Dashboard and Course Overview: The latest release has brought the biggest renovation to its dashboard. Now the users can add required block, that performs a specific task, on to it and can rearrange it accordingly. The new update has also introduced a few blocks, including Timeline, Recently Accessed Courses, Starred Courses, and Recently Access Items. The users can arrange, sort and filter the courses with the help of these blocks, and separate them from the regular display. The new Course Overview block helps the students to track their course progress, deadlines and enables the teacher to see the activities that need grading.

Assignment Feedback Improvement: Moodle 3.6 offers an interactive feedback submission for the teachers. They can now attach audios and videos, along with their feedback, for the particular students. The teachers can also record the audio or video for the feedback, directly from the Moodle dashboard. This feature also enables them to upload images, PDF files or other documents along with the feedback.

Additional privacy settings: With the last updates of Moodle 3.5, it had also adopted the GDPR compliance. This time it has brought some other additional privacy settings, which will allow the users to make policy agreements compulsory or optional. It also lets the users delete the data requests from the dashboard and perform an erasure request on previously (prior to Moodle 3.5) deleted users. The users can easily manage the Data Privacy or contact the Protection officer of Moodle, directly, and make data request, that too is now available in a human-readable HTML format.

New Messaging interface: The upgraded messaging interface of Moodle lets the students, teacher and other users interact through personal messages. Now the users can also set restrictions to who can or cannot send messages to them. The teachers can also set course groups, where the teachers and students communicate with each other using the live group messages. The users now can manage their messaging preferences from the settings, add contacts and also see the profile of added contacts.

The new badge features: Moodle now supports the Open Badges version 2 specification from the IMS Global Consortium. The new badges in Moodle are now language-specific and can be linked to competencies in Competency Frameworks. Those badges will now be issued by the certified badge verificators.

Next cloud integration: The Moodle version 3.6 comes with built-in Nextcloud support. Now the users can directly access the files, add, remove or share them on Nextcloud from within Module.

Context Freezing: The new Moodle version has also provided its users with an experimental feature, i.e. Contact Freezing. The feature allows the administrator or anyone of similar power to make the content, like the courses, blocks or other content, ‘Read Only’, to prevent other users from modifying it. Depending on the requirements the settings can be customized at any time. The main goal of this feature is to avoid duplication of the content.

Support for LTI 1.3: The 3.6 version of Moodle has also got support for LTI 1.3, i.e. enhanced security for the protection of users’ information with the help of OAuth2 authentication and JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for message signing.

Moodle is one of the best open-source LMSs, that has been working hard to remain the best and to provide its users with the best learning and teaching experience. The Moodle cloud users will soon have their sites updated with the latest version. Except for the above-mentioned features, Moodle still has to release further information regarding the upgraded features.

The post Moodle 3.6 Announced; What’s New? appeared first on Xornor Technologies.

1) GDPR: The Moodle 3.5 has included the GDPR guidelines to be followed by the institutions inside EU as well as the organisations outside EU, that store the data of EU citizens. The site administrators can create policies to get the consent of the user to use their data. Also, the users can request the administrators to obtain a copy of their data or delete their private data from the records.

2) Creating and Sharing Audio/Video: The feature enables the user to record an audio or video directly on Moodle and submit it on Atto editor.

3) Mobile App Refresh: The Moodle mobile app has also been upgraded, in terms of its usability and appearance, making it easy to use for the teacher as well as the teacher.

4) Better Question Management: In the new update of Moodle, the user can tag the questions using a label, within the question bank, enabling the teacher to filter and view the questions easily.

5) Easy Management of Global Search: Moodle has added a new Simple Search option to its latest version, eliminating the need for installation of separate SOLR search software that was necessary for the previous Moodle version.

6) Featured Image With The Course: Now you can add a featured image with the course that will be displayed on the dashboard along with the course. It will make the Moodle dashboard look more adept and attractive.

7) Improved Messaging: With the new version of Moodle, the message functionality of Moodle has also been updated. The tables in the message database, as well as the message events, will alter, eventually, with the upgrade of the Moodle version. The users that are already using some message plugins, must have to update their code to avoid loss of messages and message history.

