 Hello everyone, and welcome to this Moodle Academy webinar, What's New in Moodle 4.1. So I'm Mary Cooch, Education Manager at Moodle. I'm going to be doing the presentation on What's New, which will last about 20 minutes. And I have with me Anna Kraser, who is Education Advisor at Moodle HQ. And Anna will be monitoring the chat and will be helping relay the questions to me after the short presentation. I have to say, I am Education Manager, I'm not a developer. I didn't develop any of the features. So obviously I'll be happy to answer as much as I can. I can't guarantee to know the answers to everything, but I do know, and I know we have people in their chat as well, who will be able to point you in the right direction. Okay, so let's begin then. So this presentation is both What's New in Admin, Site Admin for Administrators, and also What's New in Courses for Course Teachers or Trainers. So we'll take them one at a time. Now, for Site Administrators, first of all, so we'll begin with those, this is a brief overview, and then we'll look at some screenshots and we'll take them in more detail. So we're going to look at what's called a Long Term Support Release, that's Moodle 4.1, then Tiny MCE, Big Blue Button, Custom Reports, Site Support, and then there are a few other new features and improvements, which have combined in a general bullet point user and course management. So let's get started. So Moodle 4.1 is what we call Long Term Support Release. So that means that after the general support that you get, if there are any bugs or problems for one year, you will then get an extra two years of security support. So not just a minor problem and something not working, but an actual security issue you have until the November 2025 with Moodle 4.1. What you see here are the support dates for the other releases. The last Long Term Support was Moodle 3.9, which still has another year of security support. And I know some people, some organizations still on Moodle 3.9 who are probably now going to go straight to 4.1 because of that Long Term Support. And if you are wondering, you can see 39, 311, 4, 4.1, if you're wondering where 3.10 is, it's not there because it's out of support. Okay, so this is a really important version in terms of Long Term Security Support. The next thing that I want to talk to you about in terms of administrators is TinyMCE. So this is an updated, more accessible, more modern version of the TinyMCE editor that you're probably already aware of that you have in the Moodle site. So the default editor that we always recommend is Atto, but now a new TinyMCE, it's actually called TinyMCE 6, is available for the administrator to enable in site administration. And you can see here in the screenshot, just open its eye and then let your users, if you want, try out this new editor. I would suggest if you're going to do that, that you then close the eye of what is now called the legacy, the older TinyMCE editor, which was quite out of date and had some issues. So if you enable it, then from their profile, from their profile, from preferences, teachers and students, learners, staff can enable it and can try it out. So this is what it looks like. It does everything that the Atto editor does. In fact, some things it does better, for example, manipulating tables. This is an ongoing project with the new TinyMCE editor. And eventually, not yet, but eventually in a couple of years Atto, the Atto editor will be removed to the plugins directory and this new TinyMCE editor will become the default. But no worries at the moment. You can still use Atto or you still have the choice. Well, you'll always have the choice. Okay, that's TinyMCE. The next thing is an improvement to BigBlueButton. You will remember that in Moodle 4.0, a free trial version or a free limited version of BigBlueButton became standard in all Moodle 4.0 sites. An extra improvement now, if you have BigBlueButton enabled and if you go to plugins BigBlueButton to the experimental features section, you can enable external guest access. You just tick that box there. And what that then does when teachers go into their courses and they want to add a BigBlueButton activity. So this screenshot shows you what a teacher sees in a course, guest access. This now opens up a guest access section. And if the teacher clicks ticks to allow guest access, then when this activity is saved, when he goes back or she, they see a meeting link and password, which they can then copy and send to someone who doesn't have an account on the site, an external invited speaker, for example, to come in and join the BigBlueButton even though they're not enrolled in the course. I do believe that if your Moodle site is behind, is false login. So if you can only get in by logging in, if it doesn't have a free front page guest access, then I don't think you can use this. But for many people, this is going to be really helpful if you want to invite people in to give a talk or a presentation. Right, BigBlueButton moving on. Now again, in Moodle 4.0, we included a report builder, custom reports, which is one example of how what is made for Moodle's commercial product Moodle workplace comes eventually into the open source Moodle LMS. So report builder, custom reports came in Moodle 4.0. And now in Moodle 4.1, there's a new settings. You can see custom report settings. And that allows you to improve the performance of custom reports by limiting the number of reports that can be made or disabling live editing. Both of these can sometimes have an effect on custom reports on your site. But also, so that's what you can limit there. But also if you're wanting to make some custom reports, there are now some really useful new report sources. So if we click and we go directly to custom reports to create a report, you can see here that we have new report sources, badges, blogs, course participants, files, notes, and so on. So this is really going to be helpful for those custom reports which the administrator can make and schedule and choose an audience, specific people or groups, and so on. Okay, that's custom reports. Moving on. Now, again, another feature in 4.0, which has been improved in 4.1. If you