prachid.com : Art & Design + ICT:ผศ.ประชิด ทิณบุตร:Assistant Professor Prachid Tinnabutr

Samaritans has developed a series of e-learning courses in Moodle to provide a cost-effective and convenient way for volunteers to be trained in their own homes.

Samaritans is a registered UK charity, with over 18,000 volunteers, which offers 24-hour confidential support to anyone in emotional distress.

E-learning offers great value for money, and can be organised to fit in with volunteers' personal schedules, as it can be carried out from any Internet-enabled computer, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Nigel Ross, Training and Development Officer for Samaritans, explains: "We extensively researched the industry standard for e-learning platforms and chose the open source learning management system Moodle because we were impressed by the robust and continually evolving platform that it offers as well as its large user base, including the Open University, NHS, local government and defence."

Moodle Partner HowToMoodle is providing Moodle consultancy, training, customisation and hosting for Samaritans.

For further details of how Samaritans are using Moodle to provide e-learning for volunteers, see the HowToMoodle Case Study - Samaritans.

Moodle Partners are a worldwide group of authorised service companies committed to financially supporting the open source Moodle project. They provide a range of optional commercial services for Moodle users around the world.

Our Moodle Books database now contains over 30 books and manuals in various languages.

Recently added titles include Estratégias Pedagógicas e Estudos de Casos (free download) by Lynn Alves, Daniela Barros and Alexandra Okada, plus a number of books from Packt Publishing:

• Moodle 1.9 Extension Development by Jonathan Moore and Mike Churchward
• Moodle 1.9 Theme Design: Beginner's Guide by Paul James Gadson
• Moodle 1.9 for Design and Technology by Paul Taylor
• Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook by Silvina P. Hillar
• Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10): Beginner's Guide by Vanesa S. Olsen

Packt Publishing are kindly offering Moodlers 20% off the price of all their Moodle books and 25% off selected books. See the entries in the Moodle Books database for discount codes.

Remember that buying a book from the Moodle Books database helps support Moodle development, since a percentage of all sales goes to the Moodle Trust.

Thanks to everyone who took part in the Moodle 2 Theme Contest and congratulations to Caroline Kennedy for designing the winning theme, Splash.

Splash is cleanly coded, makes creative use of the Moodle 2 theme engine and was highly rated by the community.

Caroline’s theme will be included in Moodle 2.0 together with other cool Moodle 2 Theme Contest submissions.

Many thanks to Moodle Partner NewSchool Learning for sponsoring and running the contest.

Hi all!

I thought it was time to crawl out of my cave and post a little update here on how things are going with Moodle 2.0.

All of us working on Moodle 2.0 core are still plugging away hard on development. We're responding to all the feedback from people helping to test the series of Moodle 2.0 Preview Releases we've been doing (eg see the notes for Preview Release 4), and fixing hundreds of bugs and rough edges in the new features.

(I'd also like to announce that we are launching our first formal cycle of functional QA testing today, which is a great milestone for us. See Helen's recent post in Testing and QA forum and the QA testing page in the docs for details.)

If all goes well, it's looking like we should be able to hit a usable and feature-complete state for Moodle 2.0 in a couple of weeks, around July 20. You can follow the the main blockers in the tracker to see progress towards this. Unfortunately, I don't think we can call that a final release yet, because the testing period for much of it has not been long enough, so at this point we'll call it Moodle 2.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1).

This code will still not be a recommended upgrade for all sites, but if you are an experienced Moodle admin able to dive into PHP if required, and you urgently require the Moodle 2 features, and you find it works well enough for your particular use of Moodle, then the risk will be manageable. The APIs and Database will be completely frozen and most issues should be relatively cosmetic.

Testing and polishing will continue for probably another month or two, focusing on consistency, correctness and performance. This will also be a great window for developers to update their contributed plugins, as we'll be improving the documentation for core APIs with more examples of best practice for the new Moodle 2 platform.

Thanks for your patience everyone! We are getting close!

