New features

Moodle 2.5 brings a lot of exciting new features for teachers, students and administrators. This page highlights a few of the most interesting!

Full details of the release, with technical information, can be found in the Moodle 2.5 Release notes.

(Click any screenshot below to see it enlarged)

For teachers and students:

Badges

Badges are a nice way to acknowledge good work, and it's now possible for teachers to award course badges based on a variety of chosen criteria. These badges are fully compatible with Mozilla Open Badges.

Teacher sets up a badge

Student view of allocated badges

Badges from backpack.openbadges.org on student profile

This blog post has some interesting reflection on when badges might be most appropriate: The Badges of Oz

Forms are much shorter

Moodle has a lot of settings and features, which means some of our forms have been getting rather long. We know this is daunting for new users!

We've made changes so that non-essential settings on forms are collapsed by default, yet you can quickly access them when you need them.

Note the "expand all" option and condensed links

"Show more" (and "show less" options

The rich text editor is collapsed and can be expanded:

Formatting options collapsed and box is narrow

Formatting options shown and box expanded

In a similar space-saver, you can choose whether or not to enable the rich text editor when creating quiz questions:

Without the editing tools

With the editing tools

Reports moved to the Administration block

Reports have moved and can now be seen in the newly named Administration block, (formerly Settings.)

Administration block with Reports

Quickly "Jump to.." another section

If you're using the 'one section per page' setting, you can now move to other sections from a drop down menu:

The 'jump to' drop down menu returns

Drag and drop media and text onto the course page

You can now drag an image or some text onto your course page and choose whether to display it embedded in a label or as a clickable resource. See the Label documentation for more information.

Drag an image onto your course page

Choose "add image.."

And here it is!

Text selected from a Word document is dragged over

Choose "add a label" (or page if you prefer)

And here it is!

Folders can be displayed inline on a course page

You can now choose whether to have a folder show its contents in a separate screen, as previously, or to have it display them inline with any subfolders expanded:

Typical folder display before 2.5

Folder displayed inline

Folder displayed inline with subfolders expanded

Assignment enhancements

Along with neater options for choosing submission and feedback types, resubmitting options are much improved. See Assignment settings for more information.

Neater assignment set up screen

New settings for resubmissions

Word count in forum posts

A new setting in forums will display the number of words in a post:

Note word count bottom left

Templates for Essay question types

When using the Essay question type in a quiz, you can now set a template which appears in the students' text editor for scaffolding their response:

Response template in question set up screen

What the student sees

Glossary block enhancements

You can now use a global glossary in the random glossary block, and you can display the entries in alphabetical order:

Entries will display in alphabetical order

Search the list of enrolled users

A new Enrolled users search box makes finding users in very large courses much easier:

A search facility allows teachers to search for specific users.

For administrators:

New themes suited to all screen sizes

Many of your favourite sites around the web these days use Bootstrap as a base framework and now Moodle does too! We have a new 'base' theme called "Bootstrapbase" that implements the basics, and a new usable theme called 'Clean' which extends it with some simple configuration options and also functions as a good template example for developing your own Bootstrap-based themes. It also (along with Afterburner) allows you to upload a logo directly from the file picker.

The Bootstrap framework allows us to responsively reformat the layout according to the screensize of the device used - on phone or tablet screens blocks move to the bottom, freeing up space for the main content at the top. In the future we hope everyone will want to migrate their Moodle themes to be Bootstrap-based.

Clean theme on standard screen

Clean theme on smaller screen; note position of Navigation block

Add your logo from the file picker in Clean theme

Install add-ons from inside Moodle

It's now possible to install add-ons from within Moodle, rather than accessing folders on the server; useful for those admins who do not have FTP access. Add-ons can be uploaded and installed from a zip file or located and installed from the Moodle plugins directory:

Add-on install tool

Add-on passes validation; ready to go

See also

• Category:New features - list of pages documenting new features in Moodle 2.5