remember, if you use the boost theme, bottom right of your screen, you have a question mark icon. And one of the things in there is a link to the site support. And that's very useful, for example, if you have a learner who needs to contact, they can't remember, they have a problem. However, it did cause some issues with people who were complaining that it meant that any random person who chanced upon your site could contact and fill in that form. So what is now available is that there is a dropdown where the administrator can choose either to make this support contact form available to anyone on the internet who just happens to come there and see it, or available to people who are logged in only, or to turn it off completely if you don't want to give any support. I'm not sure that's a good idea, but perhaps in your specific circumstances, you have a different way of giving support. But that's a new improvement to the support contact form there. Now, as I explained, the next bullet point is like a combination of features and improvements that didn't neatly fit anywhere else. And they don't all lend themselves to pretty screenshots. So I'll just talk you through some of these. The first one is that you can now, through a CSV file, you can bulk assign course category roles, which the course category roles are quite popular and this will make the life easier of administrators. And if you go to the documentation, there is some information on what to put in the CSV file there. Equally making life easier for administrators, there is now some script again in the documentation where you can delete courses via CLI, via the command line. Now you might need to do this if, for example, it's an enormous course and you can't delete it manually. I know about that kind of thing. We've had that initially. Or if for some reason you can't delete the course manually, you have to troubleshoot it and this is the best way to do it. So you can simply use this command line interface to delete courses. Now, the next few do have screenshots and I'm happy to show you the next one related to a time zone. I think this is quite a cool feature. So now, if you go to a profile, it will show the time zone that they are in by default. I like this because particularly working in Moodle HQ, we have people all around the world and it's a nice way of finding out if they're in a similar time zone or if they're completely different the other side of the world. This is on by default. I can't imagine why you would want to turn it off but you can if you go to, I think it's user policies hide user fields so the time zone is there. Okay, moving on. The next one is related to the feature course request. You know that as an administrator you can turn on a feature whereby people with the appropriate capabilities can request that a course is made for them and they have teacher rights in that course. That's been around for a long time but what happened with Moodle 4.0 was it was a bit difficult for these people to find where to press the button to request a course. So now if you have course request enabled on your site they simply go to the dashboard, sorry, the My Courses page, click the three dots top right and there they will see the request course button. Much easier to find if you're using that. Now finally for administrators, I always like to share with you any differences in capabilities. Sometimes there are new capabilities, sometimes some have been removed. We don't have many this time because it's quite a small release. So you will see that we have four new capabilities. One of them is related to a new report in fact which we're going to talk about shortly. And then three of them are related to the new tiny MCE editor. So we've got embedding H5P and then recording audio or video. You might know that you have a little button in ATTO already. You can either directly record audio or video. If you don't want your users on the site to do that then you can not give them this capability. You can prevent the capability so they're not able to do that. But I like that feature myself. And because the whole protocol plugin was removed, XML, RPC, that capability has also been removed. Okay, and so that is a brief overview of what is new in site administration but I'm going to carry on and talk a little bit about what's new in courses because so much of it obviously is linked together that we can then look at the questions afterwards. So let's move on to new in courses. And again, the main features here are database, grade book, question bank, and then again I've combined in a bullet point a few other various improvements. And you'll notice I have a little orange box there because I'm mentioning a reminder that in courses you have the option to use the new TinyMCE editor and to enable external guest access in BigBlueButton. But since we already discussed those I'm not going to repeat myself. So let's take a look at the UX improvements for the database activity. Now this had some support from the Moodle Users Association. So very many thanks to them for their support with this. And what we have now when as a teacher you go to set up a database activity you have a useful new, I think depending on where you're coming from, some people call it zero state, empty state. I like to call it start page just to help you begin. And three new presets along with the improved existing preset which you can preview. And if your database activity is set to be moderated for the entries to be approved you can as a teacher easily see and do that. So let's look at some screenshots explaining that. So as a teacher, once you've added your database and defined your settings, for instance if you want to set it to entries have to be approved then you will see this new start page as I like to call it start building your activity. And you can either if you know what you're doing create a field and do everything manually. You could import a preset, an existing preset perhaps one that someone has given you or perhaps from MoodleNet which has a whole collection of database presets go and have a look at them or you can use one of the presets that now come with Moodle 4.1. So if we click use a preset