Moodle 1.9 Released

[Geoff]

Moodle 1.9 has been released!

After the longest beta-testing period in our history (over 5 months) including a successful Bugathon and nearly a year after Moodle 1.8, I am very glad to announce that Moodle 1.9 is now ready for use!

Major new features include:

• An all-new Gradebook designed from the ground up for expansion and integration with other systems (sponsored by Open University).
• Integrated support for Outcomes, so that learning goals can be tied to individual courses and activities, and can be graded against (Moodle.com)
• A huge increase in performance due to review and refactoring of many parts of the Moodle code. Large sites especially will see major speed increases. Special thanks to Catalyst in particular for their scalability work on the core Roles functions. (Catalyst Pty Ltd, Moodle.com etc)
• Tagging is now a core function allowing us to easily link things like users, blogs, courses etc as well as external sites like Flickr and Youtube through the use of simple tags. (Google SOC and Moodle.com)

and much much more, including hundreds of bug fixes and tweaks.

See the Release notes for full details and as usual, get your fresh copy of Moodle via your local CVS mirror or the (currently very busy!) Moodle download server.

Thanks to everybody in the Moodle community (and their families!) for supporting this complex project in a myriad of ways. It's just getting better and better, and I'm still having as much fun working with you all as the day I started.

Cheers and let's get working on Moodle 2.0 (ok, wait until tomorrow )

Martin
Moodle Founder and Lead Developer

[gaz350]

nice stuff, just in time for a summer roll out

[Geoff]

1.9 is already live on our VLE.

http://vle.carrhill.lancs.sch.uk

[gaz350]

we are still running on 1.5.3
Mainly due to the tech who installed it left(and i was never confident to admin the box until recently) and our head/LA not being able to make their minds up with what platform they were going to choose for the new school, Which we were going to use throughout the LA. So we put off developing things for a while, anyway now we have decided to push on with it again. No way am i going to upgrade during term time!

The entire box is a bit of a mess, so its going to be a a fresh install.

[DSapseid]

We were upgraded to 1.8 over half term by county as they store and manage all the vle's for the whole county! I cant change much on it or add applications to it

http://learning.manhood.w-sussex.sch.uk

[Geoff]

CLEO do a similar thing for Lancs/Cumbria schools. However you also have the option of running your own (if you're brave enough).

[georgebush]

Should be interesting, I'm currently trying to resurrect our Moodle. I did part one of CLEOs training course a few months back and now the second part will probally be on the new version.
After that its the hard part, trying to figure it out from a teachers perspectve and then training teachers. I'll probally start out simply and use it as a place to store files and resources.

[strawberry]

Error reading environment data (13) for me, no upgrade just yet!.

[SimpleSi]

@gb

A simple way to start off is to just put up a simple writing exercise - you can use Moodle itself for the online editing.

Then move onto doing one where pupils upload a document written in something (Writer or Word).

And then do your all singing - all dancing hot potatoes matching quiz with pictures and sound

regards

Simon

[zag]

I just setup our moodle server 2hrs after this was released

Looks like I installed it at a good time!

[beeswax]

After all the huffing and puffing at our school, the head has decided to finally go with Moodle. I haven't been officially told this, but have been asked to set aside two days a week to administer it, so I'll be obliterating our v.1.7 (there's not enough content worth saving) and starting afresh. No doubt when manged (I know, it's a typo, but it somehow looks more appropriate) services arrive we'll have to accept what is given.