Archive for March, 2008

Mar 11 2008

Moodle 1.9.0 Spawns, Begins Hunting Early Adopters

Published by Kenneth Newquist under Moodle, Web Applications

Moodle 1.9.0 is out. You can download it here. Among the highlights:

  • New Gradebook. That’s worth repeating … new Gradebook!
  • Integrated Outcomes
  • Performance enhancements
  • Tagging is now a core function

Gradebook is probably the single biggest reason to consider upgrading; it has support for fractional (aka decimal) grades, which is probably the single biggest thing our faculty have been demanding. Integrated support for Outcomes sounds cool, but I think it’s usefulness will depend on having some built-in rubrics for faculty to take advantage of.

The performance enhancements will be huge; the fixes to Moodle’s statistics-crunching cron alone are tremendous. I’m not so sure about tagging; I like the concept, but I’ll need to see how it’s executed.

So what next? We’ll be trying out a vanilla install of Moodle 1.9 on a test server and running it through a test script we put together at a recent Moodle Hack/Doc Fest. Then we’ll consider doing a test upgrade of the production Moodle (note, that’s a test upgrade). The March release date gives me a lot of confidence that we can have this ready for Fall 2008, but there’s a hell of a lot of work to be done between now and then.

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