Moodle Upgraded for 2017-18 Academic Year

Moodle will run 3.3 for the 2017-18 academic year. Below we've highlighted major changes and new features.

For all users

• Dashboard includes a redesigned Course Overview block.  
• Completed courses or those whose end date have passed appear in the ‘Past’ section.
• Courses appear in the ‘In Progress’ section if the course start date is in the past and the current date is before the end date OR there is no end date. Keep in mind you may see several courses in this section as migrated courses initially will not have end dates - this is a new setting.
• For courses to appear in the 'Future' section, the student must be enrolled in them even though the course start date is in the future.
• Some of the new timeline tracking features will require teachers to set activity deadlines, expected completion dates, or “remind me to grade by” dates.
• New messaging and notification options. Messages now support media filters for embedding images and video.
• Improved support for Moodle Mobile app. See Moodle Mobile Features for complete details. Teachers may want to view tips for creating mobile friendly courses.

Teachers

• Course Settings:
• Courses can now have end dates. This is used to indicate when a course should appear in the ‘Past’ section of the Course Overview block.
• The number of course sections can no longer be set in course settings. Add or delete sections directly from the course page. Weekly format includes an option to automatically add sections based on the start and end date of your course. This will prevent the orphaning of course content.
• Assignments
• Restrict assignment submissions to specific file types such as a Word (docx).
• Expansion of individual or group overrides to assignments. Easily change or “override” deadlines or other assignment settings for individuals or groups.
• Set ‘grade by’ reminder in assignments. Turn this on to see alerts on assignments to grade in the new course overview block.
• Negative scores for rubrics.
• Bulk edit activity completion settings in your courses and change default settings for new activities. Watch the activity completion enhancements screencast for a walkthrough.
• Media player improvements including new default player, VideoJS. The Media players screencast describes new options for managing files including displaying thumbnails and adding captions. Drag and drop media files directly to course page or as a file resource.
• New stealth mode allows teachers to make hidden content available. This is useful if you want to link to content or activities that don’t appear to students in the main page.
• New theme option, Boost, is available for early adopters. It takes advantage of new icons and has an updated navigation scheme. We will work on updating the default theme to Boost over the 2017-18 academic year.
• Lock discussion forums automatically after a period of inactivity.
• Select for students in the choice activity.
• Improvements to report charts.

See the following release notes for a complete list:

New Features for Moodle 3.2

New Features for Moodle 3.3