Roadmap

The Moodle Project is designed to have a positive effect on the world by supporting and empowering the educators who are teaching students in all sectors, in all countries.

To do this, our team at Moodle HQ examines the problems around education and creates solutions in the forms of products that fit our values of education, openness, respect, integrity and innovation.

This page is your starting point for learning about our plans for upcoming releases of Moodle. Below you will find information on the features that are currently in progress and those being planned for future releases.

Inputs to the roadmap

Proposals for improvements and new features are sourced from a variety of different inputs. Feedback from the community is very important and you can reach us by creating new issues on tracker, joining the Moodle User Association to vote on a new project for each release, discussing your ideas on the forums, and meeting us in person at one of our MoodleMoots!

Moodle also has an extensive network of Moodle Partners. Moodle Partners are service providers that are certified by Moodle HQ to provide high quality Moodle services for schools, institutions and organisations. We work closely with our partners to determine the needs of Moodle Users and improve the platform.

Moodle 3.6: current major work

We are working on the following projects for the 3.6 roadmap:

1. Improvements to the Dashboard and Course Overview page. In particular the ability to handle large numbers of courses and activities. Planned improvements include new blocks with easy access to the most recently visited courses and activities, ability to favourite and hide courses, ability to load more courses onto one page and providing a separate timeline block.
2. Introduction of group messaging. One-to-one messaging is already possible in Moodle and this will introduce the ability to enable group messaging for a course or any other group formed by the teacher. In line with our focus on protecting privacy, users will be given greater control over who is able to message them.
3. Additional privacy features. Several improvements are planned to further enhance privacy and controls for users and their data. This continues on from the privacy features implemented in Moodle 3.5 for the European data privacy regulations: GDPR. The enhancements will include a more human friendly readable format of the data export, ability to perform an erasure request on previously (prior to Moodle 3.5) deleted users, improved control over the purpose and retention period for different types of activity modules, and more!
4. Support for LTI 1.3. Following on from the LTI Advantage support that was introduced in Moodle 3.5 we are now introducing support for LTI 1.3. One of the key improvements in LTI 1.3 is enhanced security to protect user information with the introduction of OAuth2 authentication and JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for message signing.
5. Improvements to Quiz analytical tools. This is a project selected by the Moodle User Association (MUA) to simplify the way response statistics for random question pools are displayed. Further information can be found on the MUA page and in the tracker.
6. Adding file and media support for assignment feedback. This will allow teachers to upload files and media when providing students with feedback on their work.
7. Accessibility improvements. Inclusiveness for people with disabilities is the driver for this project and current work in this area is focused on improving accessibility of the Boost theme and Forum.

Moodle 3.7: planning in progress

Planning for Moodle 3.7 and beyond is in progress, so stay tuned!

Here are some items we are currently working on for Moodle 3.7:

1. In line with our goal to ensure Moodle is feature competitive we are currently undertaking a review of the open educational standards, such as the IMS Interoperability Standards. Support for LTI 1.3 will be included in Moodle 3.6 and we are in the process of reviewing and prioritising standards for subsequent Moodle releases.
2. Themes: with the introduction of Bootstrap 4 final for Moodle 3.5 we will now focus on further improving the Boost theme. As discussed on the forum we will retain Bootstrapbase and the Clean theme for Moodle 3.6, but will remove them for Moodle 3.7. Supporting multiple frameworks and themes increases our development and testing efforts as all new features require development and testing across the different themes. In turn this means that less time is available to work on new features, bugs, and other user-facing functionality. In the long term this is not sustainable and also not beneficial. This will allow us to focus our efforts on improving the core theme and ultimately serving our users better. A new ‘Classic’ theme, based on Bootstrap 4 final, will be introduced that is more in-line with the Clean theme, retaining the 2 and 3 column grid layout, and the classic navigation block.

Moodle releases

See our Releases page for information about past releases. After Moodle 2.0 we switched to time-based releases rather than feature-based releases (see our development process). Because of this, the details above on future releases are an indication of current priorities only, and are targeted to be released in the upcoming releases. Anything not ready by the next release date will generally be pushed to the following major release.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The EU data protection regulation came into effect on 25 May 2018 and all organisations in the EU, as well as those outside the EU that store data of EU citizens, have to comply. Moodle 3.5 introduced features that assist these organisations to become GDPR compliant. These features focus on functionality to:

• Provide additional privacy information during user sign up, as well as more extensive recording and logging of user consents
• Provide additional means for users to obtain a copy or their data, invoke their right to data erasure and keeping track of all types of data within Moodle in a data registry

See also

• Releases - versions of Moodle that have already been released
• https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Releases#General_release_calendar Key dates relating to future releases. Since that is hard to browse, the key ones for 3.7 in 2019 are Code Freeze: 8th April, Release: 13th May, End-of-on-sync: 27th May.