The open source virtual learning environment Moodle in use at Lapland University of Applied Sciences is version 2.5 of the software. This version is no longer supported since the beginning of this year, so an upgrade is overdue. The reason why the eLearning Services decided not to upgrade during the Christmas break was that we did not want to confront the new Moodle users in Rovaniemi with too many changes in a short time frame. However, this summer, we will execute the upgrade of Lapinkampus Moodle over two branch versions to version 2.7. In this message we look forward to the differences you may expect.
First of all, the look and feel of the environment will change somewhat. Some of the old 1.9 course themes will no longer work with this version, because 2.7 requires themes to be adapted for mobile use. If you have enabled one of those old themes in your course, your course theme will be reset to the standard during the upgrade. On the other hand, several new themes will replace the obsolete ones, so that you have enough new and flexible options to choose from. Another noticeable change in appearance will be entailed by the adoption of the Atto editor as the default text editor in Moodle. This text editor is more flexible and accessible and will sport some new features like autosave.
The assignment module’s on-line text submission type hs been improved so that teachers can now specify an maximum word length of a submission and they can provide in-line feedback (i.e. modiefy the text submitted by the student in Moodle).
The system for restricting access to course material has been upgraded so that more conditions can be chosen. The teacher can set that students must meet one or all of the conditions, such as obtaining a grade for a task, or having opened a resource. This new set up will make mix ups between availability dates and restriction dates less likely.
Also the logging of course activities has improved so that results can be filtered to teaching, participating or other.
Moodle 2.7 will be supported until the summer of 2017, so we will likely be using it for two years.