 G'day Moodlers and welcome to Moodle 2.0. The purpose of this screencast is to give you a quick flavour for the feature enhancements in the latest stable major release of the Moodle Learning Management System software, this version 2.0. Now it's been quite some time in the making and I think it's pretty fair to say that this screencast won't serve as a definitive list of all the new and improved features. It's just not realistic to demonstrate all of those wonderful things in such a short period of time. So I do apologise in advance for all of the aspects that I won't be covering but look on the same token I'd encourage you to get onto docs.moodle.org. You can certainly read up on the release notes and see the full functionality by the documentation wiki there. Okay look in a nutshell why would existing 1.9 or earlier Moodle users want to upgrade to 2.0? Why would other people out in the e-learning community who are evaluating learning management systems consider Moodle 2.0? Very simply compared to earlier versions of Moodle it is more usable, it's prettier, it's easier to tag and comment. There's now ways to control and manage the learning path of users. We can now push and pull data to and from third party services. We can promote and share courses with other Moodle instances and there's a fair bit of improved admin functionality as well. So that's a little taste for where we're headed and perhaps why I guess a bit of a rationale for Moodle 2.0. So let's kick off with navigation. Look we're on the front page by the way this is a standard plain vanilla installation of Moodle 2.0 and we're logging through seeing the system through the eyes of an administrator okay who can pretty much see and do all as far as global settings courses and users and functionality is concerned. So look as far as navigation is concerned for 2.0 we've now got this navigation block sort of pinned up on the top left and that will in fact follow all users wherever they go throughout the system okay. The idea there is to make the system more usable and in fact make it possible to navigate to most places in less clicks okay. So my home for existing Moodlers is you know synonymous with the My Moodle page okay. So it's a personalized dashboard page where users can view the courses they're enrolled in and any information that is relevant to them. Site home that could well be the front page or it might be the My Moodle page or another page depending on how that is configured by the system administrator. Site pages that will certainly be visible to the system administrator it may not be visible to users in lesser roles and depending on their permissions and capabilities. All users will see the My Profile function there in the navigation block and you can see the features listed. Courses courses will list those courses or discrete units to study that the said user is currently enrolled in. Again they become a click away like so. So we go straight in here and you can see again within the navigation block it has followed us to to this particular context and we can see the topics or sections that if you're like sort of threaded within the navigation of this particular block and again you could expand any of those sections or topics or they could be weeks depending on the course format and you could draw straight into a granular level to a particular activity with a single click. So it does make navigation a breeze within and throughout the system now and naturally you can simply return home with a click as well and I guess it's now you know it's an option as opposed to simply using the breadcrumb option as current Moodlers would be familiar you know in Moodle 1.9 and earlier versions. You might have noticed these little blue threads if you like there alongside these blocks. If we click those it now docks those blocks into vertical tabs on the left side of any page okay and we can simply mouse over them and it serves up you know the functions that are you know are relevant to the assigned role and context for the said user okay. So it is a very nice way to declutter any page. I might add that this this function here only affects the said user's view of the system okay not everybody else's and you know it's all about decluttering the system for the user clean spaces as you're on the eye and it does in fact make the system more usable. Look if you do prefer it the old way you can click those blue threads again to undock those blocks so we're back to the way it was. I'll just return to the front page now okay look on the topic of blocks and we're editing on I mean we've got the usual suspects that existing Moodlers would be familiar with they're back again we do have a few new blocks that are noteworthy I've added these to the front page already the comments block you can see there is essentially a shout box people make public text-based announcements and other people in a context can read them and I guess comment back community finder we'll get to in a little while but that does relate to the hubs functionality okay and the ability to I guess share and promote courses and I guess the finder is a way to seek out courses on other Moodle instances and have them listed on that particular block course completion status and self-completion probably don't belong necessarily on the front page but more likely on a you know like a my Moodle and or a course page where it relates to essentially the ability for teachers and students to track progress through a course and up until Moodle 2.0 that hasn't been a function you know users are sort of been hanging in a course and teachers and students have been unsure who's where and who's completed and who hasn't so this is a this is a very welcome mechanism okay there's some other blocks new blocks I'd encourage you to explore those and check them out for yourselves okay now we did say Moodle has has gone about it's it's prettier and there's there's now a few ways to you know go about making