 Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Moodle Academy webinar. What's new in Moodle 4.2? It's lovely to have you here with us today. So I'm Mary Cooch, Education Manager here at Moodle HQ. And I have with me Helen Foster, UX Analyst and writer from the Product Experience team. And together, we're going to be talking to you about Moodle 4.2. We will pause at certain intervals during the presentation to read through and repeat your questions in the chat. Feel free to type them in the chat. And we'll have time for questions afterwards as well. So the way we're going to do it is we're going to, first of all, look at what's new in site administration from the administrator point of view in the interface. Then we're going to go down into individual courses and share with you what is new for teachers in courses from the point of view of editing and managing your course and new improvements to activities and new features to activities. So with everyone's audio muted, we're now going to begin. And let's start off by looking at what's new in site administration. So there's quite a lot. As you can see, we have a long list here. We're first of all going to focus on some improvements to the report builder feature, which was originally in Moodle workplace. But as many features in workplace, they are brought in and shared with the LMS for free for the world, for the community. Report builder for building custom reports came in Moodle 4.0 and with each release, new improvements come into the community. So we'll take a look at those first. Then we have some new and some extra settings in Admin, some exciting news about trialing Moodle net, and then quite a few in the other section as well. So in terms of the report builder, if you go to create a new custom report, you'll see that there are many sources that you can use for your report. And there is a new one now, which is user badges. I think that will be a very useful report to do. Also, you see here that we have the comments report. But the way that comments has been added is that it's now possible. For example, if you do a report on blogs, as you can see here, you can have the name of the person who made the blog and the title of their blog, but you can also include the content of the comments. I think, again, that will be a very helpful feature. And while we're on this same screenshot, actually some new filters have been added to Moodle 4.2, to the custom reports, enabling you to filter by last buy current and by next hour. So along with other times which you can filter by, you can now filter by hour. If you run course completion reports, so this is my next screenshot here, we have a report users who've completed the course. And along with the course completion, time completed filter, you can have time enrolled, time started, and time re-aggregated. And that's not all. There's still at least one more improvement to report builder that we'd like to share. And that is if you're running course reports. So it's now possible to include on your course report, the course overview file. Basically what that is, is when you're creating your course and you give a summary of it, you can upload what is normally, most times, an image, an attractive image to display with your course. It doesn't have to be an image, though, you as the admin, you can set it so that a PDF of describing the course could be used. And so here you can include that file in your report. An example might be, if you as an admin would like to run a report to see if there are any courses which don't have specific dedicated course images, but are just using the default colorful patterns. Just one instance there. So those are some report builder improvements. We're now going to look at some admin settings. The first one is indentation, that's a new setting. And then we're going to look at some extra additional settings for tiny MCE editor, big blue button, and H5P, all very exciting. Now, in terms of indentation, this has been an interesting topic to follow because in middle 4.0, the ability for teachers to move course activities or resources to the right was taken away. And there was some concern expressed by some users of Moodle that this didn't help in the way that they like to have their courses organized in sections and subsections. So it's now been put back, and in fact, not only for Moodle 4.2, but also 4.0 and 4.1 in the latest versions, which came out on Monday. So all of this is now available to you. So how it works is this. As an administrator, if you go to site administration, and then you go to plugins course formats, you'll see a page for topics format. This is what we have here, but also weekly format. So this indentation setting is in two separate pages, and it applies to the topics and the weekly format. Now, any other contributed formats, they will have to organize that themselves. But these two standard topic and weekly format, you'll see a checkbox, allow indentation on the course page. If you have a completely new Moodle installation of 4.2, that's enabled by default. Otherwise, if you want to enable it, then you can go as an admin and check the box. You might not want to, obviously. And another option that you have, and again, you might want to discuss this first of all, is to reset the indentation. And if we click where it says reset indentation, and a little alert comes up saying, this will remove any indentation previously set for courses in topics format. And there is an equivalent in weekly format. Now, what that actually does, or what that enables in a course, we'll take a look at shortly when we go into our course as a teacher and see what new things they're able to do. So those are some completely new settings. I also said we had additions to