Cheers,
Martin (Founder and Lead Developer)

There are lots of Moodle conferences, or MoodleMoots as they are often called, coming up in the next 6 months:

• 6th French MoodleMoot - Troyes, France, 28-30 June (#mootfr10)
• MoodleMoot Italia 2010 - Bari, Italy, 2-3 July (#mootIT10)
  
• MoodleMoot AU 2010 - Melbourne, Australia, 11-14 July (#mootau10)
• US West Coast MoodleMoot 2010 - San Jose, CA, USA, 20-23 July
• US Midwest MoodleMoot - Goshen, IN, USA, 26-28 July (#mootusin10)
• MoodleMoot Austin - Austin, Texas, USA, 2-3 August (#atxmoot10)
• Moodlemoot Colombia 2010 - Bogotá, Colombia, 17-18 August
• MoodleMoot Hamburg - Hamburg, Germany, 8 September
  
• International Moodle Conference - Essen, Germany, 16-17 September (#mootDE10e)
• Polish MoodleMoot - Czestochowa, Poland, 4-5 November (#mootPL10)
• MoodleMoot Spain 2010 - La Rioja, Spain, 11-13 November

If you're organising a Moodle event and would like it added to the moodle.org calendar, please let me know and/or post in the announcements forum in the Moodle Conference Centre.

(Edited by Helen Foster to add additional dates - original submission Wednesday, 23 June 2010, 02:29 PM)

We recently released Moodle 1.9.9 and Moodle 1.8.13 for your Moodling pleasure.

Apart from a range of bug fixes and small improvements, four security vulnerabilities (2 critical, 1 major and 1 minor) have been discovered and fixed since Moodle 1.9.8. (Thanks as usual to the reporters and to all the team responsible for fixing and publicising these serious issues).

WE RECOMMEND ALL MOODLE SITES UPGRADE THEIR SITES TO ONE OF THESE VERSIONS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

As per our usual release procedure, over 46,000 admins of registered Moodle sites were already directly notified nearly a week ago.

Upgrading from 1.9.x or 1.8.x should be a very straightforward affair for most Moodle users as there are no new features. Full details about the releases can be found in the Moodle 1.9.9 release notes and the Moodle 1.8.13 release notes.

The releases themselves are available, as always, from our downloads page or any of our CVS mirrors.

Cheers,
Martin (back to Moodle 2.0!)

Are you into Moodle theme design? If so, how about entering the Moodle 2 Theme Contest run by Moodle Partner NewSchool Learning. The winner of the contest will receive an Apple iPad and all the best themes will be included in the Moodle 2.0 release!

Documentation on the new Moodle 2.0 theme engine is available in Moodle Docs - Development:Themes 2.0 - and if you have any comments or questions you're welcome to join the discussions in the Themes forum.

Full details of the contest, including information on how to enter, may be found here: Moodle 2 Theme Contest. Good luck with designing your Moodle 2.0 themes!

With 9,000 users across two major online learning programs, South Carolina Department of Education (SCDOE) in the USA needed a reliable solution that could support its users' individual learning requirements.

Facing a budget crisis and the need for more flexibility, SCDOE, which previously used a proprietary LMS, decided to switch to open-source Moodle. However, after initially attempting to self-host and experiencing challenges with managing hardware, SCDOE turned to Moodle Partner Moodlerooms for a supported solution with Moodle at the core.

All Moodle Partners contribute directly to the ongoing development of Moodle software via funding and/or expertise, so by making use of Moodlerooms' services, South Carolina Department of Education is helping support Moodle development.

Due to increased flexibility and ease of use, instructors were better equipped to accommodate the unique needs of their individual students. As a result, both the South Carolina Virtual School Program and eLearningSC PD saw increased success, with eLearningSC PD success rates increasing from 93% to 97%.

For further details of this Moodle success story, please see the Moodlerooms South Carolina Department of Education case study.

Our development work on Moodle 2.0 continues furiously towards a estimated release date of July 20, 2010 (about 10 weeks away).

Today, however, we hit a very welcome milestone, Moodle 2.0 Preview 1.

As a true open source project our Moodle development code is always available, of course. This milestone just means that all planned features are mostly implemented (though still with many known bugs), and we feel comfortable inviting experienced Moodle users to start testing it and giving us feedback to polish it into our best release ever.

Please see the Moodle 2.0 Preview 1 release notes for full information on how you can help and finally, thanks to the whole community for your support of Moodle and our goals of helping educators improve the quality of education around the world.

Wrexham Local Authority in the UK has installed Moodle across 10 secondary schools, two work-based learning providers, one advisory learning and teaching support unit, and four pupil referral units.

