 I am an analyst developer at Moodle HQ, and in this presentation we are going to look at what's new in Moodle 3.4. Some of the important aspects because we have many things in there, we cannot cover everything. So we'll look at the few important ones here. Yes, for this presentation we have divided, I have divided the features in four different contexts. First we'll look at the side administration improvements followed by the course administration improvement and then we'll see what do we have new for all Moodle users and we are going to skip the mobile app because Sara already mentioned the improvements to the mobile app. So the first thing in the side administration is we have a new capability called manage all tokens. So this is given to admins by default and if you have this capability you can see a report something like this for all your web service tokens. So here you can see the tokens that you have created. You won't be able to see the token itself for other users because that's a security risk but as an admin you would be able to delete tokens created by other users using this report. As you can see for the second entry the admin is not able to see the token itself in the first column whereas in the first entry the token is visible because that was created by the admin itself. So you might be familiar with the user tools which is a way to get users familiar with the Moodle interface. We introduced that I think in 3.2 I think. So as of 3.4 we have added more filters to it. Now using this user tools you can target a specific category. You can target a specific course. You can target a specific course format as well. So you can decide how you want to deliver your tools to which specific audience you want to deliver it to, your tool to. So the next thing that everybody is talking about that you must register your site. Martin mentioned it. Sara mentioned it. We have made some improvements to the site registration form. I think somebody was asking how to do the registration so if you go to your site administration menu you will find a link there which will take you to this form. It's being simplified and it's being made easier to register your site now and it also explains what are the benefits of doing this registration which you have heard many times during the last two days. So the next thing we are going to look at is the STTPS changes that we have did. So previously in 3.2 and 3.3 an earlier version we had a setting called login STTPS which allowed you to have only the login page on STTPS and your rest of the site could be on the STTPS protocol which didn't really make much sense. So as of 3.4 this setting is removed. So now you have to move your entire site to STTPS or you keep your entire site in STTPS. So whichever you prefer. To help you with the transfer process we have also integrated a tool which you can access as an admin. In Moodle 3.4 it will identify all your links which is present in your site and it will see if they have an STTPS alternative or not and it will give you a report about the status of which links are possible to be converted to STTPS and which are not and what are the issues that you might face. And it will also help you with the conversion process. I think Sara also presented about OAuth providers as well. So we have an option there now whether you want to trust the email of OAuth provider or not. So if you want them to still go and do a manual verification you can request that and if you say you trust their email and then there would be no verification required. So over the last few releases we have also done significant improvements to the messaging interfaces. If you have used 3.3 you would have already seen that the messaging interfaces has been improved a lot. And now the messaging icon is already present in the navigation toolbar. So this is an old screenshot of 3.3 where we used to have a messaging block. So it's no longer required because everything is already present in your home page in your screenshot. So it's been deprecated and it's been removed from core. But if for some reason you still want it it's available in the plugins repository on GitHub. Next major improvement is the analytics engine. You might be hearing about the project inspire that we have been working on. As of 3.4 the project inspire is being integrated in modal core. It's still in very beginner phase so we would love your feedback and comments on it. And I'll just show you a screenshot. So we have included some models by default in core as well. So there is a model which is able to identify whether students are at risk of dropping out from the course or not. And you can see that this particular model in this test course has predicted that the first three students are at a risk of dropping out from the course. And it lets you take various actions based on what you want to do with that. You can send them a message and you can also just say that it's a false positive and you don't want to do anything. So this whole engine is based on AI and we are still working on it and we are trying to improve it more. So if you have feedback and suggestions we would really like you to use this feature and let us know what you think about it. I think that concludes the section on site administration. We should now move on to course administration. So the first thing is how the course restore behaves. We have changed that a little in 3.4. So before 3.4 what happened is when you restore a course, a old course to a later date, when all your data was moved, every single date was moved as well. So this was not ideal because say somebody made a forum post and that was specific to that given date. It doesn't really make sense to, that forum post doesn't really make sense if the date is moved. So what we decided is any configuration dates such as deadlines and due dates, those would be moved whereas any user created data and dates related to them will not be moved. For example, forum posts, database entries or whatever is created by users, dates related to that will not be moved when you are doing a course restore since 3.4. I think Martin also showed this in his keynote. So we have merged the enrollment and participants page and you can see it here. It's much more smooth and it's much more clean. On top left corner there are a lot of filters which are really helpful, which I find myself a lot of using a lot. And here you can do various actions. You can do bulk and roll and send them messages and all that thing. And the status is also present which is color encoded. So all the information that was distributed in two different pages which were kind