Moodle 2.5 brings Badges and Bootstrap

Version 2.5 of the Moodle open source courseware suite has been released. In some ways, the update brings with it many of the same sort of feature enhancements one might expect of any content management system (CMS), but there are some improvements tailored to the education environment as well.

They're the dot in .edu

The release announcement was posted on May 15 in the Moodle discussion forum. The first feature mentioned is support for badges: criteria-based awards given to students, based on guidelines established by the teachers or site administrators. Moodle's badge implementation is compatible with the Open Badges specification created by Mozilla, and earned badges can be displayed outside of Moodle itself. That makes them a potential certification tool for a variety if organizations that use Moodle for online training (outside of, say, the traditional school and college deployments). The release notes observe that Moodle is believed to be the first courseware system to implement Open Badges support.

The other new features of interest to educators include expanded settings for assignment "workflow"—specifically, the ability to set whether or not an assignment can be re-submitted by the student, and whether or not it must be re-submitted until it passes. There are also several new options for setting assignment feedback—for example, whether an assignment should be recorded in an offline spreadsheet, gets a file in reply (which could be anything from a text file to a video), or simply gets brief comments from the teacher. In quizzes, teachers can now include a "template" for essay questions, prompting what the student needs to write rather than presenting a blank text entry field. That might sound like a trivial change, but consider how valuable such a template is in a bug reporting form; such a brief outline can prevent students from accidentally leaving out a vital portion of their answer, and makes asking for multi-part responses simpler. It is also now possible to search the database of students enrolled for a course, which may not be a common occurrence in classroom situations, but could prove useful in online training courses with their potential for unlimited enrollment.

The usables

Several other changes in this release have been classified as usability or accessibility improvements in the release notes, which noted that these are a continuation of "our incremental usability improvement made in every version, and is difficult but very important work that we will continue to focus on in every release." Several of these usability improvements amount to the ability to hide or switch off portions of Moodle's sometimes-dizzying assortment of options. The majority of web forms in the interface have now been reconfigured to hide the less-frequently-used options under a toggle-able "Advanced" switch. Similarly, teachers can switch off the rich-text editor component for quizzes and forms where simple text will suffice.

But there are other usability improvements as well. Folders containing course content can now be displayed in several ways, including a new tree-style navigator akin to the one found in almost all OS file managers. Teachers can now drag-and-drop content directly into course pages, which is a new feature. A returning feature is the addition of a "Jump to section" drop-down list for reading course pages. The bug report suggests this feature disappeared sometime between Moodle 2.2 and 2.3. Without it, the only ways to get to a specific section in course materials were to either to click through the sections one by one with "Next" or to back up to the table of contents.

They're also the M in CMS

As Moodle has evolved, it has found plenty of uses outside of traditional educational institutions, from certification programs at government offices to training for open source applications like Blender. As a result, it has grown into a somewhat more general-purpose CMS; there are plugins and add-ons that enhance functionality and themes that allow administrators to fit Moodle into the established look-and-feel of a site.

Both of these aspects have been improved in 2.5. First, add-ons and plugins can be both installed and upgraded from within the Moodle web interface, rather than requiring shell access to the Moodle server. Second, Moodle now supports creating themes with the open source Bootstrap framework. The release notes caution that version 2.5 does not yet "fully take advantage of" Bootstrap, but say it is already usable for creating themes that automatically work well on desktops and on mobile devices (both with small displays and with touch-screens). Both of these updates are changes that do not alter the fundamental feature set of Moodle, but show its progress as a project—Wordpress adopted similar features when it was growing out of the traditional "blog" use case and into wider CMS adoption as well.

There is also an updated Moodle app for iOS, which allows users to upload photos and videos directly from a mobile device to the course (there are similar apps for Android, but they are unofficial work from third-party developers). There are additional management features, too, such as the ability to switch off new self-enrollments for a course (thus allowing self-enrollments for a time, but also enabling teachers to decide when the time for enrollment is up), there is a new "scheduled maintenance" mode, and support has been restored for enrolling in a paid course with a PayPal payment.

Moodle has had its share of security vulnerabilities in the past (not an uncommon affliction for PHP applications), and version 2.5 also closes several important holes. LDAP password expiration is fixed, information leaks in the built-in gradebook and in site registration have been closed, and passwords are now saved in bcrypt format rather than as MD5 hashes. The site can also be configured to lock out an account if too many failed login attempts are made (with an adjustable threshold value). Finally, this release rolls in all of the security fixes made in point releases of Moodle 2.4 as well.

Moodle is one of those interesting projects that has a large and vibrant user community, but a community that is comparatively self-contained. That is to say, people who run large Moodle installations often do so because they are motivated by the subject matter that they teach, so they may not be particularly interested in open source software as a movement. Still, it is encouraging to see how much momentum the online courseware community has, Moodle in particular, and it looks like version 2.5 is poised to refresh the package in ways that help student and teacher alike.