Best and Cheap Moodle 3.1 Hosting

What is Moodle?

Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is a free open-source learning management system or e-Learning platform, that serves educators and learners across the globe. It is the most widely used LMS in the world and currently has over 68 million users world-wide (and growing!). Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments.

What is New in Moodle 3.1?

Highlights

• MDL-53451 – Competencies support in Moodle
• MDL-52954 – Improvements to the Assignment grading user interface
• MDL-31989 – Global Search API allows to search forums, wikis and other content throughout the whole site. Installation and setup of SOLR server is required,
• MDL-52002 – Significant performance improvements in gradebook calculations
• MDL-48012 – Recycle bin plugin is now part of standard Moodle distribution: allow instructors to “undo” deletions of course modules and courses. Moodle Users Association project
• MDL-49279 – Add support in moodle plugins for exporting “Mobile app addons”

Forum

• MDL-372 – Allow to “pin” discussions to keep them always on the top of the list
• MDL-34160 – Allow forum email subject to be customised
• MDL-47365 – Add permalink option to forum posts
• MDL-51214 – Rename the News forum to “Announcements”
• MDL-44087 – Forum does not observe message notification settings for digest emails
• MDL-53050 – Highlight the selected forum post when deep linking with a #anchor

Assignment

• MDL-52397 – Feedback for Assignments is not sent if the assignment grade timemodified setting was set to two days ago
• MDL-52596 – Add a ‘maxperpage’ site wide setting for grading table size (to mitigate broken grading pages in large courses)
• MDL-52269 – Not obvious to tell if an assignment is in blind marking if user holds the “mod/assign:viewblinddetails” capabilty
• MDL-52270 – Difficult to cross reference users with their blind identities
• MDL-44598 – List student names on ‘grant extension’ screen
• MDL-52490 – Download selected assign submissions as a zip file
• MDL-52290 – EditPDF – Also show the total page number in the pagination
• MDL-52489 – “Download all submissions as a zip” should maintain the folder structure in students submissions

External tool (LTI)

• MDL-52154 – Rework LTI admin screens
• MDL-45064 – Option to add preconfigured external tool to the activity chooser
• MDL-52035 – Integrate LTI Provider support in Moodle as the Publish as LTI tool
• MDL-52821 – Compliance: Send tool_consumer_instance_description in LTI launch request

Feedback

• MDL-53738 – Feedback activity module will be enabled by default in new 3.1 installations. If you are upgrading to 3.1 we recommend you to enable it manually.
• MDL-52094 – Various improvements to UI and bug fixes, including:
  • Performance improvement to download responses as raw data in multiple formats (CSV, Excel, etc.) – now available on “Show responses” page instead of “Analysis”
  • Allow any characters in labels, do not display empty labels
  • Do not display empty pages
  • Map frontpage feedback to multiple courses without leaving the form
  • Improved display of automatic question numbers
  • Disable “Response time” for anonymous feedbacks
  • Use moodleforms to display feedback

SCORM

• MDL-45712 – Add Result field to the SCORM Interactions Report
• MDL-48680 – Add score and status submission events to SCORM activity
• MDL-42473 – Add group support to SCORM activity

Quiz

• MDL-52738 – Quiz attempt/review page should have a previous button to match next
• MDL-46092 – Add the OU styling of the Quiz navigation into Moodle core as the default
• MDL-46091 – Rationalise confirmations when you start a quiz
• MDL-52806 – Show right answers when manually grading automatically marked questions
• MDL-53304 – Immediate feedback behaviours should not show a disabled check button when you can’t use it

Other activity modules

• MDL-42190 – Workshop: Possibility to delete a submission
• MDL-51306 – Folder: Bulk download all files within a folder activity as ZIP file
• MDL-52414 – Lesson: Allow Default Settings for Lesson Module Settings
• MDL-51267 – URL/File: Make setting up a URL/File resource more obvious
• MDL-50794 – Workshop: Restricting file types as attachments to a workshop

Gradebook

• MDL-48634 – Option to rescale existing grades when changing max points
• MDL-52522 – grade_minmaxtouse should be respected for overridden categories
• MDL-51900 – Tab Down Grade Column in Single View of Gradebook
• MDL-52309 – Make Grade History report require user to submit parameters before the report starts running

