Moodle 2.0 Setting the Standard for eLearning

July 6, 2010 - PRLog -- Some of the most anticipated new features in Moodle 2.0 are the Community Hub (now called MOOCH), Conditional Activities and Completion Tracking.  Other lesser-publicised but equally beneficial new features are Cohorts, Customised User Profiles and the new HTML Editor.

Cohorts

A Cohort or “site-wide group” is a collection of users that can be enrolled into courses in one action, either manually or automatically.  The addition of Cohorts in Moodle 2.0 will ease the administrative burden involved in creating class lists.

According to Moodle.org the goals for Cohorts are:
1. Simplify manual enrolments – instead of enrolling students one by one, it would be possible to enrol a cohort with single click.
2. Cohort enrolment plugin – new enrolment plugin synchronising users in cohort with enrolments in a course (including role assignment and group membership)
3. Synchronisation with external systems – some external systems do not know the actual courses, they only contain some user groups, at present there is no simple way to reuse these groups in Moodle.

Additional benefits of the Cohorts feature include the ability to add users to more than one cohort and teachers being able to add single users to a course as well as cohorts.  Should the occasion arise the name of a cohort can be changed.
Cohorts are one of the most requested missing features in Moodle and will be considered a very welcome addition to Moodle 2.0.

Customised User Profile Pages

In Moodle 2.0 site wide user profile pages can be customised with blocks, news-feeds and so on.  The aim here is to make the “My Moodle” interface a more usable space that provides each user with their own personal experience.

According to Moodle.org, My Moodle initially could come with specific pages:
1. Home page / dashboard – A completely user configurable page where the informational blocks can be added and moved. Users could have items such as news-feeds, calendars, etc.
2. Profile – The same function that currently exists on the user profile page. It will provide options for the user to assign what information can be visible by what roles.
3. Blog – Access to the user’s blog (like the current tab on the user profile page).
4. Course list – A better version of the current My Moodle page.
5. Report – Access to various reports and logs on your activities.

Each page would be available to be enabled or disabled to the My Moodle interface.

HTML Editor

Moodle 2.0 will use TinyMCE as the new HTML editor, which will work in more browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome.

You can also use the new HTML editor to embed media from other sites such as youtube or Flickr.

Moodle.org lists the benefits of the new HTML editor as follows:

1. It is a new editor based on TinyMCE
2. It works on more browsers
3. There is a resizable editing area
4. There’s cleaner XHTML output
5. It allows for full integration with configured external repositories to import and embed media into a text

For more information on upgrading to Moodle 2.0 with Synergy Learning visit http://www.synergy-learning.com or email info@synergy-learning.com.

Synergy Learning is the leading Moodle Partner in the UK and Ireland offering a full range of Moodle Services including Moodle Support, Moodle Hosting, Moodle Training, Moodle Themes and Moodle Development.

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Synergy Learning is the leading Moodle and Mahara Partner in the UK and Ireland. Synergy Learning has been creating professional, interactive elearning content for schools, colleges, universities, businesses and private training organisations since 1997 and has now has a global customer base. For more information visit http://www.synergy-learning.com