tiny MCE, big blue button and H5P. So tiny MCE. Now, tiny MCE, a new accessible updated version of this editor came in in Moodle 4.1. And it is now the default editor if you have a new Moodle 4.2 site. However, as an administrator, we really recommend that you go in and that you make it the default editor if you're upgrading. What's also new now in Moodle 4.2 is that tiny MCE has its own settings page where you can disable or enable any of the features in the editor that you need. And that's including the branding option if you don't want to see that, although it's quite nice to support them. So that's tiny MCE. In terms of big blue button, again, two more extents functionalities. If you go into plugins and you go to big blue button in the extended capabilities section, you as an administrator can check the box to decide whether to show the profile pictures, whether participants profile pictures will be shown during sessions. And then in terms of the recordings of the sessions afterwards, again, in the recording screen, you can decide which of these formats or these files everyone, that's including your learners should be able to view. So it makes sense, of course, that they can view the presentation videos, but also which ones then only people with specific capabilities and will share with you what new capabilities and which have been removed later, only people with those capabilities, such as course teachers can see. So for instance, statistics, the course teacher would see that, you might not want everyone to see it. And then another thing, which I think you will enjoy, and that is a setting for H5P. Now H5P, if you've ever used a lesson activity, for example, you may know that if you start a lesson and then you leave it and you come back to it, you can continue where you left off. This is a little bit similar to that, in that if a student is doing an H5P activity, maybe they answered a couple of questions, but for some reason couldn't continue and couldn't submit, it will now save that state. So when they go back, those questions were saved and they can continue, answer the other questions and then submit. So we're calling that save the current state there. And here as an admin, save state frequency, you can set the frequency, how often that state will be saved. Okay, I'm going to talk a little bit about MoodleNet and then perhaps we'll see if we have any questions then. Now MoodleNet, you may be aware that for a while now, it's been possible if you enable it in your, as an administrator, then you can have in the activity chooser, as a course teacher, you can have in the footer, a link to go to MoodleNet, browse for the content and then bring it in into your course, if you'd like to use it, adapt it. So that's inbound as we would call bringing MoodleNet items in. What we now have is another experimental, so it's in the really early stages of implementation, is going the other way. And so if you want to try this out, you need to go to site administration to experimental settings. And there is a new setting, enable sharing to MoodleNet outbound, because if we're sharing, we're sharing out from our course out into MoodleNet. Or, and I must remember to point this out, it doesn't have to be what we call MoodleNet central, so that is our global MoodleNet site, which I really encourage you to browse and maybe contribute to. You can also install your own instance of MoodleNet, for example, just your university or your company or a group of universities or organizations. And this applies here as well, this setting. When you enable this, if you then go to site administration general to the MoodleNet setting, previously we just had one setting, but now inbound is the one where you can connect and you can browse and look in MoodleNet, bring things in, and outbound is for sharing teacher's content. And so MoodleNet now needs, so you now need to connect your site via OAuth2 services. So we're here on the OAuth2 services page and you can see that we have an option for MoodleNet. And when you've done that and when that's configured, then teachers will be able to share a particular resource or activity in their course too, whichever MoodleNet instance you're connected to. And we'll look at that when we go into our course as a teacher. At the moment you can only share activities and resources, you can't yet share whole courses. As I've explained, this is the initial implementation. This is our experimental setting. So please do experiment and give us some feedback on it. Now we do have quite a few other features and improvements to tell you about. I just wonder, Helen, if there are any questions, questions on Moodle 4.2, obviously, that is the topic of the day. So if you have 4.2 related comments or questions, please let us know. How are we doing, Helen? No questions so far in the chat, but feel free. If there's anything you're not sure about or just are going through, please pop your question in the chat. Oh, just got a couple now. I've got one question saying, how and who decides in which course the activity will be added on MoodleNet? Well, you go in as a course teacher and you go into the activity chooser of your course. So it will then come into your course, okay? If you are an administrator and you're using MoodleNet and you're bringing things in, you're then prompted with the different courses. And so you as the administrator, because you can access all the courses, you can then click the course that you want it to go into. So obviously it depends on your permissions on your access to the course. I hope that answers your question if I've correctly understood it. Yep, seems like it. Scott is asking about indentation saying, it looks like the site admin reset affects all courses. Well, there's