of identical the enrollment and participants page, they have been merged together in 3.4. So another feature that we introduced is the easier activity navigation. So as a student if you are trying to just complete your courses and then you are jumping from one activity to another activity, doing one quiz after another or doing one assignment after another, it's just easier to do that navigation now. I'll enlarge the screenshot. Yes, so as you can see here, if you go to an activity, you can see now both previous and next activity link on either side of the page. So you can easily navigate to the next activity which is present in the course. And in addition to that, there is also a dropdown at the center which will just let you to navigate to any specific activity that you want to go to in your course. Another feature requested to us was that teachers should be able to mark activities as completed for students, so which you can do as of 3.4. So there is a capability called override completion. So if you have that capability, then as a teacher, you can mark any activity as completed for students. And it is displayed differently than if a student himself has completed the activity so that you can know actually what is happening. As you can see in the screenshot, this is the teacher's view. And the first one is marked as completed by a teacher. The other one is done by the student himself. And the same thing happens in a student's view. An activity which was completed by teacher is shown differently to an activity that was completed by student himself. So when you're creating an assignment or say you are writing a workshop and then you want to specify what file types the student should submit. You want to just allow PDF or you want to just allow all the doc file types, like doc.x, PDF, text files and all that. Previously, what you could do is you have to specify all the extension, which was a bit tedious and not optimal. But as of 3.4, you can have this file chooser and it will give you a pop up where you can just select what file types you want. You can just select document files which will, by default, select all the type of document files or you can be specific and you can say that you want to just have PDF files or text files like that. So it makes it easier for a teacher to create activities and define the file restrictions on that. The next feature is tagging database entries. So recently, we have been doing some improvements with tagging as well. In 3.3, as of 3.3, you have many more tagging options. Like you can tag book chapters, you can tag forum posts and a lot of other things. As of 3.4, we added that support to the database entries as well. So it has to be enabled by your admin in the settings. So if it is enabled, then as of 3.4, you can also tag various database entries. So as you can see, there is a tag added in this particular screenshot. Oceans for all to a database entry. Okay, I think that's it for the course administration improvements. Now, let's look at the improvements for all users. Okay, so the first improvement, which is pretty obvious in 3.4, is the calendar improvement, which was funded by Moodle Users Association. So we have made a significant redesign in the calendar interface in 3.4. It's like a really modern interface now where you can do everything in a pop-up. There is no need to reload the page. You can create, edit, you can drag and drop. And you can almost like whatever you want to do, it's possible in that just one single page now. So the first thing is, if you remember, these filters were present before as well. So it's not very visible in the screenshot. But there is an option to hide and show various events, global events or course-related events and things like that. It used to reload the page and it was bit tedious. Now, when you click on that, it's instantaneous. There is no page reload and it happens like you can see the changes right in your screen. Next thing is, we have added support for category events now. So previously it was just user group, course and site. Now you can create category-based calendar events as well. The other thing to note is when you are creating a new event, you can just do it in pop-up. So you just click on a date and this pop-up comes in and you can just create the event right there. You don't have to go to a different page. You don't have to move around. You don't have to do multiple clicks. Just one click and you can create a new event now. The same thing goes with editing. So if you click on an existing event, this pop-up comes up with the details and you can click on the edit button and it will show you a pop-up to edit the details of that particular event and then you can do it right there. The next thing is you can drag and drop events now. Say that you have an event on 11th of what is that month, October and you want to drag that to 20th of October. You can just drag it in the calendar and it automatically moves the event. And the good thing about that is say the event is about the deadline of an assignment or the due date of an assignment. And if you drag that, then the due date is automatically updated in the assignment itself as well. So you don't have to do that. Go and do it manually again. And next is the improvements to file area. So as you might know, there is a limitation which is usually set by admin how much space you want to allow users to have in their private file area. And now there is a small notification when you go to your file area saying what is your total allowed limit and how much actually are you using out of it. So in this screenshot it says 15 KB out of 100 MB is being used. So you are aware of what is the status of the disk space that you are using and what is left for you. This doesn't allow, this is not related, like this doesn't affect the admins because they do not have any such limits. The other thing is the improved global search. If you have seen 3.3, we have already support global search with solar extension. We have improved it in 3.4. So now you have access to HTML block contents as well. So if you're searching for something, I'll show you the next screenshot. And if that particular string is present in an HTML block content, if you look at the bottom of the screenshot, it will still show up, which this particular area, we were not searching that before in 3.3. So it's now possible in 3.4. The other thing is now you can also search non-enrolled courses. So if a student is not enrolled in a given course, but he has, say, guest access, or if the course is open to everyone, something like that, in 3.3 the global search was not