8) Theme and User Interface: The new Moodle 3.5 allows the user to update the theme accordingly. The Moodle 3.5 has been built on the Bootstrap v4 framework with enhanced appearance.

Moodle has always been the first preference for people across the globe for their LMS development needs. The platform provides you with numerous functions including the freedom to change the code as it is an open source platform. Also, now as it has also included the GDPR for the data protection and providing new features like better question management, improved global search, easy creation of audio and videos, etc., there is no question in why one should not upgrade to the newer version of Moodle.

Xornor Technologies has years of experience in Moodle customization and development. It is one of the rising LMS development companies in India. So, if you are looking for a company for your LMS development project, feel free to contact our expert Moodle developers.

The post Why You Must Upgrade to Moodle 3.5? appeared first on Xornor Technologies.

1) Open Source: Moodle comes as a free LMS platform that is used to cater to different type of training needs. It is embedded with many features that help you create a personalised environment and customised courses to fulfil particular learning needs. It is an open source platform but you have also got Moodle expert assistance that will help you understand the different features and how to use them.

2) Supported By Global Community: Being an open source platform Moodle has an open code for developers. That means, the code can be modified to enhance the data security or to make changes to its features, and that too can be done by the developers that are also its users. Along with the editing the code, you can get in touch with other users within the community who can help you with your doubts and guide you with Moodle development.

3) Flexible: Moodle is flexible as it has more than 500 plugins options that you can use according to your need and specifications. Those plugins are created by the global community that can help you with their usage and implementations.

4) Assesment & Certification: Learning is better with motivation. When it comes to Moodle, you can create various certification courses that encourage learning as the reward of learning is certificates and badges. The analytics helps the learners to keep a record of their progress with each course completion and keep them motivated.

5) Interactive Learning: Moodle gives you an interactive environment that to make the teaching and learning more engaging. The students can easily interact with the educators and can resolve their doubts. Also, it has got features like gamification that is helpful in active learning.

6) Easy integration: Moodle also supports easy integration with the other enterprise platforms like SAP, Oracle, Workday, SalesForce, etc. It provides a range of collaborative learning tools that can be used and customised according to the particular course.

7) Support For Social Learning Tools: Moodle is integrated with various social media tools promoting the collaborative learning through emails, blogs, podcast, social media forums, offline messaging etc. It extends the medium through which diverse learners and the educators can associate with each other for active learning.

All in all, Moodle is a highly-flexible and scalable Learning Management System development platform that is customizable and can be configured for its betterment. Its plugin library has got hundreds of plugins that are helpful in enhancing the teaching and learning experience. It serves the organisations of every size and every field.

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To effectively impart learning or training to learners  a Learning Management system or LMS with inbuilt tools like course module, certification, enrollment, reporting, tests /quizzes is required. An organization can choose to use a paid or free LMS. They have their own advantages and disadvantages depending on the type of course and other requirements.

Free or Paid LMS

All the widely used LMSs have some basic features like a provision for course creation, allowing students to access the course remotely and allowing the student to submit their assignments & test their proficiency. As there are many free open source LMSs with rich feature set are available, many colleges, universities and organizations are using the free Learning Management System for their organization. One of the major advantage of using the free LMS is that the organization or professional does not have to invest any money initially in the LMS. This is particularly suitable for organizations with a limited budget who are short of funds.

If a paid LMS is used, the organization will find it difficult to change the LMS at a later date, if it is not found suitable due to the lack of some features or some other reason. On the other hand, if the free open source LMS is used, though some time may be wasted, it is comparatively easier to change the LMS at a later date, as very less money and time would have been wasted. So for an organization using an LMS for the first time, it is highly recommended that a free LMS should be used, as there is more flexibility in switching the LMS if required.

Another major advantage of using a free open source LMS, is that the source code is available, and the organization can modify the LMS based on their specific requirement. For most paid LMS the source code is not provided, and the developer of the LMS may charge an additional fee for making even small changes in the LMS according to the requirement of the organization or professional who is developing the course. In case the organization is satisfied with the free LMS, they can opt for a higher paid version of LMS or hire the services of developers who specialize in customizing the LMS.

