I missed the announcement early last week, but Moodle 1.9 was made available in early March. Since I haven't mentioned anything about Moodle since last October, I have some making up to do with the open source project responsible for this course and learning management system.

Significant new features in this new version of Moodle include:

• An all-new Gradebook designed from the ground up for expansion and integration with other systems
• Integrated support for Outcomes, so that learning goals can be tied to individual courses and activities, and can be graded against.
• Performance improvements due to review and refactoring of many parts of the Moodle code.
• Tagging is now a core function allowing users to easily link things like users, blogs, courses etc as well as external sites like Flickr and Youtube through the use of simple tags.

229 courses in 40 different places, five thousand teachers and more than 56 thousand students make the USP – Universidade de São Paulo (São Paulo University) in Brazil is the number one in Latin America and one of the 100 most important in the world. Since 1997 in the Internet, the university conduct a research on the last year with the visitors of USP Portal (www.usp.br) about changes and new features on this gate with intent to support the desires and requests of national and international users. The result was a set of new websites with a new navigation system, news and events channels, maps, informations to foreigners in four different languages and a new design."

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Note: The off-topic but good discussion about Joomla! has been moved to its very own post: http://cmsreport.com/node/1664 . Please post there your opinions about Joomla! there. If you have comments specifically related to São Paulo University's implementation of Joomla!, those comments are still welcomed and appreciated here.

Recieved an e-mail a couple days ago from ATutor.ca that that there is a new version of ATutor available, version 1.6. ATutor is an open source learning content management system (LCMS or sometimes just LMS). As the project describest, with Atutor "educators can quickly assemble, package, and redistribute Web-based instructional content, easily import prepackaged content, and conduct their courses online. Students learn in an adaptive learning environment."

The two most significant changes with Atutor 1.6 include:

• Adoption of a single character set, UTF-8, which provides universal language support.
• A new look-and-feel changes and updates to the default themes

You can visit the ATutor 1.6 Demo to try out new features in 1.6 and download ATutor 1.6 to install a version of your own.

I have not had time to talk about Google's Highly Open Participation Contest. Luckily, Amy Stephen posted a good article about the contest at Open Source Community which I encourage you to read. In the article, she talks about the positives of this program for both the high school age coders as well as the open source communities involved.

As Amy mentions in her article, Google invited ten Open Source projects, including Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python and SilverStripe to participate. In Google's own words this is what they have to say about their program:

"...what's more important is that Moodle is every bit as good as any other CMS/LMS product on the market -- and better than many. Just being available, supported and free is not enough to be compelling; being all of those things and being better than the alternatives is."

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Link found via Open Source Community

"A learning management system (LMS) is a big investment, and one not to be taken lightly. Mike Morrison has some advice on how to choose the one that is right for your organisation."

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A new version of Moodle is released with the developers stating that Moodle 1.8 is "a very high standard" and is "highly recommend production sites using older versions to upgrade to Moodle 1.8".  Moodle is a course management system (also called a learning management system) and used by educators to build online learning communities.

The most significant new features in this version of Moodle include:

• Accessibility improvements (Complies with all major international standards in this area, including XHTML Strict 1.0).
• Moodle Network (Allows for cross-site roaming)
• Roles improvements

Additional changes and enhancements can be found in the Moodle 1.8 Release Notes.  Downloads of Moodle 1.8 can be found on the  Moodle Downloads page.

The Software Freedom Law Center's (SFLC) request for a re-examination of Blackboard's patent for elearning systems has been granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Another request for re-examination by Desire2Learn is also pending. Speaking for the SFLC, Richard Fontana expresses optimism that these requests will either overturn the patent claim or else narrow it to the point that it no longer poses a threat to free software learning systems.

Filed on January 16, 2006, the Blackboard patent is for "a system and methods for implementing education online" by providing courses that "include assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like." In particular, the patent includes what amounts to group permissions for access to course materials. The patent was granted on July 26, 2006, and, on the same day, Blackboard filed a suit for patent violation against Desire2Learn, one of its leading competitors.