searching those courses. It was searching only the courses in which the student was enrolled. But now they can, so based on this setting, which you can set it as an admin, they would be able to access all courses, the search across all courses. And obviously, there is security limits there, so it means all courses that the user can see. If he cannot see a particular course, then obviously nothing would be written for that course. I think that's about it. Yeah, that's all the improvements we have. Mobile app we have already covered. So do you have time for questions? Any questions? While you go for a registration tab, there are two questions, basically. How to register through Intranet, which is a web server on Intranet. And second is if it is not HTTPS, it is not allowing to register. OK, I don't think you can register aside without internet access because it needs to connect to model.net to post the data. So you need to have at least internet access on that site. Internet access is there, but it is not given to the public gateway IP. Yeah, so it's a two-way communication, so the server needs to be able to talk back to your server. Sorry, in HTTPS, since you brought it up, everybody should have HTTPS now, like get it. It's the way the web is now for security. Get a certificate on your website. You can get them for free. It's a completely free thing. Just do it. You will protect yourself. Otherwise, any student can sit there, look at the traffic, and find passwords of other students, or teachers, or administrators, and get into your site. This is a web security problem. So I've noticed a lot of sites do not have HTTPS, and you should, so I'm just stressing it just for your own safety. OK, I want a small information about upgradation of model 2 to 3.4. So to upgrade to model 3.4, it is asking for some parameters like PHP should be seven, seven version or above. And it is asking about some database structure. So can you elaborate on that? Well, PHP requirement has been increased to seven since 3.2, I think. Yes. But I'm not sure what database structure is asking you. It is asking about some database name I could not remember, actually. It comes with something with B. Yeah, yeah. If you're using, are you using? So you might have to install the PHP extension if you don't have it, but you should already have it because you're running model 3.4. Yeah, PHP is not a problem. Database, I can't. So you need the MySQL, PHP extension, or Postgres, whatever you are using it. So can I use the previous database what I have used for the new model 3.4? No, the database upgrade needs to happen as well because the database structure has changed. So you cannot use the same DB structure what you had in 3.0 and 3.2 because we have added new features that needs new columns and new tables. So you need to upgrade your database as well alongside. It should happen automatically when you're upgrading model. It should upgrade your database on its own. Okay, okay. Isn't there some requirements about different storage engines on MySQL as well? We recommend InnoDB, but I don't think there is any hard-coded requirement. For Unicode, for nothing. For Unicode, I think we recommend InnoDB as far as I remember. But there is no check there to say it's not post. Okay. In general, we are very conservative with forcing people onto new databases, new PHP, new everything. But if we're saying it's required, it's because we really think it's required and there's security reasons or the versions we're asking for are actually themselves, four or five years old or something. So upgrading everything is a good idea. The PHP 7 will have a serious impact. I mean, I think a lot of people will delay their upgrade like I have delayed because if I have to switch to PHP 7, I also have to change my OS on the server. But it's a valid thing, but the benefit is worth it. So if you install PHP 7 personally, I've seen it's much faster than PHP 5 and there is also added security concerns in PHP 5. And PHP itself is not supporting the older versions now, I think. So, well, you have to upgrade. Yeah. And it's been a while, I think, we made it required for 3.2. Yeah, that's why we are still on 3.1. No, I think it's required in 3.4, required, but it's recommended. Recommended in 3.2? Yeah, okay. If you can't upgrade PHP, you have bigger problems probably. And if you really, really can't, then you have to stay on older versions of Mooder as well and stay on the old world. It's unfortunate, but it is much faster. How we can upload a calendar from our Excel academic calendar to our Moodle calendar? Not in one click. From Excel, I'm not sure it's possible, but you can. There's a file format at .ICS. I can. We have to convert Excel into .ICS, then we can upload. Yeah, so there is the Ical format, which is .ICS. We support importing from that. So that is the standard for exporting and importing calendar events. So I don't think right now it's not supported to export from Excel files. So for now you have to... So because if you have the calendar events created in Google Calendar or even the calendar of your operating system, when you export it, it exports as an ICS file, not an Excel file. So that's what we are supporting right now. Okay. Okay. Any other... Is there one more question? One more. The back. Is there a microphone down there? Any further questions? We have the Dr. Moodle session later, so we can ask them there. Is there any difference in the installation because on the Moodle page of the installation, when we are installing Moodle on website, it shows that you have to create different databases and then the installation proceeds. However, the hosting website, actually from which I have taken, he has the Softaculous app installer embedded inside the control panel. So just within the click, that all of the Moodle gets installed. But the thing is currently I'm getting invalid JSON error or certain undefined errors there. So does it makes the difference that the installation through that Softaculous one that my hosting provider offers is giving the error or how it is? So if you're getting an error, it's most likely the script that your hosting provider is using is broken because, well, we are installing Moodle every day. I did a live demo yesterday of installing Moodle as well. So there is no issues in installation of Moodle. So I guess you're using C-Panel or something like that. Yes, yes, yes. So they have their own scripts which does everything for you, the installation process. So maybe something is broken in their script. Okay, okay. Thank you. All right, thanks, Ankit. Thank you. Good. Let's cover that.