the standard themes you know configurable and customizable and it's fairly trivial via the front page side admin block appearance themes theme settings we'll just point out a few of the parameters here the theme list and allowing user course and category themes is nothing new but the ability I guess this parameter here theme designer mode will be useful for theme developers and people testing themes when they want to reset their case being able to allow changes in the URL could be useful also for themes for a variety of reasons custom menu items is a new parameter here and it makes it very easy to if we follow the syntax there to set up this horizontal navigation menu system within your learning management system okay so I can look and feel a bit more like a website so that will now become a very easy thing to do on the same token in fact I'll go to one of the themes in particular then we can check out a list of the standard themes some of these standard themes also give you the ability via the I guess the Moodle admin in a face to change some of the styling elements without having to to get FTP or or control panel or server level access to do so so things like putting you know logos into logos into a header or a tagline changing the color of links column widths and other you know sort of CSS elements can be can be controlled here directly within the Moodle interface for certain themes okay so it's it does make the appearance of the themes more customizable and configurable and easy to do so and I guess for those who are new to Moodle a theme is synonymous with a skin or a template that might be language you're more familiar with with other systems these are the standard themes the default themes within Moodle 2.0 they're different I guess now it's all about being brighter and bolder you know there's a variety of colors and styles and fonts and layouts okay and you can in fact configure these or you can select these standard themes for a modern or an old browser I'll leave you to interpret what the difference might be between a modern and an old browser but you get some idea there in terms of how theming will work for Moodle 2.0 so there's a lot of positives to be had I guess if there's any if there's any drawback to all of that it's the likelihood that your current theme so your standard or your third party themes for Moodle 1.9 or earlier won't be upwardly compatible so that will likely mean you'll need to modify or redo your existing themes for 2.0 so just bear that in mind before you upgrade okay as far as a HTML editor is concerned we've got a new editor for new WYSIWYG editor for 2.0 it's called TinyMCE here it is it's now cross browser compatible so you can not only use it for Firefox and IE it should be compatible for Chrome and Safari and other modern modern-day browsers I'd encourage you to explore it yourself the HTML editor is your friend and is the way to make Moodle pages pretty just a few things that are probably noteworthy is the ability to embed media very quickly via the HTML editor and the spellchecker the Google spell as opposed to probably no spellchecker for most Moodleers up until now that is I guess unless you're on a Linux platform and you might have had access to a spell so HTML editor okay now let's go to navigate our ways to a course we'll get away from the demo we'll go to the sandpit the sandpit it's just our place to experiment we'll make things break things with no consequence it's not a formal course just yet it's in fact a blank canvas but look we come in we turn editing on and we can then go about adding resources so for existing Moodleers there's nothing too foreign here other than the language has been simplified in the add a resource drop menu look we'll add a we'll add a file so what we'll do firstly is give it a name and then the mandatory description so we go to select the content that we wish to add and this is where it gets interesting this is a real game changer for Moodle so go on to the days of uploading simply directly uploading files and copying them into Moodle course and having to manage them there we can we can pick files from a variety of locations including a server your private files and then some third-party repositories if these are configured and enabled by your system admin including Google Docs Dropbox Flickr YouTube Wikimedia and the like okay so you know you got some you got some options there in terms of how this might be look just by way of example we'll just choose one of these run a keyword search on Flickr Flickr is a photo sharing site so naturally you would want to own the resource that you're about to upload or else or else have permission to use it that would be the premise under which you're going to make this resource available so look let's just choose choose that particular file we've selected it it's uploaded and that is done okay so we've got the repositories plug in there again it gives us the ability to pool or import resources from a variety of sources like never before as far as exporting goes that's a real game change as well i tell you what why don't we add an activity to make this possible let's add a forum we can go perhaps uh show you something else while i write it here the forum has changed well there's a new forum type i should say that's the blog format so so just giving the forum a title and an introduction okay so that is there we've set the forum up what we'll do now is add a discussion topic so for those not familiar with forums it's a public space to discuss good ideas and exchange ideas ask questions get answers help one another in an online collaborative sense so look we'll make our first post to the forum and i'll just say this is whatever's going on here message goes here we might want to attach a file as well so we could go grab a file if need be okay so we've got enemies like so we'll select that we're going to attach this file to our forum post so that is there now we'll add another