this is where it takes us to. And we have image gallery. So that's already been there for many years but it's improved as you'll see in a moment. And then we have three new presets. Journal, proposals and resources. And these were ones which it was felt based on discussions and surveys would be the most useful presets to have. And what you can do is if you click on them so if we click the link image gallery it then shows us the preview of what it will look like if we decide to use it. This is list view. So we can also view single view. And then if we decide we want to use it we click bottom right in what I've now learned is called a sticky footer to select use this preset. So let's assume that our teacher Hansen, Mr. Wilson there has decided to has chosen a preset. He set up his database activity with entries to be moderated. Then what he will see here in the list view is pending approval. And so he knows then that he has to click the three dots to approve it. So clicking the three dots will either allow you to approve it or unapprove it or edit it and so on. As you can see there. And that's the database activity improvements. So the next thing we're going to look at is some ongoing improvements to the grade book. So this is part of a bigger longer project of improving the grade book. In Moodle 4.1 we have improvements in single view and the user report. There is a new grade summary report. And also this might help you if you're in a country or an organization where you need more than the default number of grade letters. There is also the possibility to add extra grade letters. So taking a look at that, here we're in single view. We're looking at grade items. And you can now simply search for a grade item by just typing the first few letters and it will suggest which one you think it thinks you want rather than having to scroll through a long menu of grade items. The same with users or groups. So if we go to this group task languages of love which our search has found for us. You can also see that it's much easier, much smoother process to do bulk actions. You have been able to do bulk actions before but it was a little bit more tricky. Now from the actions menu, you can override, exclude, bulk, insert or whatever. So these make your life easier in single view. Now the user report which is both what an individual user would see but also again the teacher can access it. That has been improved as well in terms of functionality. Look at how attractive this is by the way. If we select a user, so let's select Barbara. Now if a learner has many grades or many grade categories in a particular course it can get quite cumbersome. So what is now possible is to collapse certain grade categories to free up space and make you able to focus on another category. So here we have teamwork and so Barbara or the teacher can simply click to collapse teamwork and then that opens up and gives you a better view of the quizzes category. For example, okay, moving on, there is a new report, grade summary report which does exactly what it says it is. So it gives you a page of a summary list of all the gradable activities in your course along with the average grades. And there is a filter, so you can filter by activity there. So if you only wanted to see the quiz activities, for example, okay, there it is. Incidentally, this has reminded me that on YouTube we have three videos giving you more information about this and you can follow the process through. So there is a video about the grade book improvements, about the database improvements and also about the custom report extra report sources. So go to our YouTube channel and have a look at those. Finally, this is requested because in some examination boards or examination organizations or countries, they need more than the default grade letters, which is 14. Now you can have as many as you want to please those authorities and your managers simply by adding extra grade letters. Okay, moving on, question bank additions. Again, like with the grade book, this is a long-term ongoing project. There will be more work done in later versions but in Moodle 4.1, we have three improvements related to editing the question name or title and then two new columns. So let's go into the question bank of the course to see what it looks like. Now here you can see the question bank and you can see that the questions by simply by clicking the pencil icon which we're familiar with elsewhere, you can change the name of the question. Maybe you're in a course with your teaching colleague who simply called them question one, question two, question three, not the best names. So you could give them some more meaningful names, for example. And then going across here, there are two new columns modified by and last used. So last used is when a learner last accessed this question, did this question and modified by allows you to see who changed one of the questions and when. If you're wondering where these other ones are, these are new in Moodle 4.0 by the way. And another new feature of Moodle 4.0 was that the administrator could decide not only the order of the columns in the question bank but also which ones to include and which ones to remove. So not all of the available columns are shown here simply because I wanted to make the screenshot a bit easier to read. Okay, and again, as with the admin, various other little improvements which I've combined into one section. And the first one is related to the very useful and versatile resource label. So let's take a look at that. So now in English and in certain other languages as well, label is now called text and media area. It makes it a lot easier for newcomers to Moodle to know what it actually does. I remember when I first started using Moodle in 2006, I never used it for months because I didn't know what it was. And I thought, what's the label? However, it's important to flag this to let you know because it's going to mean if you have your own in-house organizational, documentational videos, you will need to change it unless you decide to change it back to label in your language packs, obviously. But I think it's a useful change. And if English is not your first