Moodle announced its upgrade to version 3.6 on Monday, and the new version is already available for downloads. The Moodle 3.6 is comprised of various new useful features, and a few of them will automatically get merged in its previous versions as well. The primary new features of Moodle 3.6 are as follow:
Dashboard and Course Overview: The latest release has brought the biggest renovation to its dashboard. Now the users can add required block, that performs a specific task, on to it and can rearrange it accordingly. The new update has also introduced a few blocks, including Timeline, Recently Accessed Courses, Starred Courses, and Recently Access Items. The users can arrange, sort and filter the courses with the help of these blocks, and separate them from the regular display. The new Course Overview block helps the students to track their course progress, deadlines and enables the teacher to see the activities that need grading.
Assignment Feedback Improvement: Moodle 3.6 offers an interactive feedback submission for the teachers. They can now attach audios and videos, along with their feedback, for the particular students. The teachers can also record the audio or video for the feedback, directly from the Moodle dashboard. This feature also enables them to upload images, PDF files or other documents along with the feedback.
Additional privacy settings: With the last updates of Moodle 3.5, it had also adopted the GDPR compliance. This time it has brought some other additional privacy settings, which will allow the users to make policy agreements compulsory or optional. It also lets the users delete the data requests from the dashboard and perform an erasure request on previously (prior to Moodle 3.5) deleted users. The users can easily manage the Data Privacy or contact the Protection officer of Moodle, directly, and make data request, that too is now available in a human-readable HTML format.
New Messaging interface: The upgraded messaging interface of Moodle lets the students, teacher and other users interact through personal messages. Now the users can also set restrictions to who can or cannot send messages to them. The teachers can also set course groups, where the teachers and students communicate with each other using the live group messages. The users now can manage their messaging preferences from the settings, add contacts and also see the profile of added contacts.
The new badge features: Moodle now supports the Open Badges version 2 specification from the IMS Global Consortium. The new badges in Moodle are now language-specific and can be linked to competencies in Competency Frameworks. Those badges will now be issued by the certified badge verificators.
Next cloud integration: The Moodle version 3.6 comes with built-in Nextcloud support. Now the users can directly access the files, add, remove or share them on Nextcloud from within Module.
Context Freezing: The new Moodle version has also provided its users with an experimental feature, i.e. Contact Freezing. The feature allows the administrator or anyone of similar power to make the content, like the courses, blocks or other content, ‘Read Only’, to prevent other users from modifying it. Depending on the requirements the settings can be customized at any time. The main goal of this feature is to avoid duplication of the content.
Support for LTI 1.3: The 3.6 version of Moodle has also got support for LTI 1.3, i.e. enhanced security for the protection of users’ information with the help of OAuth2 authentication and JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for message signing.
Moodle is one of the best open-source LMSs, that has been working hard to remain the best and to provide its users with the best learning and teaching experience. The Moodle cloud users will soon have their sites updated with the latest version. Except for the above-mentioned features, Moodle still has to release further information regarding the upgraded features.