discussion topic and a message that goes with it post that just quickly to illustrate this blog format again that's very much like the standard forum for general use the existing moodlers would be familiar with um we're now able to serve up that same forum in a blog type format with the uh with the various threads if you like um in this sort of view um back to what we were saying about um i guess you know the notion of port the portfolios and and the capacity to push or export artifacts away from moodal to third-party sites and services um you can see here this idea of exporting the portfolio we've got the link there and also alongside the the graphic so look we'll just do that because uh you know the user ought to be in control of their learning artifacts um they're not owned necessarily by the institution um or the system administrator for that matter so we've got a few places we could select as the destination for this exported file in this case okay so we might simply want that to be a file download if it were mahara that's the portfolio system okay um and we could export um export our learning artifacts to it so very flexible very open and i think that's the way learning needs to be the ability to push and pull um or export or import content um that you have permission to do so all right so that's been done and that's downloaded going back to the course now so look as far as other activities are concerned um i'm mindful of time and i really encourage you to explore these i'll perhaps make brief mention of them without demonstrating many more of them um but certainly the blog if we can call it an activity is the sort of thing you want to visit um if you're familiar with it already it has changed um the ability to blog and associate it with a course the ability to comment search and copy and actually feed in from an external blog into a moodle blog um feedback feedback was a third party contributed uh module that's now found its way into the standard release of moodle but it is disabled globally by default so you'll have to ask your system admin to turn it on um again that will be excellent for you know likes of web forms unit evaluation surveys questionnaires etc um we we said a bit about forums um we'll have a look at quizzes perhaps if we add a quiz we'll actually just check first we've got some questions in the quiz bank uh we appear to which is good look i'll return to the course page itself okay so look we're editing on adding an activity and it's a quiz quiz is a great revision tool okay you put questions in the quiz bank ideally and you can compile those with your colleagues over a period of time and then use them for revision or assessment purposes and the good news is they pretty much mark themselves okay so we just put in a name and an introduction here i'll leave all those default settings as they are for the time being so we've just set the quiz up we now need to add a question from the question bank so we'll select that and we add it so the interface has improved the workflow is a little bit more intuitive for the quiz module than it was previous so that's all set up good to go just in a couple of clicks again naturally the questions need to be set up first and they could be multi choice true false matching key concepts etc um other activities that have been improved than that are noteworthy i guess the SCORM activity for those not familiar with SCORM it gives us the ability to monitor, assess, track and report on our learners in their interactions with the learning content via Moodle and the content might have been most likely authored with a third party program it could have been the likes of articulate or captivate or one of the other authoring tools you know with the SCORM in Moodle there's now more display options better navigation and reporting functionality a couple others the wiki the wiki is a collaborative series of pages that anybody can contribute and collaborate collaborate on i would check out the wiki functionality there's now the ability to comment which is which is a you know a welcome feature and then the workshop the workshop module has been resurrected for those who are familiar with it and earlier versions of Moodle and for those who are not you know the workshop is essentially it's a it's an excellent peer peer assessment tool okay so you'd be able to set up submit assess and grade and evaluate you know in a very stepwise fashion so again without demonstrating those i'd encourage you to simply Moodle and check them out for yourself okay look i'm going to navigate out of this particular course perhaps back to the front page momentarily now have a little look at cohorts we're now sort of on to managing i guess the learning path for users cohorts is synonymous with site-wide groups it's been a very wanted feature of Moodle and you know the core development team are very responsive and uh you know the community wanted this feature in 2.0 and they've got it so this is pretty much how it works naturally the system admin will need to go via the site admin block on the front page courses pardon me users accounts cohorts first need to create the cohort so a cohort could be defined as a group a site-wide group of people you know they might they might share something in common it could be the business function it could be a degree you know of study it could be a geographic location i guess the people managing the system need to determine what constitutes a cohort it's like a really big group of users that you want to macro manage okay so look i'll just call this the let's say this is the this is the summer cohort so it might be a semesterized approach to what we're doing here and you've got two contexts where you can apply cohort the cohort functions either globally as in system-wide or users in all contexts or you can granularize it down to the the category level and you can see miscellaneous is our only and it's in fact the default category so you could apply