Each year, over the summer, the University upgrades Moodle to ensure staff and students have access to all the new features and fixes.

This year there has been a big improvement to the look and feel of Moodle, and a new theme has been put in place. You can read about that work here:

New Moodle theme

In this post I’ll give an outline of the new features in Moodle 3.5 that are most relevant to the University.

Using icons from Font Awesome provides clearer accessible icons.

Anywhere you have the Atto editor you’ll find two new icons (Microphone and Webcam) that allow you to quickly and easily record up to two minutes of audio or video directly into the section you are developing.

This update allows you to share the results of the choice with the students. It can be set up so that the results are available at a specified time and you can decide whether the results are anonymous.

If you are using badges as a reward system within a module, you now have the ability to release a badge depending on the completion of other badges. As you can see from the image in the link above, the three basic badges are: “Super Staters”, “Marvellous Mains” and “Delicious Desserts”. When these are finished the overall category badge called “Vegetarian Cook” is awarded.

Questions can now be tagged. This means a question may sit within one category but be tagged with key terms that could cross over to other categories. The question is then searchable from with the parent category according to any given tag.

  • Essay questions within a quiz – restrictions on file types

Should a file be uploaded to an essay question within a quiz, a range of options are available to define which file types may or may not be allowed.