language, check to see if it's been changed in your language. It has, for example, in French, German and a few other languages I checked as well, but not all of them. Okay, now talking about languages, my favorite topic apart from Moodle, you'll be aware that if allowed by the admin, a course teacher can force the language in a course. However, up until now, you haven't been able to force the language in an individual activity, but you can now do that within an activity from the common module settings. So here we've got force the language. This was discussed in the forums and also in the tracker issue. There are various use cases where it might be helpful, particularly in teaching languages. So this is one to be aware of. Now the next two relate to the course completion report. And one feature is that now in the course completion report, you can show custom fields. So if the custom field and not all custom fields will work with this, but if the administrator has decided to show the custom field in user policies ticket, then it will appear in the course completion report. For example, in this report we have branch, we've got Pacific, Atlantic, European and so on. And that can be very useful for organizations who are using specific custom fields there. The other feature which I particularly like is if you click on an individual user to look at their individual course completion report, not activity completion by the way, course completion, you will see that as well as the course completion date which we've had forever, you now have the precise time when that activity was completed. And in some instances, this is a very important feature requirement to have. So completion time as well as the completion date. And believe it or not, that's all that I have to say to you about what's new for course teachers. There are other new features. And if you go into the course, this webinar of course is part of the course, what's new in 4.1, there is a link to the release notes which tell you everything that is new that has been added to Moodle 4.1. And please do, after this webinar, please do go and complete the course because you can then get a badge to say that you know about Moodle 4.1, either as a teacher or as an admin or as both in actual fact. Well, I have to say that it has been a very, very interesting presentation, Mary. And I can tell this from the number of participants we have today with us and also the number of the questions and direction in the chat. We have way too many things to read and go through. Let me start from the beginning. So I used to started asking which will be the next LTS version, long-time support version after this one. Will it be 4.4? I don't know. If there's a developer in there, maybe the developer could tell us. I'm literally only living from one release to the next. So I can't answer that one, I'm sorry. And Andrews asked about the short life cycle for Moodle. Dave commented that Ado, it's not his favorite Ado editor, so he is very happy that it's now, we have the tiny MC back. A used comment that there is a 18-month life cycle, 12 months general support, six months security for a regular version and double that for the long-term support. And this has to do with the continuous development of futures and improvements to Moodle. Yeah, it's important to remember though that long-term support is not support for everything, it's just security support for bug fixes, yeah. Okay, we have several comments. Anderson said that I love the U-Tiny. I adore it because it doesn't clean up the CSS code. Okay. And Dave commented that the guest access is for Big Blue Button, it's very good. Yes. Ellen actually explained that the long-term support releases are normally every four releases. So the next one would be 4.5, unless there is another reason to change that. Thanks, Helen, yes. Tristan said that, can the custom reports pull in multiple custom profile fields? Custom reports, yes, as far as I know, if you talk about the user profile fields, custom profile fields, do trigger all this, and Paul has confirmed that from HQ, thank you. I just, could I just point out, I'm reading a discussion about Atto. I heard a figure of Moodle 4.4, at least another two years, and Atto will always be available in the plugins database. So we are giving people plenty of time to make the change to TinyMC if they want to and so on. So it's not just going to vanish tomorrow or even in six months' time. Okay. Great. And Dave, another dream I came through for Dave regarding the time zone of a user. I say that it was one of his requests. Cecilia asked if for the times of future automatically convert assessment due date and time for users. And of course, as Dave said, this is already available. Yes. It's really important to point that out to users, I know, because when we used to run our Learn Moodle MOOC, which has now become self-paced courses on Academy, we always had to say and repeat, as long as you change the time in your user profile to your time zone, everything will appear correctly for you, you know, and it's a great feature as long as you set it for your time zone. You just asked about the embed H5P permission could be allowed for participants. And we have already Ellen's question. We have, give me a second because it's a huge, huge... Oh, yes. I can see. Okay. Kat actually said that for new capabilities, are they enabled disabled by default or does it need to check and change in each of the custom roles, which are many in her case. And Helen has replied about this regarding new capabilities. They are implemented with defaults that makes sense. For example, other embedded H5P is enabled by default for the teacher role. If a custom role to use the teacher as a role archetype, then the capability will be enabled for the role too. And I'm going back. I think, I think, thanks to Aurelia. I'm assuming those three videos are the middle 4.1 videos that I mentioned. So thanks for sharing those. Yes, exactly. You just made a comment about the XMLRPC saying that that was used in MoodleNet Connections. So one should then also make sure that connected sites work correctly after updating. And we have several mentions about the web server that