LMS | News
Moodle 2.7 Gets Improved Interfaces, Accessible Text Editor, Conditional Activities
Moodle 2.7 has been released. The upgrade to the popular free and open source learning management system includes new themes with improved responsive design, a new accessibility-focused text editor and more.
Moodle is in use at about 65,000 sites worldwide, including hundreds of K-12 schools, trade schools, colleges, and universities. Moodle used by about 1.2 million teachers and more than 71 million students participating in some 7.5 million courses as of this writing. (Updated statistics can be found on the Moodle Stats portal.)
The latest release, version 2.7, uses a new text editor called Atto, which is "tightly integrated" with Moodle. Its focus is on accessibility, and it includes support for equation editing. The old text editor, TinyMCE, is still available for those who choose to use it.
Version 2.7 also support conditional activities, including the requirements to satisfy "any" or "all" specified conditions, such as a date range, minimum grade, groups, user profile attributes or nested restrictions.
Themes have also been cleaned up in version 2.7, with most old themes removed (but available through plugins). The default theme is now Clean, which gets an improved bootstrap-based responsive design. customizable theme called ore has also been added.
Some other new features include:
- A new equation editor that can be used on tablets and phones;
- The addition of the MathJax filter for displaying mathematical equations;
- Improved quiz reports and other general improvements to quizzes and question banks, such as the ability to duplicate a question with a single click, the ability to require an attachment for essay questions and the ability to save changes and continue editing;
- Improvements to assignments, including the ability for teachers to edit or delete student submissions, add comments directly to student assignments and view grades without changing them;
- The ability to delete badges; and
- Display of badges on course profile pages.
Moodle 2.7 can be freely downloaded from the main Moodle download site. It requires PHP 5.4.4 or later and any common database — PostgreSQL 9.1 or later, MySQL 5.5.31 or later, MariaDB 5.5.31 or later, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or later or Oracle Database 10.2 or later. Complete version 2.7 release notes are also available.