E-learning and LMS blog articles

Hubken exclusive innovations 

We’ve been busy creating enhancements to the Moodle experience exclusive to our customers.

A new theme

A completely modernised, clean version of our custom theme encompasses all the innovations in design that come with Moodle and so much more. For a detailed overview of the new branding, see our article here: Moodle Hubken Branding introduction: Hubken Group

A new course format

The Hubken exclusive Topics Extended course format has been overhauled and enhanced to take advantage of the navigation improvements in Moodle.

We have created an exiting new design which we hope you will love. Take a look at our introduction to the new format here: Moodle Hubken Topics Extended introduction: Hubken Group

New and enhanced features  

Overview block

The overview block provides a view of the student's enrolled courses and their progress in the courses. This block can be added to the student’s dashboard. The block is searchable and filterable.

Timeline block 

The timeline block which tracks upcoming deadlines in courses now appears by default on dashboards.

User tours 

You can now add images and videos to your user tours. When created or editing a step, images and videos can be added using the standard editor tools. 

Report builder  

Shareable custom reports. Reports in Moodle can be scheduled for email delivery and made available to users based on roles and/or cohort membership or individual users. Report content, filters and data restrictions are configurable by the report creator.

Moodle is no longer limited to course level reporting. The report builder allows for site-wide reporting. For example, see all users' completion statuses across all courses in one report.

Reports can be automatically sent to users via email at scheduled intervals. Moodle can currently generate site-wide reports on: 

• Course participants
  Reporting on courses, including user completion status, enrolment details and last access.
  
• Groups
  Reporting on groups, groupings and group members. 
  
• Comments
  Reporting on comments made by users on all activities with comments enabled, i.e. assignments and glossaries.
  
• Badges
  Reporting on badges, their criteria and users who have been issued with them.
  
• Blogs
  Reporting on-site, personal and course related blogs.
  
• Notes
  Reporting on-site, personal and course related notes. 
  
• Files
  Reporting on files uploaded to the site, including file size, location, context and who uploaded them.
  
• Tags
  Reporting on tags used on the site, i.e. for interests in user profiles or course tags.

BigBlueButton integration  

BigBlueButton is now part of core Moodle and no longer requires a plugin to be installed. If you are an existing BigBlueButton user, nothing will change for you. If you want to try it out, you can now add the BigBlueButton activity to a course and use the free tier or sign up for the service. The free tier includes:

• Sessions of up to 60 minutes 
  
• Up to 25 users 
  
• Whiteboards, polls, screen sharing, and breakout rooms 
  
• Learning analytics

Quiz and questions

Some great new functions have been added to the question bank to improve the management of questions used in Quizzes. Improvements include: 

• Question status – Mark a question as “Ready” or “Draft”
  Allow questions to be evaluated before they can be added to quizzes.
  
• Comments – Teachers can comment on questions to suggest changes
  Comments are visible to all teachers and site admins.
  
• Question integrity checks – Automated question analysis to determine if there are any issues. e.g., do a disproportionate number of students respond incorrectly?
  Data appears in the “Needs checking” column in the question bank and can have a value of unlikely, likely and very likely.
  
• Versioning – Updated questions create new versions which are labelled. Historical versions can be viewed, and quizzes can be set to use a specific version or the latest version
  
• The addition of a “Modified by” column to the question list
  This shows you who last edited the question and when.
  
• The addition of a “Last used” column to the question list
  This shows when the question was last answered by a student (it does not identify the student).
• The ability to edit the question name on the question list screen
  Simply edit the name by clicking the pencil icon without having to go to the question edit screen.
  
• Custom fields – Custom fields (defined by the site administrator) can be added to questions to track extra data e.g., question difficulty as in the screenshot below

Assignment 

New functions have been added to the assignment activity, including:

• Activity instructions – An extra set of instructions only visible to the student when they begin the assignment
  
• Time limit – A time limit can be placed on the assignment. A timer countdown will start upon the student beginning the assignment. Assignments are still submittable when the time expires but the submission will be recorded as late
  
• Require a pass grade added as an option to the activity completion criteria

These options are visible when editing existing assignments or creating new ones.

Update LTI feature to support LTI 1.3  

LTI (Learning Technology Interoperability) is a standards-based protocol that enables an LMS to integrate with any other application that also supports LTI. So, for example, you could use this to integrate your organisation’s Zoom account or connect with another Moodle site.

This update brings the latest LTI version to Moodle which, amongst other improvements, brings improved grading synchronisation. 

Admin configuration pre-sets

This is an advanced feature for experienced administrators. The feature enables site administrators to create, import and export pre-sets for administration settings.

You can save all your current site admin settings as a pre-set to share or reuse. Moodle includes some pre-sets as standard.

Content bank and H5P 

This change is for the native Moodle H5P integration. If you are using the Hubken-provided activity (Interactive content) you may not notice these changes. 

Editing H5P content is now possible direct from the activity via a link on the bottom-left.

Navigation by context has been added to the content bank. This means that you can grab content from any area on the site to use when creating your content without having to go through the upload process. 

Simplified notification settings 

The online/offline options in the notification settings have been removed to improve the user experience.

Favicon

The site favicon can now be changed via Site administration > Appearance > Logos. 

Label   

The name of the label resource has been changed to “Text and media area” to clearly identify its functionality.

Thinking of upgrading to the latest version? Talk to us! 

Whether you’re an existing Moodle LMS user with Hubken and would like to upgrade, or you’re new to us and want to know more about implementing Moodle as part of your L&D strategy, we’re here to help.

Talk to one of our LMS specialists and discover how Hubken can make the most of Moodle for your organisation. For more information on what a Moodle LMS has to offer, read our guide: What is Moodle? The ultimate guide to Moodle LMS.