it at either context say system-wide for this particular cohort the next screen we get presented with is um i guess the editing screen and we're able to assign users to this particular cohort and this is a very useful function when you have many users instead of going to each of the courses or each of the categories and having to micro manage them there you can do most of the hard work here as a system administrator in a pretty quick fashion so look we select our users we'll add them to this particular cohort so what this will then do for us if we find our way to a particular course now what we will do i guess at this stage you need to be need to be mindful that the cohort sync enrollment plugin needs to be enabled by the system administrator globally and then perhaps you as a teacher or else the system administrator or course manager would need to come in and ensure it's also enabled as an enrollment method within the said course that way i guess the members of the cohort also get synchronized as members of the course if that's in fact intended so look we'll choose cohort sync as a possible enrollment method we've got to choose the cohort that we're looking to sync with this particular course and we add that method so just to check i mean this indicates there's now two users enrolled in this course again imagine that could be 200 or 2000 and a couple clicks it's a very attractive function so look we could come into the participants in this particular course and see who we've got and you can now see we do in fact have two enrolled students so that's in essence what cohorts will allow us to do site wide groups or category groups i guess is a way to conceptualize it okay let's have a look um well perhaps navigate navigate to the sand pit we'll go to our pretty blank canvas as it appears here we're looking to well conditional activities we'll have a little look at it will allow us to restrict the availability of certain activities in the course and make it dependent on various conditions that could be based on date or a grade or completion of another activity so you know conditional activities might be for you if you're looking to really control and structure the learning path for your students and it might in fact be a very linear learning sequence it's not for everybody if you're more about sort of a non-linear sort of a very informal social collaborative method of web-based learning i'd probably advise against conditional activities in any case here's a quick look at it so look we turn editing on now what we might do we're going to set up some sort of sequence because we've got some resources happening here already we've got a forum and we've got a quiz so we might make it that the user needs to view the forum before they can complete the quiz okay and when they've completed the quiz we should then be able to indicate that they've completed the course let's just say there's a very small course and there's only a couple activities in it and the course completion status is tracked that progress is tracked and that status is reflected to the student and the teacher or the admin so what we might what we might need to do i guess the first thing here is via course settings again presuming conditional activities has been enabled system-wide we want to also come in and ensure that student progress completion tracking has been enabled it won't be on by default and that's um i would check the box as well to indicate that completion tracking does commence upon enrollment so back to the course now let's go to this forum and we've already set it up but we can update and revisit the activity settings so what we want to indicate here is that show the activities complete when conditions are met and we'll check the box the criteria here for activity completion will be that the student must view this activity if you want to restrict the criteria you would probably require them to perhaps post or discuss or reply so many times to a given discussion forum okay that's now being set up so there is some sort of criteria there associated with the forum now let's have some sort of um dependency if you like between the forum in the quiz this is i guess the conditional nature of these two activities now we're going to try and set it up so that the quiz cannot be accessed until the forum has first been viewed and let's presume there's some information in the forum that's relevant to the the quiz that is subsequent so the idea then if we scroll past most of these settings toward the bottom with availability activity we'll have a look here we will say activity completion condition we will say forum the forum must first be marked as complete okay as far as completion is concerned um we'll show the activity as complete when conditions are met and more to the point they'll need to a grade will be required let's say with respect to this quiz okay so in essence what we're done here is the student will first need to view the forum before the quiz become become available and then for the quiz to be indicated as completed um and all conditions met the condition is that a grade must be received and if we want we can specify what that grade in fact is i'll perhaps quickly detour to indicate what would be involved there this is via grade book and again this is perhaps a little bit of advanced functionality but via the middle grade book you could go to the simple view and for this quiz activity this particular grade item if we update that we can indicate here the grade to pass we can set that as 10 out of 10 which is essentially 100 percent for that particular quiz the student needs to get full full marks for the grade to be considered a pass and for the condition to be met for that activity so we've set that up i guess the other thing we could now do perhaps we won't but if we really didn't want to we could set up a course as a prerequisite for the successful completion of another so you know we could say that you need to uh