Tutor2u Moves to Moodle 2

This is an exciting time for our investment in the open-source learning environment known around the world as MOODLE. With the help of our super Moodle Partner Synergy Learning we have migrated to Moodle 2.0 and teachers using our economics courses can now start to experiment with the much enhanced functionality that is built into this ground-breaking development of the Moodle system. Here are some of the main changes and improvements:

* Community Hubs: A new Community Hub has been established - with the super name MOOCH - where Moodle users can share their courses with millions of others in the Moodle Community and beyond. This can be found here. We will be adding to the courses available a little into the new year.

* Conditional activities: This is perhaps one of the most innovative developments, Moodle 2.0 now allows teachers to specify and set course completion condition standards for all students. In other words students can progress through a course but must complete a series of tasks or activities before moving onto each new stage. This allows for chains of activities to be set to aid a progression through a topic. It will be fun to try this out with some Year 12 and Year 13 economists early next term.

* Comment Blocks: The ever-useful blocks give teachers huge scope for customising the pages of their students and their course. A new comment block allows comments to be added to any page within Moodle. That includes feedback on assignments, blogs, articles, forum posts - the lot - great for generating a strong flow of student feedback.

* Private files: My private files block allows access to a user’s private files, which can then be accessed by them anywhere with the File picker

* Plagiarism prevention - Moodle 2.0 now supports integration with plagiarism prevention tools such as Turnitin

* Blogs have been improved and students and teachers can now synchronise their favourite economics and business blogs or anything else for that matter from other parts of the web (using simple RSS feeds) so that their own Moodle home page (My Moodle) has the blogs and other news flows that they want.

* Quiz modules and question banks have been improved for teachers wanting to create their own questions and revision quizzes

* Linking to third party apps: Moodle 2.0 now makes it really simple for students to link to 3rd part applications such as Flickr, Wikimedia, You Tube, Google Docs and Portfolio programs such as Mahara (we are looking at this for next academic year). They can export blogs, forum posts, essays and loads of other assignments into their Google Apps. This is a big plus for me as student collaboration using Google Docs has been a success with my students this term and I plan to be more ambitious in using it next term.

There are many more improvements to the whole Moodle system many of which are really only of interest to 3rd party app developers and system administrators. We will be showcasing some of the uses of Moodle 2.0 at our ICT event in London in February 2011. And in future blogs we will focus on some of the specific improvements in Moodle 2.0 and how we are finding the transition. My early impressions are that Moodle 2.0 is cleaner and much faster. Time for a proper test run!