UCL Moodle is due for its summer upgrade tomorrow (25 July 2024). We will be upgrading to Moodle 4.4. Downtime should be minimal and the upgrade will take place between 00:00 and 04:00 GMT on Thursday 25 July 2024.

There will be improvements and new features for site administrators, teachers and students.

What does this mean for you? Well if you are involved in teaching or editing course pages on Moodle, you can expect to see the following changes:

• Course page improvements
• Forum enhancement for groups
• Quiz improvements
• Badge filtering

On course pages, activities and icons are now more clearly defined, icons have more accessible colours and file types can be more easily identified. Also, you are now able to choose to focus on one section at a time when viewing a page and choose to see one section at a time while in edit mode. This will help to reduce clutter when you need to focus on one part of your course page. Topics format has become “Custom sections”.

Additionally, Flexible format will be removed as part of the update. Courses in this format will automatically shift to the “Custom sections” format. The previously issued Flexible format guidance explains why this is happening.

The forum has been enhanced to allow you to post to all groups if the forum is in group mode and you have set up more than one group, which will be a welcome time-saving feature.

In terms of quiz improvements, students can now see when their response to a question was last saved, and teachers can assign a grade to a quiz section to provide more detailed feedback to students. In addition, there is now a new ordering question type that can be used for text or images.

Finally, teachers and students can now filter badges.

Moodle HQ have created a YouTube Playlist which highlights the main changes in Moodle 4.4. We shall also be updating our own mini guides in due course but we are hoping that you find these simple improvements intuitive and seamless.

Please note the TinyMCE editor and Matrix rooms are not part of the upgrade. We are currently reviewing TinyMCE and will update you if we decide to install it in the future.

Happy Moodling (version 4.4) in the meantime!

The Digital Learning Environments team.