one link to reset all courses in topics format and another link if you want to reset all courses in weekly format. Yes, yes, that's right. Likewise, for if you want to enable indentation in weekly and topics format, okay? Shall we continue? Yep, good plan. Okay, other things to mention that's new in site administration. First off, not a new feature, but I like to point out that assignment 2.2, a very old activity module is removed in 4.2. This activity has been disabled by default since 2012, a very long time but was kept if you wanted to enable pre 2.2 backups to be restored. So when you upgrade your site, if it's still using assignment 2.2, you'd be prompted to back up any of these old activities that you wanna keep and restore them as standard assignment activities. Okay, let's look at the rest of the items in more detail. So in 4.2, we provide the option to add cohort custom fields. As for course custom fields, you can choose from adding a checkbox, date and time, drop down menu, short text or text area and specify if the fields required or not. And then these custom fields that you create are shown on the add edit cohort page. Also in 4.2, you have more options for the setting activity chooser tabs, enabling you to show the recommended tab after start. This improvement was suggested by Diane, I don't know how to say her name exactly, Sohini from the University of California who wrote in a tracker issue, to quote, our university has a lot of activities because we span the gamut from sciences and engineering to humanities. We also have a lot of instructors who are new to Moodle and feel overwhelmed to see so many activities. To simplify the activity chooser, we have it open up showing just the recommended activity. So as a site admin, you can select the most commonly used activities to show as recommended as we see in this screenshot and our small selection to choose from. And then more experienced teachers or lecturers can access the full list of activities in the all tab. Also in 4.2, we have a new services and support link setting for if you prefer to enter your own URL rather than linking to Moodle services on Moodle.com in the page footer. Then if you have a new 4.2 site with no courses, maybe you signed up for a Moodle cloud site, rather than seeing a completely blank My Courses page, you'll now see some helpful info and links. Here the site admin is prompted to create a course or manage courses. Then on the students My Courses page, they see a short explanation of why they don't yet have any courses listed. Finally, a teacher with the request course capability has a link to Moodle docs and also to the quick start guide on Moodle Academy. Then if your site has courses in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew or Arabic, and you found text not displaying correctly in downloaded PDF files such as assignment submissions, you'll be pleased to know that in 4.2, the site admin can enable PDF fonts and specify which fonts should be available depending on the language is used. If enabled, you then have a new course setting where you can select the PDF font to be used for downloaded PDF files in the course. Then in 4.2, as usual with the new version, we have a lot of new capabilities. These new ones include the big blue button recording format feature that Mary mentioned and also a couple of new features that we still have to cover. The removed capabilities are all relating to the old assignment 2.2. Okay, thanks Helen. And that's all that we could find for you to show you about admins, what's new insight admin. So unless there's anything urgent to look at in the questions, I'll probably go on to looking at some of what's new in courses. And again, lots. So we're going to look first of all at some course page improvements. And then I've kept this separate because it's a course page improvement but it's a major new feature thanks to the Moodle Users Association and that is bulk editing. We'll go back and look at how you can share your content from your course to a MoodleNet instance. And then Helen is going to talk a little bit about improvements to the grade book, quiz and questions, groups and assignment. So let's start by looking at how you as a teacher edit your course page and how that has improved. And in fact, there are so many of them, I had to make another list here. So you'll look here, what we can do is in sections, we can duplicate and add permalinks. Possibly my favorite feature of 4.2 is the ability to add activities anywhere you want on the course page. And then we have some other visual improvements, including taking a look at indentation. So going into our new 4.2 critical thinking course and if you're interested in what's on these screenshots, the Moodle School demo site Mount Orange has this course as a demonstration course highlighting 4.2 features. We're in a section, module two, identify and analyze arguments. And with the edit mode turned on, we can see that you can duplicate this section and all the content in it. And if it's important to you to have some kind of link to reference the section, you have the option there to add a permalink. Now, this is, yeah, this is my favorite feature. So with edit mode turned on now, if you want to add an item between other items, so for instance, we want to add something between the book, learning materials and the page task to complete, you simply hover your cursor over and press into it when you see that plus sign and the activity chooser will appear. There's no need now to click add an activity or resource and then move it to where you want to. If you want it at the bottom, of course you can, but as long as you have other activities, you can simply click between them and add the resource or