Balbul says that my web server does not fulfill the requirements of Moodle 4.1 and all this technical stuff. So he's unable to update. But Tim said that if this server only serves you, Moodle site should be possible to ask you or provide to upgrade actually with the latest version. As you said, I really provided a new YouTube videos about that. Ellen comment replied to Dave for his question about the database improvements that don't include the filter codes. Well, perhaps in a future version. We have a comment from Hust you're saying about the translations of the new name of the label activity. And he said that yes, we have it in Dutch also. And it was highlighting the contribution of our community in translations which is always welcome and high importance. Khan said that H5P styling is possibly without H5P mode. And if I'm not wrong, Sarah has already answered because she's saying that H5P styles can be only overridden in custom themes. We have so, so many comments and replies, questions and replies from participants and more comments. Thanks to the people. Thanks to Ogele, Helen, Sarah helping answer the questions in there as well, especially the ones we don't know the answers to or sending links to tracker issues as well. That's really useful. Yeah, definitely. I know I've seen it answered for Ato editor is still default in Moodle 4.1. Nothing's changed and it's not going to move suddenly away. I'm going through new messages. We have way too many. You can never have too many messages. No, no, I love it. I love having lots of questions and interaction. Tim is asking that, he heard that there will be a color picker for the text available in TinyMCE, is this correct? I think Helen's added a link to future features coming in TinyMCE and of course, one great thing about Moodle is if it's not in the default editor people can make plugins for it and add it to the plugins directory and then you can just have that. That's what happened with Ato and it's also happening with the new TinyMCE. Several people say that they have been stuck a little bit with older versions because of technical issues, to be honest. I'm also speak education. I don't really understand those cases but we have tons of answers from our team. Blair said that regarding the question bank he was disappointed to see that the issue around copying all courses question bank categories has not been yet resolved. Yeah, we now have a course with over three million questions in it. Wow. And probably this might be part of next improvements. Yeah, I think Helen's replied saying this problem should be resolved hopefully in 4.2 when the question bank activity is implemented. So yeah. Hoda, yes, he's asking about the Moodle 4.1 if it will continue supporting Ato editor and the answer is yes, Ato will be around for a long time. Okay. Yes, and Sarah said that there is an epic in the tractor to collect all the issues related to the tiny MC6 and the Ato removal. So if you want to contribute and serve your problems and take a look of the list of the things that have been listed there and you may also comment. Okay. Cohen provided a link for the Dutch people where they can see Moodle 4 in action for free. I just noticed Louis saying we've been using 3.9 and 3.11 with the moon theme because of the accessibility tools and bar. Well, tiny MCE has accessibility features. Also there is the standard upcoming in standard brick field accessibility block and feature as well. And that's not theme dependent. And I think we have covered all the comments in the time. That's great. Please reminder, if you do have other questions we have a forum in the What's New in Moodle 4.1 course. Also of course, if you come over to Moodle.org depending on your question there are lots of different forums on different areas and aspects of Moodle and in different languages as well. So you've plenty of places to ask questions if you didn't get a chance to see them here. I'm going to share my screen again just to talk to you a little bit about Moodle Academy. So yeah, I'm really absolutely delighted we had so many people joining today. And if you would help us to grow and get even more people then please go to the front page of Moodle Academy and click to join our Get Involved course and suggest topic ideas. The courses and the webinars we do are based on what people ask us to do. And maybe rather than just suggesting maybe you're a particular expert or fan of a particular aspect you could offer to present a webinar. If you present you'll get a presenter's badge. You might even like to contribute to designing a course. You can get a course build a badge. So it's not just about us doing all of the work. We'd love you to get involved and join as well. Equally, we would like you to spread the word. So if you enjoyed this webinar, if you've done some courses on Moodle Academy then please tell other people, encourage them to join. You get a badge each time you complete a course. In fact, this course you could potentially get two badges. And if you're an educator and you've used Moodle for a year and you're quite experienced then why not do our, are you ready for the MEC quiz? And take the MEC. This is with partners. This is a paid program of certification in different languages, not only English. We are multilingual in Academy and in Moodle.org which is one of the reasons why I love it so much. Okay, so thank you for that. I'm just going to stop sharing my screen for a moment and check if there are any other questions. Otherwise, we will stop the recording and end it. Well, basically, Paulie asked, not asked, but I think all the participants, if they have a beautiful Moodle site that she could visit just to appreciate their NGO to stick with it. Dave gives comment about accessibility and different color options, replying to team. And yes, I think that was all. I really is looking forward to get her badge on. Oh, right. Good 4.1. Okay, then, that's great. Thank you very much, everyone. And that's the end of our webinar. Please do the course and we hope to see you again very soon for other webinars. So it's goodbye from me, Mary Cooch. Goodbye. Thank you for me as well, Anna Cressa. See you in the next one.