository API (application programming interface) will allow you to easily bring content into Moodle from external sources. It makes more sense with an examples.

I use the awesome photo sharing site Flickr. It provides a great interface for sharing and discussing photographs. In Moodle 2.0 you will be able to make a connection to Flickr from Moodle. This will allow you to pull photos from your Flickr account directly from the Moodle interface.

Moodle conneced to my Flickr account

It doesn’t stop with Flickr either. The repository api provides anyone with the ability to build a plugin. Soon you will have direct connections to lots of external content as the Moodle community will certainly deliver many great plugins. In the current development version there are already plugins for:

• Flickr (both your account and public photos)
• YouTube
• Google Docs
• Wikimedia
• Merlot.org
• Mahara
• Alfresco
• Box.net
• File System (give access to any folder on your server)
• Picasa Web Album
• Remote Moodle Site (Pull content from another Moodle server)
• Amazon S3
• URL Downloader (Pull images from any website)
• WebDAV

The administrator gives access to certain repositories and teachers will have the choice of which ones are active for their class. Teachers and students will be able to access these sources for resources and assignments from the “file picker.” The development community has written up many scenarios on the Repository API page to give you an idea of the flow of this new feature. For example:

1. Student needs to submit an assignment and presses the “Choose files” button
2. Student sees a “file picker” where they can see files listed on any of several configured repositories
3. Student chooses MySpace from the list
4. Student is prompted to enter MySpace username/password (if admin allows it, a checkbox could be there to “remember this for next time” but remember security)
5. Student sees their files in MySpace and chooses one or more
6. Files are copied from MySpace to Moodle
7. Assignment module controls the permissions so that only the Student and assignment graders can see the file (other students would not have permission).

Blog Improvements

If you have blogged with tools like Blogger or WordPress then you will undoubtedly find Moodle’s current blog features lacking. It currently amounts to a place to post. That’s it. No comments. A confusing interface. All around not worth using for most people. Moodle 2.0 hopes to improve the state of blogging on Moodle.

Comments are in place in 2.0. This issue has gone back and forth in the Moodle community for some time now. Many thought the it shouldn’t be called a blog if there weren’t comment while others didn’t understand why you couldn’t just use a forum for comments. The argument is now moot and we can move forward.

Blog Comments on Moodle 2.0

While beggars can’t be choosers, I would like to see the Moodle blog expand comment features even further. Most needed in a classroom environment would be threaded comments to help those heavily commented blog posts stay readable. Other than that this feature will certainly make the Moodle 2.0 blog usable for more people.

If you still find the blog in Moodle to be lacking you are in luck. The blog in Moodle 2.0 brings the ability to register external blogs with your account. This means you can use Blogger, WordPress, or any other blogging tool and sync it with your blog on Moodle. This worked well for me on my test install. I registered edutim.com and all my post showed up on my Moodle blog. Pretty cool.

External Blog

According to the doc page for the these blog improvements there will be a blog assignment module. Thus making it easier for a teacher to assign a blog post to students. This would put an entry in the gradebook as well as make it easier to find the related post. This isn’t in development version yet (at least I couldn’t find it). Here’s hoping it makes it in for the final release of 2.0.

Gradebook

Historically the gradebook in Moodle was less than stellar. Moodle 1.9 brought many welcome usability changes making it easier for teachers to keep track of student progress and putting the gradebook on par with many other grading tools. The Moodle development community is still working on tweaking and improving the gradebook. Moodle 1.9.5 brought us stage 1 of this process with easier editing of categories and items, organization improvements (scrollbars!!), and tabbed navigation. Stage 2 is set to hit with the release of Moodle 2.0. With it the gradebook will be easier to use and include a bunch of fixes here and there.

It isn’t clear if it will be included in 2.0 at this point but I am hoping the animated grade statistics report makes it in. It would be a welcome addition and give teachers useful visuals based of the information in the Moodle gradebook. Like this:

Continuous Grade Distribution Visual - mmmm, pretty

Wiki

I should include this here because I know many of you are looking forward to seeing improvements with the Wiki in Moodle. I wish I had more details for you. All I can report is that the aging Wiki module is currently planned to be replaced with a version of NWiki. NWiki is a wiki engine designed from scratch to be part of a LMS. It has been available for Moodle 1.9 but 2.0 will make it an included module. It isn’t included in the development version of Moodle yet, however if you are feeling brave you can download the alpha version here and play with it. I didn’t get it to work on my setup. It is alpha after all. You can be assured that as we get closer to the 2.0 release things will be working a lot smoother.

EDIT: Thanks to Helen Foster’s comment you can find a working 2.0 wiki by clicking of to http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=140032.

Feedback module

I can’t tell you how many times I have told someone the Survey assignment only includes pre-selected questions. People want to create their own surveys. The Feedback module has provided this functionality since Moodle 1.5. Thankfully it is being included as a standard module for 2.0.

A look at the Feedback Module

Navigation

While I think Moodle has always been easy to navigate it hasn’t stopped the developers from improving things. The goals for the 2.o release is clarity, consistency, usability, performance, and backwards compatibility. For the end user this means that Moodle will present data to you in a manner that makes sense. Whether it is more ajaxy drag-and-drop-ability or a tweek to the course navigation, Moodle 2.0 will be even easier to use than ever before. I am particularly fond of the new organization of the new course navigation block. It gives you a quick way to access any week’s content with ajax enabled links (which means you don’t have to load the whole page to access any weeks content).

Course Navigation in Moodle 2.0

Quiz

There are many changes to the quiz module for Moodle 2.0. Including report enhancements, navigation improvements, question flagging, question tagging, and more. My favorite happens to be the quiz editing interface has gotten a complete makeover. If you are a Moodle user you will certainly remember being confused the first time you learned how to create a quiz. While it makes sense once you understand how it works, the interface tended to get in the way. For example, here is an empty quiz from Moodle 1.9.

Quiz Editing in Moodle 1.9

Now let’s look at 2.0

Editing a Quiz in Moodle 2.0

The interface is cleaner and more streamlined all the while including more features. The question bank remains but is now hidden by default so as not to get in the way. It is difficult to explain why these changes result in a better experience but I am sure you will agree once you get your hands on it.

HTML Editor

I usually tell people to use Firefox when using Moodle. This isn’t because I like Firefox the best (although I do) as much as it is about the WYSIWYG HTML editor not working in Safari or Opera. Many Mac users are quite happy with Safari but are disappointed to find they have to write HTML if they want to have their responses display as anything else other that plain text.  Moodle 2.0 will include TinyMCE as the new WYSIWYG HTML editor. This is exciting news as it will work with all modern web browsers (even the beta of Chrome for Mac). It will also give us more options for formating in any HTML area.

WYSIWYG Editor in Moodle 1.9

WYSIWYG Editor in Moodle 2.0 - Thanks TinyMCE

There are many more features planned for the Moodle 2.0 release that will make this version the best ever. I am very much looking forward to rolling it out for the college in the fall of 2010. I will be posting how the process goes here so stay tuned. Feel free to ask questions in the comments, there is so much more to share.

Tagged as: moodle, review