One of the new plugins in Moodle 3 is a course format called “Flexible sections”. It allows sections/topics to be placed within other sections in either open or collapsed form. The collapsed section links will open the section on its own page when clicked. Note that this new format may not work with some of the older Moodle themes! Changing the course format back to the default Topics format, will return the sections to their normal positions.
The assignment module in Moodle 3 looks almost the same as in Moodle 2.7. In the assignment settings you may notice that under submission types, if on-line text is chosen as submission type, a maximum word limit may be set, so as to force students to adhere to brevity, for example, in summaries or reports.
The most notable new feature in the assignment, however, only becomes visible when a student submits a PDF file. PDF files are unwieldy and sometimes impossible to annotate for teachers. To deal with this, Moodle 3 contains a simple PDF editor, as shown in the pictures below:
The upgrade of Lapinkampus Moodle and Open Moodle to version 3 and up will not cause drastic shifts in the functionality of the environment, but will bring about a great number of incremental improvements. Some of these improvements and additional functionality will be highlighted in this and subsequent entries.
The Forum module in Moodle is the most used and most flexible tool that can perform almost all functions of the assignment module (including the Urkund plagiarism check), but combines it with the interactivity of a discussion tool. In the upgrade from Moodle version 2.7 to 3.0 the Forum will aquire a few improvements which are shown on the images below:
