Try out the new Moodle 2.0 !

Approximately 34 Million  people in the world are Moodle users. What started as an effort to counter expensive proprietary Learning Management Solutions has today turned into the world’s largest Open Source platform for educational purposes.  Come July 20, 2010, Moodle will be releasing a version 2.0 of it’s platform.  There is excitement amongst all Moodle users because Ver 2.0 comes with huge number of changes in the core platform itself.

First off, the biggest pain in working in Moodle – Navigation – is completely revamped.  Now, blocks can be placed anywhere on the page rather than being stuck on the left or right side. Within each block, links can be grouped and will collapse to provide easy access. There is core support for adding custom menus in themes.

Then, there is integration of external repository content. That means students and teachers can keep their files anywhere – in Google Docs, Flickr, Youtube etc and just import them into courses.  As this feature is a plugin, developers can create more options to integrate any external repository.

Some other nice changes I’ve found are listed here :

Cohorts –  Also known as “Site-wide groups”, these are site-wide collections of users that can be enrolled into courses in one action, either manually or synchronised automatically

Comments block – like a shoutbox, allows comments to be added to any page. Great for student feedback.

Private files block – allows easy access to one’s private file repository in Moodle (with quota support)

Blog –  Support for comments on each blog entry.

Comments User comments (Glossaries, Databases, Blogs, etc) are now all consistently handled and displayed throughout Moodle. User activity reports will include all the comments made by that user

Messaging – All email sent by Moodle is now treated as a message

Navigation – Standard “Navigation” block on every page showing contexual links, while allowing you to jump elsewhere quickly

Of course, there are so many more improvements to the content creation tools and modules.

Here’s a place you can try some of the basic features of Moodle 2.0 – http://qa.moodle.net/ , the login details are available on the page itself. Have fun !