Performance

• MDL-51374 – Do not purge entire databasemeta cache when there are structure changes (esp temp tables).
• MDL-51603 – Refactor downloading of csv, ods, excel etc files in reports and exports across moodle to stream progressively
• MDL-34925 – Improve bulk user export performance
• MDL-50385 – Performance improvement to the grade history report

Tagging

• MDL-50851 – Introduce tag collections – ability to separate independent tag areas
• MDL-52252 – Add tags to modules (Resources and Activities)
• MDL-25742 – Allow to search wiki pages by tags
• MDL-51283 – Rename “official” tags to “standard”, allow admin to set for each tag area how to use standard tags
• MDL-16855 – Add tag filtering to “Manage tags” page
• MDL-52707 – Allow tags to be combined

Usability

• MDL-27628 – Enrol meta: Possible to add multiple courses without leaving the form
• MDL-51818 – Move the profile ‘Message’ button to be next to the user picture
• MDL-52258 – Calendar now shows duration in calendar block
• MDL-53043 – Move user search box above the students list in the manual enrolments popup
• MDL-35590 – Navigation block redesign to meet ARIA specification
• MDL-49963 – Allow to message all participants when there are more than one page in participants list
• MDL-51354 – Help popup and improved name for events dropdown menu on the course and site logs pages
• MDL-53026 – Use inplace editable for editing cohort names
• MDL-51706 – Move plagiarism links to the top of the summary and full text outputs
• MDL-53382 – “Show all” link on participants page should be moved beneath the page switcher

Other improvements

• MDL-53057 – Add search feature to the File system repository
• MDL-48506 – Improve memcached cache store so that it is multi-site safe
• MDL-50661 – Restyle “Clean” theme to use Logo and Header in Frontpage with smaller logo option in other pages.
• MDL-36652 – When downloading an Excel spreadsheet of student logs, have the course short name included in the file name.
• MDL-53207 – Display stock avatar instead of own user picture from messages from fake users
• MDL-51698 – Markup the crumb trail so search engines understand it and leverage it
• MDL-53072 – Option to choose whether we include suspended users when auto-creating groups
• MDL-52869 – Convert inline activity name edit to use the inplace editable element

For administrators

• MDL-26935 – New capability to control role renaming
• MDL-28030 – Add config.php settings to allow plugins to rewrite output moodle_urls (eg clean / semantic urls)
• MDL-52752 – Administrators can specify an alternate URL to use for MathJax
• MDL-52219 – Completion tracking & availability should default to on for new installs
• MDL-52990 – Enable all emails to be themed, ie add 4 wrapper mustache templates
• MDL-53260 – Option to display CLI upgrade messages in English
• MDL-52386 – Allow to control field for flagging enabled/disabled users in LDAP authentication (useful for Active Directory)
• MDL-52383 – Calendar “Days to look ahead” should allow intervals up to 1 year
• MDL-49934 – Admins or managers should be able to retrieve assignments info via get_assignments web service

Security issues

There are no security issues included in this release, please refer to Moodle 3.0.4 release notes

For developers

Significant new areas

• MDL-31989 – Global Search API allows to index and search forums, wikis and other content throughout the whole site.
• MDL-49279, MDL-50032 – Add support in moodle plugins for exporting “Mobile app addons”
• MDL-53451 – Competencies support in Moodle (documentation)
• MDL-50887 – Implement plugins infrastructure for antivirus and create ClamAV plugin (documentation).
• MDL-51603 – New Dataformat plugin type for downloading data as csv, ods, excel etc (eg from table_sql export)
• MDL-50851 – Significant changes to Tags API, tag areas can now implement callbacks to display tagged items (documentation)
• MDL-46891 – Upgrade to behat 3.x (documentation)

Smaller new things

• MDL-51802 – Reusable element for inplace editing (documentation)
• MDL-30811 – Introduce notification stack to moodle sessions (documentation)
• MDL-52237 – Add a callback to inject nodes in the user profile navigation (documentation)
• MDL-51324 – New course chooser element for moodleforms (documentation)
• MDL-53311 – Reusable element for displaying tree similar to navigation tree (documentation)