As the LMS is free, the user base for the LMS like most open source software is likely to be larger. So there is a larger community for the LMS who can help in solving any problem related to the LMS, as many users will face the same software related problems. There are also likely to be more developers who will develop plugins for improving the features of the LMS. Moodle which is one of the most popular LMS software having student dashboards, tracking the progress of students, and a provision for selling courses, using Paypal. There are also some course templates available, Sakai is targeting the educational sector while Opigno is a cloud based LMS. So depending on their requirement and budget, an organization should choose the right LMS for training or online learning.

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Moreover, Despite the high need of internet connectivity which such learning platforms requires, the systems gets the user’s information and responds through customized feedback. The user can even connect to a tutor directly where one have issues. This means that learning efficiency goes much high with this e-learning and most probably the reason for its high growing market size. E-Learning Market size was estimated at over $150 billion in 2016 and is predicted to potentially grow at over 5% from 2017 to 2024. This is most probably due to the competitiveness arising from the efficiency created by diverse companies offering these services and more so due to the highly increasing need for training solutions in the modern world.

Moodle LMS is among the world’s most used platform for e-learning today with over 68 million users and with over 55,000 Moodle learning sites since its inception back in the year 2002. This is because Moodle is free open source LMS that offers many creative designs, themes and management of the site to ensure that it is user friendly, flexible and easy to download. This has made Moodle to be widely adopted by many organizations even those beyond education ranging from non-profit organization to government and many more. It is rated second in the market size on the e-learning platform and expected to keep the competences. It has been used widely for: Compliance Training, On boarding and Related-training, Competency-based Training and Management, Workplace Safety Training etc.

In all these years Moodle has come a long way in terms of technology, flexibility and services it offers. We at Xornor Technologies offer different Moodle development services required by schools, universities and organizations.

Moodle Development Services

(a) Moodle development

We provide Moodle development services from basic installation, configuration and set up to integration like front end website in WordPress and back-end as Moodle.

(b) Moodle customization

Among the customization services are: Custom theming to promote your brand, SSO authentication against your preferred system, Third-party system integration, SSL certificates for secured logins, PayPal course enrollment configuration, custom plugins and many more. Our Dedicated Moodle development team can handle any kind of custom requirement.

(c) Moodle Mobile apps

With mobile apps, students would be able to study on the go, anywhere, anytime. Get your own Moodle LMS mobile app with your own branding.

If you are looking for Moodle LMS development, reach out to us here and we assure that you would be delighted to work with a team that has more than 15 years of experience in e learning industry.

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The key to success for any e-learning platform is to deliver a high class learning experience. Whether it’s self paced learning, live virtual classroom or a flipped classroom use case, if learner doesn’t get the learning experience which is at least equal to a typical classroom training, the product will fail, no matter how fancy it is.

Creating a great e-learning platforms requires a great team that can not only deliver the product as per requirement but also understand the use cases and posses domain knowledge. A typical E learning product might require features like tracking and reporting student’s progress, live virtual classroom or Live web conference tool, training courses, tutor search, cloud content management, online quizzes and tests, mobile apps, document sharing etc. If you have an in-house team, it is easy to manage, motivate and guide them towards the end goal. Over the time in-house time would develop the domain knowledge and would have customer empathy. Same is not true for an offshore software development company that has no expertise in e-learning domain. They might not understand the idea, terms and the philosophy behind the product. They will deliver the code but may fail to deliver the product you envisioned.

If you have a great e-learning idea and want to engage an offshore development company or e-learning professional, do keep following things in mind-

• Look for a software development company or professional that has expertise in e Learning
• Have they delivered any e-learning product as big and complicated as yours
• Do they have work samples or a rich portfolio
• What’s the learning curve for them to get started
• Do they fit in in your overall product plan
• Apart from programing what other expertise they have that can benefit you
• How exited they are about your project

As a budding entrepreneur if you are also trying to tag along the e-learning bandwagon and working on a great idea, give us a shout and you won’t regret it.

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