activity that you want. And you'll notice that with edit mode turned on, we can see the names of these items, forum, book, page, quiz. This again, when this came out in Moodle 4.0, this sparked some discussion because some people felt it was maybe perhaps not necessary or they didn't use those terms in their organization or it uses up some space. So what we've done now is that you only see the names of the activities when you're a teacher in edit mode, as you can see on the left, but if you're a student and we've got a screenshot here on the right, or if you're a teacher and you've not got edit mode on, then you don't see those names at all. And if you want to add names or titles, you can add them in the link of the actual activity or resource. So that's a new feature, a new improvement in 4.2, which is also in 4.0 and 4.1, the latest versions that came out on Monday. Now, in 4.1, we renamed labels text and media areas. However, they have not until now displayed in the course index and some people felt that it would be useful to have a label in the course index as you scroll through since it's on the page. Now, what you see here is a label or text and media area with a YouTube video. I've added some text, useful video, and then I wrote lesson from Socrates and linked a YouTube video to it. Over in the course index, you'll see the label highlighted. So useful video, that's the text, and then lesson from it's short and Socrates, that is the actual YouTube video because it's not going to show in the course index. So that's worth knowing about. If you don't have anything in the label, if it's just a blank space, it will say text and media area, so you know that it's there. Now, while we're talking about the course index, let's go back and explore the indentation. So our admin set indentation for both topics and weekly format. So our teacher here, he's got edit mode turned on and he has the option to move this page to the right. Unlike previously, with this indentation, you can only move once to the right. You can't have sub, sub, sub, sub sections once to the right and when once back again. So if we were to indent this page, historical overview, and if we were then to indent the book learning materials, then in the course page, you see it's a very subtle indentation of the two items and in the course index. And I think this works really well. This displays very nicely. They're also indented in the course index there. Okay. So now we're going to look at, I think my second favorite feature, which is thanks to the Moodle Users Association, they proposed this project and they sponsored it. And so they have now given us bulk editing in courses. And so if we go back into our course, with edit mode turned on, you won't see it unless you've enabled edit mode. There is a link, bulk edit. And when you click this link as we're going to do now, it will then add check boxes next to each of your sections and individual activities, because you can bulk edit sections as well as activities. So what we've done here is we've checked book page and quiz. And then when you've selected them, in the footer, you can change their availability. So that's visibility or how they are displayed. We'll look at that in a moment. You can duplicate them. So if you quickly want to duplicate some activities to put them into another section, move them in bulk or delete them. So for example, if we decided to bulk move these, you would click the crosshairs icon and then a pop-up would suggest places that we can move them to and we just click into where we wanted to move them. If we wanted to hide them until we were ready to release them because we were still working on these, then this is what you see if you click availability, you can hide or show on the course page. And if you know about stealth mode and that's enabled, you can make them available, but not shown on the course page. And you can do all of that in bulk rather than one at a time. And then finally, just to show you that these two sections, module one and module two are selected. So you can bulk edit them as well. You can change their availability, move or delete them. Duplicate as we've seen, you can duplicate sections from the three dots at each section. Okay, I'm going to talk a little bit about MoodleNet, then we'll see how we offer questions and move on. So if you remember, we enabled the experimental feature of MoodleNet and connected to a MoodleNet instance with OOS2 services when it's all correctly configured. If a teacher has a particular activity or resource that they're very proud of and want to share, they click into it. So our teacher has clicked into the historical overview of critical thinking. And from the more link, there is the option to share to MoodleNet. And obviously it's not going to happen immediately. You'll be given a notification to check, yes, you definitely want to share this and whichever MoodleNet site it is, that will be the one that you will go to. Okay, now I'm going to pass over to Helen who's going to continue with the course improvements. How are we doing for comments or questions Helen? We have a question from Jack about report builder and using a wildcard. I don't know the answer of hand, but what I recommend is for you trying yourself on a 4.2 site. I think the demo site that we have, the sandbox demo is due to be upgraded or is it already upgraded Mary? The sandbox demo is not yet upgraded. However, the school demo, school.moodledemo.net is upgraded. And actually one of the features that are highlighted is that you can go in as a manager and go to the report builder and try out the new features of the report builder yourself. So why not go there and find out for yourself? Because I don't know the answer either, but we