Simon Billington, Learning and Teacher Advisor at Wrexham Local Authority explains: "Our eLearning network consists of one overarching Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) acting as an eLearning portal linking to other Moodle VLEs across different schools and colleges who can access shared resources and courses. From anywhere within the authority you can log on securely to access work and records."

The Wrexham 14 to 19 eLearning Portal enables students in the area to study a variety of courses at different locations.

Moodle Partner Synergy Learning is providing a range of commercial services for Wrexham Local Authority including hosting, installation, technical support and training. All Moodle Partners contribute directly to the ongoing development of Moodle software via funding or expertise, so by making use of Synergy Learning's services, Wrexham Local Authority is helping support Moodle development.

For further details of Wrexham Local Authority's eLearning network, see the Synergy Learning Case Study: Wrexham Local Authority.

If you are a teacher using Microsoft Office for Windows to produce content for Moodle, then you might be interested in Microsoft's latest product for Moodle.

They've produced an Office Add-in that allows you to open Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents directly from Moodle, and also to save your documents straight back into your course files area - bypassing the Moodle web interface completely. (Note that such Add-ins are only compatible with Office on Windows, not the Mac OS X version).

They've done this by calling Moodle web scripts directly which is probably not as stable as using web services designed specifically for this purpose (such as the ones in the upcoming Moodle 2.0), but their approach does have the huge benefit that it works with any recent 1.x Moodle out of the box with no modifications to the Moodle site.

See the Office Add-in for Moodle page for more details.

I promise this is not an April Fool's joke.

Moodle 1.9.8 and Moodle 1.8.12 were recently released. Apart from a range of bug fixes and small improvements, nine security vulnerabilities (2 critical, 5 major and 2 minor) have been discovered and fixed since Moodle 1.9.7. (Thanks as usual to the reporters and to all the team responsible for fixing and publicising these serious issues).

WE RECOMMEND ALL MOODLE SITES UPGRADE THEIR SITES TO ONE OF THESE VERSIONS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

As per our usual release procedure, all 46,000 admins of registered Moodle sites were already privately notified nearly a week ago.

Upgrading from 1.9.7 or 1.8.11 should be a very straightforward affair for most Moodle users, but you may have login issues if you are using a custom authentication method. Full details about the releases can be found in the Moodle 1.9.8 release notes and the Moodle 1.8.12 release notes.

The releases themselves are available, as always, from our downloads page or any of our CVS mirrors.

Cheers,
Martin

Moodle books for teachers and administrators are now available in an increasing number of languages from our Moodle Books database.

Recently added titles include Costruire Siti E-Learning con Moodle by Roberto Chimenti and Moodle Com a Plataforma Educativa de Centre (free download) by Irene Martínez Pérez, Joaquim Vilar Sais, Joan Queralt Gil, Àngels Mustienes Montero and Jordi Fontich Vicens.

Buying a book from the Moodle Books database is one way of helping support Moodle development, as a percentage of all book sales goes to the Moodle Trust.

Moodle manuals in many languages are also available for download from Moodle manuals.

I'm pleased to announce a new course on moodle.org - Teaching and Learning with Moodle!

According to Tomaz Lasic, Moodle HQ's Education Researcher, in his welcome message,

The main aims of the space are to:

• provide a clear, synthesised and relatively gentle 'intro to Moodle' to new users in education and training environments
• serve as an organised point for great ideas and resources for new and experienced users alike
• become a generator and repository of Moodle-related (in)formal research in the use and design of Moodle

Be sure to check out Moodle recipes for educators - a community cookbook! for ideas on using Moodle in education, and feel free to add your own!

Moodle is not only used by schools, colleges and universities around the world - an increasing number of healthcare organisations are putting it to good use too!

The Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust in south east London, UK, has been using Moodle for two years. Their site now has almost 200 courses and over 3,000 active users.

According to Jeff Burge, Learning & Development lead for Oxleas, "We manage all of our statutory and mandatory training, Continuing Professional Development and e-learning with Moodle, and it has been a huge success for us."

"As a public body our performance is measured by, amongst other things, our achievement against certain governance standards. The NHS Litigation Authority awarded us a full score for our Level 2 assessment in January of this year, and also highly commended our systems, helped in no small part by our utilisation of Moodle."

For further details of Oxleas' success story, and for more experiences of Moodle in healthcare, please see the discussion Moodle in healthcare in the Moodle stories forum.