Moodle announces long-term support release

May 19, 2014 - PRLog -- The Moodle community and Moodle HQ have delivered a more user-friendly and effective learning platform with the latest version of Moodle – Moodle 2.7.

One of the world’s most popular open source learning platform - used by more than 70,000 companies, schools and organisations worldwide – Moodle 2.7 brings a suite of new features, improved tools and streamlined workflows to administrators, educators and students. The free Moodle learning platform continues to strengthen with several new capabilities and improvements, including:

- A more responsive and accessible interface across all devices: Moodle now uses Bootstrap themes by default for improved responsive design and usability.
- New HTML editor: Atto, the new default editor is lightweight, accessible and user-friendly. TinyMCE editor is still available as an option.
- Customisable theme: New More theme allows users to easily customise the look and feel of their Moodle site via the user interface, without the need for advanced technical knowledge.
- Improvements to Assignments: Teachers can now notify students when providing feedback, easily keep track, edit or delete student submissions, set a word limit and add comments directly to text assignments.
- A streamlined workflow in conditional activities: Enhancements include a more streamlined interface, as well as added support to enable restricted access with “or” conditions and use nested restrictions for complex access criteria.
- Easily create and manage Quizzes: A number of productivity improvements have been added to Quiz and Question Bank, including an added option ‘Save changes and continue editing’, improved quiz reports, and an updated question type selector makes duplicating and moving questions much easier.
- New mathematical equation editor: Create and display mathematical equations directly in the Atto editor across all devices.

Moodle 2.7 also addresses administration, maintenance and support needs:

- New logging infrastructure: A new logging subsystem with plugins allowing detailed and external logs provides opportunities for data usage, such as improved reporting as well as advancements in better learning analytics.
- Better task management: With an improved scheduling system, tasks can be scheduled precisely, even on complex clustered servers.
- Long Term Support (LTS): Extended support of 3 years (until May 2017) for security and data-loss fixes, twice the time of other releases.

“Moodle 2.7 is another solid step towards our vision of the ideal modern open-source learning platform that empowers educators to create personal learning experiences that are effective and enjoyable, in all sectors," said Martin Dougiamas, Founder and CEO of Moodle Pty Ltd.

"I’m particularly pleased to announce that we’ll be investing extra time and effort into this particular release by giving it long-term support for 3 years, and I hope this will encourage many of our longtime users still using very old unsupported versions of Moodle to make the effort to upgrade soon.”

Learn more about the new features and improvements in Moodle 2.7 at http://docs.moodle.org/27/en/New_features,  or try it now at http://school.demo.moodle.net/.