Moodle Features

Moodle offers students and instructors a personalized dashboard listing courses and tasks, and collaborative tools including forums, wikis and group calendars. It lets you work with files stored in cloud services like Dropbox, and supports notifications and private messaging between users. It is available for multiple languages, supports open standards like Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) and Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), and works well with screen readers. Finally, it comes with an extensive plugins directory together with support from more than 60 worldwide partners.

What is New in Moodle 3.5?

Major features

GDPR

• MDL-61275 – GDPR Consenting of Minors and Managing, Versioning and Tracking Privacy Policies and User Consents
• MDL-61292 – A new admin tool to manage policy documents
• MDL-61423 – Add age and location verification to identify minors
• MDL-61302 – Workflow to allow users to agree to all policies
• MDL-61301 – Report of user agreed policies and their versions
• MDL-61705 – Bulk accept of policies on behalf of users
• MDL-61864 – Include policy tool in core
• MDL-62286 – Add policy link to the site footer

• MDL-61306 – GDPR Data Requests and Data Registry
• MDL-59718 – A process to send a request to the data protection officer
• MDL-59720 – Delete personal data when it is no longer required
• MDL-61307 – Create a new privacy subsystem
• MDL-61362 – Ability to create data categories and purposes
• MDL-61486 – Data registry with purpose and retention period
• MDL-61489 – Report of plugin/components implementing the Privacy API
• MDL-61499 – Ability to set default purpose and retention periods for context levels
• MDL-61785 – Ability to review and confirm which expired data can be deleted
• MDL-61899 – Include data privacy tool in core
• MDL-61935 – Ability to specify the lawful bases for the collection of personal data

Question bank tagging improvements

• MDL-61066 – Expanded tagging functionality for question bank
• MDL-61133 – New modal to add/edit/remove tags on questions
• MDL-61135 – Filter questions by tag
• MDL-61138 – Show the list of questions in the ‘Add a random question’ dialog
• MDL-61363 – Ability to add question tags at a course level in the edit question form
• MDL-61364 – Manage tags at a question and course context level
• MDL-61380 – Allow filtering/adding random questions by tag for quizzes
• MDL-61410 – Add import/export support for course level question tags
• MDL-61444 – New capabilities for tagging questions

UX: Usability improvements

• MDL-62021 – Boost 4.0 Migration
• MDL-56511 – Update bootstrap 4 to final release
• MDL-61657 – Add images to the course cards on the dashboard

LTI Advantage support

• MDL-60416 – Add support for LTI Advantage 1.1

RecordRTC for Atto

• MDL-60848 – Implement RecordRTC Atto plugin as core feature
• MDL-61973 – Update RecordRTC Atto plugin buttons

Messaging database tables

• MDL-61254 – Merge messaging database tables
• MDL-36941 – Create new tables for messaging
• MDL-61255 – Ad-hoc task to upgrade messages to merged table

Other Highlights

Global search

• MDL-58885 – Add group support
• MDL-59434 – Content aware searching / alternate results sort orders
• MDL-60981 – Reindex a single area
• MDL-61028 – Allow filtering search by user
• MDL-61256 – Search of section titles, summaries

Functional changes

• MDL-2051 – Inform student whether and how their selected choice will display
• MDL-32585 – SCORM: option to force new attempts
• MDL-53226 – Add Moodle DB search engine
• MDL-55491 – Use cohort as badge criteria
• MDL-56246 – Add site wide default for grade export: include feedback
• MDL-59875 – Allow badges as criteria for other badges
• MDL-60119 – Feedback – Multiple choice (rated) – remove weights from answer
• MDL-61203 – Allow uploading of profile picture to be used as badge criteria
• MDL-61601 – Allow cohort themes
• MDL-61651 – LTI: line item definition within link to return gradable LTI links
• MDL-60811 – Bulk delete self-registered enrolments on participants page
• MDL-60682 – Ability to set date/time to nearest minute
• MDL-60441 – Ability to add a link to glossary entries
• MDL-58411 – Ability to apply file type restrictions for essay question type
• MDL-56945 – Add easy return path from PDF grading screen to list of submissions
• MDL-52811 – Add force language capability to course settings
• MDL-41090 – Allow teachers to embed files when manually grading questions

Security issues

• MSA-18-0007 Calculated question type allows remote code execution by Question authors
• MSA-18-0008 Users can download any file via portfolio assignment caller class
• MSA-18-0009 Portfolio forum caller class allows a user to download any file
• MSA-18-0010 User can shift a block from Dashboard to any page
• MSA-18-0011 User who did not agree to the site policies can see the site homepage as if they had full site access
• MSA-18-0012 Portfolio script allows instantiation of class chosen by user

For developers

• MDL-61307 – All plugins must implement Privacy API to be compliant with GDPR requirements. They must implement the API to report on, export and delete stored user data
• MDL-56511 – Bootstrap is upgraded to final release of version 4
• MDL-61869 – Infer rendering of templatables with no render method
• MDL-61298 – Boost: use navigation node icon

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