do know a site where you can explore. Good plan. Then a comment about if you're on a long-term scope version such as 4.1 about new features being backported, it's not normally done. So the tiny MC setting is not backported. We only backported indentation because it was existing previously and it was removed. So that's that one. Then there's another question asking whether it's possible to disable the display of the label in the course index. No, it's not. It's always displayed the same as all other activities and resources in the course. You don't have that choice. There's a question. Can you create reports in the report builder using SQL queries? I don't know the answer to that one. Do you, Mary? Well, no, I don't think so. Isn't that a separate way of doing reports? But I'm not an expert on that. But again, if you haven't used the report builder, then go and try it out. And remember, any questions that we can't answer or any questions that occur to you later, there's always the forums on middle.org that you can ask. OK, let me move on to gradebook enhancements in 4.2, which include new features in the grader report and gradebook setup. First of all, in the grader report, we have a new search enabling you to easily find students by entering their name, email, or ID number or other user identity that you use. This is a lot easier than finding students by selecting the first letter of their first or last name. Then we've received lots of feedback from people saying they had to scroll a lot in the grader report. So what we've done is made the columns collapsible. So you can collapse user identity columns, such as email, which can be a very wide column. Or if you've got lots of grade items, you can collapse the ones from your previous semester. You can then see how many columns you have collapsed on the top right. And from that dropdown, you can expand selected columns as required. If you collapse a lot of columns, there's even a search to find them easily. Another 4.2 grader report new feature is an icon showing which grades have feedback. You can then choose to view this feedback in full in a modal window. Moving on to grade book setup, we've responded to feedback from people with big grade books of lots of grades and categories and added the option to collapse categories. These collapse categories are then remembered when you next return to the grade book setup page. Also in grade book setup is a new status column showing that category aggregation, in this case natural, and also icons indicating locked or hidden grade items. Also new in courses are improvements to quiz groups and assignment, all of which have been contributed by community developers. So firstly, in a 4.2 quiz, you can customize the question numbers, say, if you want to match the setup of an external test. This feature was developed by the UK Open University. Also developed by the UK Open University in 4.2 quiz, teachers can reopen never submitted quiz attempts. This is a longstanding feature request with over 70 votes in the tracker. And then after reopening an attempt, it's either submitted automatically if the student doesn't have any time left or if you've given the student more time, it's changed back to in progress. 4.2 also includes an important group privacy setting called group membership visibility. If you use a group for giving certain students extra time in assignments and quizzes, you can set the visibility to hidden so that only teachers can view the group and members. Other setting options include only see own membership where a user can see that they are in a group but they can't view other group members. This feature also had lots of votes and has been developed by Catalyst EU. Finally, the last new feature to cover in this presentation on the assignment submissions page, you now have the option to message selected students. Can imagine this is useful if you want to send her in mind to students who've not yet submitted anything. Thank you, Helen. And that's actually, that's it. That's all that we have to tell you about in terms of what's new in site administration and what's new in courses. We do have a little bit of time left. And so I'm going to open it up now to any questions or comments that you would like to say. So I see that Scott is not so happy about labels or we should remember to call them text-to-media areas showing in the course index saying that lots are decorative and it seems like a lot of people have been agreeing with Scott. We did do some research where it was commonly said that people wanted it in the course index. But as with all improvements and new features, we're very happy to receive feedback. So please do post in the forums or comment on the tracker issue if you think further development needs to be done in this area. Yeah, I'd like just like to add if you're in the Moodle.org French forums they've already started discussing this and also on Moodle.org in the community sites forum Orelie Community Engagement Lead has posted that we've upgraded Moodle.org to 4.2 and there's a discussion commenting on that post also referring to the display of text-to-media areas in the course index. So you might like to view and respond to one or either of those posts on Moodle.org as well. Lots of comments from people liking the new features. That's great. A question from Jack about the grader report. Features will they be backported to 4.1? No, unfortunately not. As I mentioned, normally new features are not backported. I was just going to say I can actually see Jane saying that Jane actually liked forum, book, et cetera as the title for students as feel it's more accessible and obvious than just including in the activity title. Yes, I understand what you mean. I saw it from the opposite