Trine IT Services are pleased to announce that Moodle will be receiving an update, taking our Moodle LMS from version 3.11 to version 4.0! This article is intended to expose both faculty and students to the upcoming changes with the new version. This update comes with a massive user interface (UI) overhaul, so navigating the site may be a little different from what you're used to. Other than the cosmetic changes, however, there aren't any major changes to how Moodle works behind the scenes, so common tasks for both professors and students will still function the same way as before.
One of the first major changes you'll notice is that your navigation menu is no longer docked on the left side of your screen. In Moodle 4.0, your navigation menu is always located at the top of your screen, meaning you'll always have a quick link to your home page, dashboard, and the new my courses tab.
The Dashboard page has received a pretty large revamp. The Calendar is now located on the Dashboard to free up space on the home page and now has the ability to filter by courses to see what is due for each course individually. At the bottom of the page is where your recently accessed courses will be located, as well as the new timeline menu. This menu will show you what assignments and activities will be due, according to the time you specify. This reworked dashboard should allow you to better see and know exactly when assignments will be due, without having to search through your courses manually.
The new My Courses tab is meant to more easily find courses than previous methods. Before, you would either have to go through your Dashboard and filter by 'past' courses, or by navigating to their archived section and looking for the course that way. This menu is intended to allow both students and faculty to search for courses in an easier manner. When filtering for 'All' courses, as seen in the above screenshot, a user can simply type in the name of their course and easily find it without having to sift through other previous courses.
In Moodle 4.0, there are new icons for activities within courses. Activities specific to Moodle have been grouped into four different color-coded categories. Pink items are for student submission activities, whether it be an assignment or quiz/exam. Blue items are for file links and external web page links. Green items are for chat-based activities, such as feedback and surveys. Lastly, red items are for collaborative activities, such as discussion forums and the student folder. These are intended to immediately tell a student what kind of activity something is without having to analyze what the icon is, by looking at the color of the icon you can have a general idea of what type of activity one will be. The actual activities themselves are all the same functionality-wise, the only major change is the icon design.
Old activity buttons: New activity buttons:
The left side navigation menu has now been repurposed to only display while within an actual course. The menu will now only display the different topics within a course as a drop-down option, with all of the activities and resources on each topic's page listed underneath the drop-down. This should make navigating through a course much easier, as you can now go from anywhere in the course to any activity with the new navigation menu. You'll also notice that the usual options, such as participants and grades are no longer on the left side menu. These are now located at the top of the course page, and can be accessed as long as you are not within an activity or assignment.
Instructor-specific actions, such as editing course/activity settings have had the placement of their menus slightly readjusted. Like the rest of this update, the only major difference is the placement of the menu, the settings and categories themselves have not changed in practice. In order to make accessing course settings easier and more streamlined, these settings options are now displayed along the underside of the top banner of your Moodle course. Course settings, the participants tab, the gradebook, and reports are all displayed with their own unique options. All other options are present underneath the dropdown option labeled more. Please note that the Import function for courses has been relabeled as course reuse in Moodle 4.0.
Old settings menu New settings menu
Similar to our current live version of Moodle, editing mode is still a toggled function that has to manually be turned on or off. The edit button has now been turned into an on/off slider, located in the upper right-hand corner of the screen when viewing a course you are an instructor for. Editing mode will still function as it does in our current live instance.
Editing Mode off Editing Mode on
These are the major changes you can expect to see once Trine University's Moodle environment upgrades from 3.11 to 4.0. As mentioned throughout this article, this update will bring a major user interface overhaul while leaving a lot of the key functionality of activities and settings the same. This update should make Moodle feel refreshed and modernized for all users and should simplify some site-wide navigation. If you are interested in finding out more about the upcoming version of Moodle, please visit their official release page here, as well as this demonstration from the Moodle team on YouTube.