Moodle 2.3 adds Course Interface and File Management Improvements

Call me a sucker for education, but despite the fact that CMS Report retired Moodle from our Top 30 list last year, I still insist on posting Moodle articles from time to time. The supporters and developers of Moodle have released Moodle 2.3, a new version of their open source CMS. The "CMS" in this case stands for Course Management System. In order to avoid confusing the Moodle CMS with the other type of "CMS" we typically cover here, I will continue to stick to calling Moodle a Learning Management System  (LMS) or even an LCMS.

Getting back on track, Moodle 2.3 offers a significant number of new features and improvements. In the Moodle 2.3 announcement, Martin Dougiamas headlined three of the following features:

• Course interface - the course formats have been enhanced to make it quicker and easier to create and manage your course.  Everything in your course can be dragged around the screen, and files and links can be dragged and dropped straight from your desktop.
• Files and repositories - it's now a lot easier to manage files anywhere in Moodle.  You can see and manage the content you have, while also introducing new content easily via our many repository interfaces. These include many popular services around the internet (such as Google Docs/Drive, Dropbox, Box.net, Amazon and so on) as well as some you may have installed at your institution, like Equella or any network drive.
• Assignment module - this critical assessment module has been completely rewritten from the ground up, fixing a lot of quirks and providing a good foundation for more growth in Moodle 2.4.  As well as that, a new Advanced grading method called "Marking guide" has been added, with features like canned comments.

Additional significant new features in Moodle 2.3 includes:

• The third-party Book module is now part of Moodle core.
• Additional features and improvements have been added to the Quiz and Workship modules.
• Update notifications for Admins

For a complete list of new features and improvements in Moodle 2.3, you'll want to take a look at the Moodle 2.3 Release Notes. The release notes also contain a listing of API changes that would be of interesting to Moodle developers. You can get new packages from the Moodle download page or access the code directly from Moodle's main git repository.