point, which is that not everyone uses. For example, one good example is Quiz. People don't always call their quizzes quizzes, especially if they're end of unit summative test, but it'd be interesting to know the opinion of others. Well, the good thing with 4.2 now is that you have the choice of whether you want to have these names in your activity titles because you can always go and edit them and add forum or book to the start or the end of them. Jane is saying maybe an option to show or not will be good. It's like with every improvement and new feature in Moodle, we have to decide do we want to add the feature and add a setting to say that enabled or disabled, but the more settings we have, the more complicated Moodle becomes, so we try and do what's best for the majority of Moodle users. And I see David is asking, will the send message feature be added to other modules? I don't know about that. You can message participants, can't you? But that's slightly different from messaging within. I suppose it's a question of if people request it really, and enough research shows that this is something that would be very beneficial. There are various places where you can select participants and send them all a message. Like you mentioned, Mary, the participant's page, but there's also, I think, an activity report also allows you to send, or maybe it's only one person. Well, it could be bulk, I'd have to check. There's a few places for sure. I don't think you can send it from the activity completion report, though Yamuna is asking. I don't think you can send one from there. We will be upgrading in August from 3.11, so it looks like it will be Moodle 4.2. We will move to absolutely. You'll get the benefit of everything, including adding activities anywhere and bulk editing for sure. While you're thinking if you have any other points to raise, I'd just like to remind you that this is not just a webinar. There is a course attached to this webinar, and you can get a badge either as an administrator who's read and learned and passed a quiz about Moodle 4.2 or as an educator who's done the same, or you could get both badges and be a complete Moodle 4.2 expert. And the course is opening up at the end of this webinar in 15 minutes, and so you're very welcome to do that and have your Moodle 4.2 badges. I see Emily saying the bulk editing is fantastic. Thanks for your efforts. Thanks to the Moodle Users Association there. I'm actually going to just move on to mention a few things about Moodle Academy since we don't have any questions. Of course, you're still free to ask some questions, but I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how we'd love you to get involved in Moodle Academy. You came here to attend this webinar. Why not go to our Get Involved course where you see the light bulb on Moodle Academy. It takes you into a course where we'd like you to suggest topics which we can cover in future webinars and courses. And we've been looking at them and basing our webinars and courses on those. Maybe you are also a Moodle expert and you'd like to actually help us by presenting webinars or helping designing courses. Again, share your expertise. You can have badges for that. And that's also in the Get Involved course. And something very close to my heart. Our courses are written in English, but we have a really cool plugin which enables you to translate the course on the page into your native language. We have courses translated already in Dutch and other languages. We'd love you to get involved and translate as many as possible. And there is a course called Translate Moodle Academy. You need to go through that course so you can understand how to use our plugin and then we can make you a translator on Moodle Academy and you can translate the course. Maybe you're thinking this Moodle 4.2 course would be very useful if only you could translate it into your native language. And of course, please help us spread the word by telling your friends and colleagues about Moodle Academy for all the courses. You can get a badge. Help us grow the community we had over 90 people in this webinar, which is great. If you came here as an educator to find out the new features of Moodle 4.2 and you've been teaching with Moodle for a year or more, why not explore our Moodle Educator Certification? Find out if you've got the skills and expertise to do the Moodle Educator Certification. And it would be lovely to have you involved in that. I'm just checking if we have any other questions before we finish. We do have time to continue, but we'll see if we have any more questions. Oh, I see Graeme says, Graeme's very rusty with Moodle. So we'll take another look at the recording when it's available. The presentation itself will also be available as a PDF. Oh, great. Tatiana is pleased to have the reopening the quiz option. Filippo says it would be lovely to do the MEC, but for example, in Italy, it's almost impossible. Presumably you mean doing it in Italian. So I'm not sure if we have translations in Italian. Of course, you can do it in another language with a Moodle partner in another country, but I understand you'd want to do it in Italian. Hodo is asking about the bug in Moodle 3.11 with unread post notifications. We haven't covered bug fixes here, only new features. So I don't know if that speaks to 4.2, but feel free to ask in the forums on Moodle.org or check in the Moodle tracker. Okay. Well, if we don't have any more questions, then I'm going to end the webinar and stop the recording. So thank you everyone for attending. I hope you've got a lot of benefit from it, and please do the course and gain your badge or badges. So it's goodbye and thank you from me, Mary Cooch. And thanks from me, Helo Poster.