MoodleMoot Keynote – The road ahead for Moodle

Moodle is the name of the system which powers our main online learning environment QMplus. Every year, a Moodle conference, known as a MoodleMoot takes place somewhere in the UK or Ireland. This is where Moodle users gather together to discuss their use of the system, share knowledge and to find out about developments. This year it took place in London just before easter.

One of the highlights is always the keynote presentation by Martin Dougiamas, the inventor of Moodle and the person who heads up the organisation who look after “core Moodle”, known as Moodle HQ. This is the point in the proceedings where we get to hear about the big plan and where things are heading. Generally speaking, we at QMUL are about a year behind in terms of our version of Moodle. The things being talked about are therefore usually a year away for us but being able to see the horizon allows us to plan our own path towards it. Knowing what features are being worked on in future versions allows us to prioritise our own activities and to determine where our efforts are best directed. We maintain a QMplus request tracker where QMplus users can make requests for enhancements to the system. Part of our process for determining which requests to prioritise is based on our knowledge of the features that will be coming in future versions of Moodle.

The full keynote presentation is available to watch online. If you have an hour to spare, it’s an interesting watch as you will get a feel, not only for the new bells and whistles coming soon, but for the general ethos behind the Moodle system.

The rest of this article provides an overview of a few of the highlights which I feel have particular relevance for us here at QMUL which I have divided into:

What’s coming in Moodle 3.1?

Moodle version 3.1 is currently the latest Moodle version. It was released between the MoodleMoot and this article being published and was therefore a major focus of Martin’s keynote. We are currently using Moodle 2.8 and will be upgrading to Moodle 3.0 on July 13th 2016. The following features therefore won’t be coming our way until summer 2017[1]:

  • Support for competency-based education. Although Martin did not focus for too long on this feature in his keynote, I feel that it is something that could be very significant for a number of our users at QMUL and may ultimately have some impact on everyone. Competencies describe the level of understanding or proficiency of a learner in certain subject related skills. Moodle 3.1 provides support for this through the ability to set up competency frameworks in the system and to allow teachers and learners to track their progress against these frameworks through things like learning plans. With other features around providing evidence of competencies, there are some overlaps between this and the functionality provided by our e-portfolio system QMplus Hub and we will need to consider how our two systems work together to complement each other. We will be considering how we might make the best use of this part of QMplus when it arrives in the summer of 2017.
  • Global search. Currently there is no way to search for content across QMplus module areas. This is something that our users have been asking for for some time and will finally arrive with Moodle 3.1.
  • Improvements to online grading. Moodle 3.1 will bring some improvements to the user interface for providing grades and feedback online, particularly for assignments. Electronic assessment and feedback is a major area of concern for us. Our event in December 2015 focussed on finding out about the types of issues and requirements QMplus users have in this area. We have been working on our own custom development, called Gradesplus, which addresses a tiny subset of some of the issues. The improvements coming in Moodle 3.1 will be welcome, however it is likely that this will still be a major area for us to focus on ourselves as many of the requirements we have gathered from staff still do not appear on the core Moodle roadmap.
  • User interface improvements. Moodle users have been complaining about usability and user experience issues for some time. The E-Learning Unit hosted a meeting of the Moodle User Group Greater London (MUGGL) in March this year focussing on this very area and Moodle HQ has long been accussed of not making usability and user experience a priority. It seems that this is changing and in Moodle 3.1 there will be more “in-place” editing, i.e. less clicking between screens and fewer confirmation screens making using QMplus generally smoother. Rather than coming all at once, usability improvements are likely to permeate across the system over time.
  • Gradebook performance improvements. We have lots of users at QMUL who struggle with the gradebook, not necessarily only those with very large numbers of students. Performance enhancements in this area are most certainly welcome but are frustratingly still some time off for us.
  • User disguises. The ability to post to forums anonymously or with a particular role. We currently use a plugin to provide a slightly clunky way to allow anonymous posting in forums. The user disguises feature takes this slightly further and will be available without requiring an extra plugin. It will allow for not only anonymous posting but for posting under a role. User disguises will also become possible in other Moodle activities in the future.

Moodle Users Association

Moodle is an open source system and has a vibrant and enthusiatic user, and developer, community. At the heart is Moodle HQ, the custodians and developers of “core Moodle”. Around this there are Moodle partners, commercial companies who make a living out of providing various Moodle services and then there are the many plugin developers and the many, many Moodle users. Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, the way in which Moodle is developed can seem a little opaque to those who are not fully embedded in the Moodle community. The ways in which decisions are made about which features are developed can seem a little slow moving and perhaps a even a bit random. Feature requests often seem to languish, sometimes for years.

As part of his keynote, Martin spoke about the Moodle User’s Association (MUA) which is a new model for steering development work done by Moodle HQ. It is a membership organisation, you can join as an individual or as an organisation. The MUA propose projects for Moodle HQ to work on and vote to decide on ones that will go forward with your membership level determining the amount of weighting your vote carries. It will be interesting to see how this new model works and the projects that are delivered through it. At the time of writing, one MUA project has been delivered which is the addition of a “recycle bin” in courses which allow users to easily retrieve content that has been accidently deleted.

QMUL is currently not a member but we will be watching how the association develops and may consider membership in the future.

Priorities beyond Moodle 3.1

Looking beyond the latest version of Moodle, what is the direction of travel? For us, this may seem to be very far in the future however, again, knowledge of where things are headed allow us to think about our own plans.

Support for access on mobile devices

At QMUL, we have invested considerable effort in ensuring QMplus is accessible via a web browser on mobile devices. We have achieved this through the development of what is known as a “responsive theme” as opposed to the development of a dedicated QMplus app. There is, however, a Moodle mobile app developed by Moodle HQ and this has been the focus of a large amount of effort recently and will continue to be a major focus in the future. Many of the excellent Moodle mobile developments were showcased in presentations at this MoodleMoot.

It is currently not possible to use the Moodle mobile app with QMplus but we know how important access via mobiles is, particularly to students, so we will be looking more closely at this in the near future.

A ‘blockless’ QMplus

If you use QMplus regularly, you’ll be used to the concept of “blocks”. These are the items which appear on the left and right of a QMplus module area and are used to add various features, such as access to Q-Review lecture recordings. It would appear that the long term direction of travel is for these blocks to be removed from the user interface. Perhaps this can be seen in the context of the higher priority that is now being given more generally to usability and user experience.

We will not be doing a major overhaul of the look and feel of QMplus during our upgrade in July 2016. However over the course of the 2016/17 academic year we will be working with all our users to determine where we go next and changes like this coming in core Moodle will clearly have an influence on this work.

Easier integration with other systems

A major focus of future work for Moodle HQ is to ensure that the system can be easily integrated with other systems. No online learning environment exists in isolation and in reality, QMplus has to integrate with a variety of different systems at QMUL, student records, lecture capture, online reading lists, timetabling, and more. Making sure all of these systems work together well is a complex task. Any changes to QMplus which make this easier are therefore very welcome.

As QMUL now makes use of the Microsoft Office365 system, how QMplus might integrate with this is an area we’ll be looking at in the future.

Resources

These are a few pointers to further information if you’re interested in following up on some of the topics raised in this article.

Watch the keynote

You can watch the whole keynote via the Moodle channel on YouTube.

[1] You might be wondering why we aren’t upgrading to Moodle 3.1 in July 2016 as it is currently the latest version. The reason is one of unfortunate timing. This version has been released too near our upgrade date to be considered stable enough for us to move to.

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