Welcome to Moodle 3.3
the latest major release from the global Moodle open source project.
This new release continues our mission to
empower educators to improve our world.
Today, Moodle is used in every country in the
world helping millions of educators and
learners in schools, universities and workplaces.
Moodle 3.3 improvements focused on improving the
experience for all Moodle users.
Our mobile app, aimed at students, includes
updates for all these new features too.
Moodle 3.3's dashboard includes a new
course overview displaying a progress
timeline of current and future
activities. Students can see lists,
sorted by date or by courses, making it much
simpler to see what work is due.
Teachers also have a similar overview as shown here,
with clear reminders on relevant
activities such as assignments that need
to be graded.
Thank you to the Moodle Users Association who chose this project
and funded it for Moodle 3.3.
Our major new integrations with Google G suite and
Microsoft Office 365 allow students and
teachers to log in using these accounts
and then use files from those systems
throughout Moodle.
Moodle maintains the access to these files,
changing permission as necessary
to ensure a fluid experience.
Moodle administrators enable these integrations
system-wide using the new built-in OAuth2 system
which also allows you to use Facebook or thousands of other
sites for authentication
each Moodle user can now use any
preferred external authentication
service to log into Moodle.
This combination of security and convenience
really helps the overall experience.
One less password to remember.
For a longtime Moodle has allowed teachers to set
up activities with completion criteria
so that it could be clear exactly what
needed to be done for each activity.
This could be time-consuming in large courses
but now in Moodle 3.3 we've added tools
to let you control these in bulk so that
you can change the default activity
completion settings for all activities
and also you can update the completion
settings for multiple activities at once.
Setting up completion criteria properly
is important to make your course clearer
for students. This is especially apparent
on a new dashboard which displays
progress and things remaining to do.
Teachers can now restrict the types of
files that you would like students to
submit in assignments.
Teachers that always want student work in the form of
a PDF for example can designate that here.
Likewise the programming teacher can designate specialised file types
that she wants to see.
We've also added collapsible comments in assignments in
order to improve annotation and feedback.
Thank you to Tony Butler, one of the many
devs in the Moodle community for his
work on this new improvement with us.
In Moodle 3.3, our previous small icons have
been replaced by images from the popular
font awesome project. This means icons
will look a lot cleaner on every type of
screen. It can be coloured by theme designers.
The new high contrast icons
also bring improvements for visually
impaired users meeting AAA
accessibility standards.
Finally, you'll notice improved
performance and efficiency displaying
Moodle pages in a browser.
Moodle 3.3 has improved support
of multibyte unicode characters on MySQL databases,
making Moodle work more
naturally for a wide variety of
languages such as Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
In addition there is better
support for the entire range of emoji
characters everywhere that text can be
entered such as forum posts and of
course messaging both on the web and in
our Moodle mobile app.
Earlier versions of Moodle had a quirk that allowed
activities to be hidden inside extra
weeks or topics but still be accessible
to students so it's known as orphaned activities.
Now in Moodle 3.3 you can put
any activity into stealth mode to
achieve the same effects in a more
officially supported way.
We anticipate many teachers using
stealth mode to place extra content in
the course to be used in creative ways.
In Moodle 3.3 teachers can now add
sounds and video files directly to your
course page, by dragging and dropping in
the same way you can already add images.
Moodle will ask you whether you want to
add the media to the course page or make
a file resource. Choosing the first
option immediately embeds it neatly in
the page, otherwise it will be added to
the course as a link. Finally I want to
mention that Moodle 3.3 is the first
version to support our new analytics and
AI initiative called Project Inspire.
This new plug-in is available separately
for now but as it develops you'll see it
become an integral part of the Moodle experience.
As with every release from us
the long list of new features and
improvements along with many other fixes
are only made possible through many hours
of consultation collaboration and
development from our dedicated team of
core developers at Moodle HQ, together with
hundreds of key developers and other
contributors throughout our global
Moodle community. Thank you all for your
continuous support on this and every
release which I know will empower our
educators and benefit all Moodle users.
Enjoy the release and know that there is
plenty more coming