Smaller changes in core APIs

• MDL-52954 – file_storage class can now convert between office documents (documentation)
• MDL-53274 – Throw exception (in developer mode) if page context is not set, otherwise it is easily missed in AJAX calls
• MDL-52826, MDL-52715 – Allow to use moodleforms in AJAX requests (documentation)
• MDL-51718 – Allow to specify scheme in moodle_url
• MDL-51700 – Ajax service should clean the return values of the external functions
• MDL-53962 – Changes to webservices XML-RPC API – it is now critical to specify parameters for XML-RPC calls in the correct order. Previously Zend may have been able to work out the order, our new implementation, at this stage, cannot.

Themeability improvements

• MDL-50464 – New renderer for RSS Client Block allows themes to customise its look

Changes related to particular plugins

• MDL-52013 – Allow mod_assign plugins to add calendar events
• MDL-48362 – Improve the enrol API to prevent logic in the UI (documentation)
• MDL-52996 – Allow Atto customisation for special-purpose plugins
• MDL-52781 – Improved validation on user fields when creating users from external datasources
• MDL-53304 – Changes to interactive question behaviour may cause the unit tests for your question type to break if you have followed the common patter. You will need to make changes likethis.

Deprecations

For full list of deprecations refer to lib/upgrade.txt and upgrade.txt files in the folder where the particular plugin is located. Here are the most major deprecations:

• MDL-49414 – Remove deprecated web services
• MDL-48621 – Deprecate the old events system
• MDL-52207 – Delete Zend framework

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Cheap Moodle 3.1 Hosting US – ASPHostPortal.com

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Best Moodle 3.1 Hosting UK – UKWindowsHostASP.NET

UKWindowsHostASP.NET is one of the most developer-friendly web hosting providers, fully trusted by many developers. This company is famous for offering piles of useful developer-friendly features at a well-balanced price. Main features extremely for developers are Moodle 3.1, ASP.NET 5, PHP 5.6.x and much more.

Reliable Moodle 3.1 Hosting Australia – DiscountService.biz

Offering both Linux and Windows hosting services, DiscountService.biz has been voted as one of the best Windows hosting companies. To ensure Movable Type users install this software easily, DiscountService.biz offers a SimpleScript 1-click script installer, with which the software installation can be finished by just clicking the mouse a few times, within 1 minute.

Why You Should Use Moodle?

Moodle is Free

Moodle can be downloaded freely in its official site, moodle.org. Since it is an open source software, its development is revolutionary rather than evolutionary. Programmers, developers, and users around the world are working free towards the improvement of Moodle. Unlike other freewares, Moodle offers full functionality, 24/7 support in moodle.org forums, and simply best value for money because it is free.

Moodle is Easy to Use

Whether you are an administrator, educator or learner, you will find Moodle easy to use due to its graphical user interface which we are all familiar with. For example, you can include like a quiz in a given topic by choosing from the list of activities under the activity menu. Not to mention the icons specifically created to understand better the nuances of course creation under the Moodle environment. The eye icon hides and unhides a particular resource or activity. The up icon moves a resource or activity within the lesson up. It means you don’t have to be a programmer in order for you to use it but you need to invest some time in order for you to familiarize and get the hang of navigating yourself in the Moodle environment.

Moodle is Intuitive

Due to its ease of use, many of its functions are geared toward student learning thus Moodle was designed with educators in mind. With the vast array of options to enhance learning, teachers find it very helpful.

Moodle is Integrated

The learning resources, activities and features are modular which means it can stand alone but they are also designed to complement each other. Examples are: the default news forum can be complemented with the calendar which is offered as an optional block. Resources like text and web page can be complemented by uploading files like podcast to enhance the learning experience of your students.

Moodle is Multi-functional

The Moodle environment offers feature rich elements starting with the block elements like calendar, student activities and text upto activities like chat and forum and wikis. Since it is not exclusive unlike commercial softwares, Moodle supports operating systems like Linux and its other versions. Moodle can be used also as a project collaboration site, news website, school portal, and the list of possible uses is limited only to the users imagination.