need to complete the Moodle features demo as a prerequisite for the sandpit course or vice versa um so that's very achievable as well but perhaps beyond the scope of what we're demoing today look i think it's time to log out and let's have a look at this system through the eyes of a student momentarily now you can see upon login they've been redirected to the my Moodle page so that's their personalized page okay um and i guess the the learning information and the courses that belong to them at this point in time self-complete this course presuming the the user is stepped through what they needed to read what they needed to do without any conditional activities necessarily having been set up within the activities of the course so that has been done and how we might navigate to another course and the user wishes to self-enroll and that's just being done so let's have a look how these are conditional activities play out okay we can see that the quiz is sort of it's been uh it's it's quite faint that won't be available until um condition is met with the forum and if you recall the forum needed to be viewed okay so the user would need to come in view the forum if they return to the course page the quiz should then be available so they go about attempting the quiz so they submit their attempt and you finish the review having having viewed the grade and the feedback that's that's the idea behind conditional activities as far as hubs is concerned again uh if your organization uh decides to run its own hub i guess the idea is you're looking to share and promote courses with others it's a pretty big undertaking but it'd be important that you download and install the hubs module which isn't part of the standard moodle it's not it's not recommended that you install the hub software on a standard moodle instance so you'll want to set up a separate moodle instance for the purpose of your hub um so don't use your existing moodle instance um as the place to wage your hub coat okay but the idea of the hub is essentially a central repository where you can promote and store your courses um for trusted moodle instances um and certainly advertise and publish your courses to the hub um so they're you know they're shareable linkable downloadable okay so let's presume um the way we would go about that i suppose again uh needing to log out as student perhaps come back in as an admin okay on the front page side administration registration the system admin uh will be able to register your moodle instance either with a specific hub uh that is known and trusted uh and or register with mooch which is the uh the official moodle community hub okay so that's what you'll want to go about doing firstly the idea then will be if we find our way to we're already registered with one hub here by way of example let's navigate through to a course so if you were looking to promote and advertise your course you could come in and there's either a an administrator or course manager course manages a new role to moodle 2.0 it's i guess it's uh it's higher up the food chain then teacher in this respect because you can publish a course so again when the hub's function is enabled it gives you the ability to either advertise or share so advertise the course for people to join let's try that first so you select the hub where you wish to advertise this particular course so you need to put in some essential information there the name of the course is description the publisher the creator the license information the subject choose and some creator notes okay so that is advertised now on the hub bearing in mind again the hub is a separate moodle instance with uh specific hub code that's been downloaded and installed by moodle.org so we've just advertised that particular course um we might in fact want to share it as well so sharing sharing will give the end user the ability to download the the course and then restore it into their own moodle instance so uh you certainly anonymized all of the user information that won't be included in this particular backup so we step through the wizard very quickly and perform the backup so the course has been sent essentially published uh over at the moodle hub okay so let's have a look how that plays out okay so what we can do over here again this is the specific hub software that's been installed on this particular instance of moodle it's not a moodle that's typically used for the courses itself and the typical communication collaboration and uh assessment that would go on in a standard moodle instance it's really as we said the repository for promoting and storing courses and then certainly sharing them and downloading them so look we can uh we can browse for our courses that we can enroll in and that should serve up a certainly the course that we uh published there before if we're looking for courses that we can download there we have it so courses that are available there and you can see the link okay where you can actually download the course and then restore that course to your own moodle instance so it's all about I guess promoting and sharing good moodle courses with other moodle users via the hub or the central repository all right well I reckon that's just about enough for a bit of you know a snapshot of what moodle 2 has got on offer I think all that remains is really to go get the software start planning for the next step there might be a fair bit of new learning involved here for existing moodle users and anyone new there's a fair bit involved certainly to get yourself up and running but again the software is freely available via moodle.org and look if you need help the community the moodle community is very generous if you need expert and commercial assistance you know in the way of hosting or training or support recommend that you contact your preferred moodle partner or a trusted learning solutions provider but in any case relax and joy I hope this screencast has been useful and happy moodling