Course Site (Moodle) 3.9 public release notes

Activity chooser

The activity chooser has been completely redesigned and is more intuitive and efficient than ever.

Users can now star favorite/most used activities as well as browse activities and resources using a tab-style navigation. The "more info" button also displays detailed information about an activity or resource from right within the chooser interface.

Collapsible Topics Format

Rather than have a long list of items that your students must scroll through on your main course page, you can now choose to allow your students to collapse topic areas on your course site, either collectively or one by one.

When you 'Edit settings' you can select 'Collapsed Topics' in the 'Course format' area.

Now when you view your course home page you, and your students, will be able to 'Open all' topic areas, 'Close all' topic areas, or selectively open or close individual topic areas.

Session timeout notification

After a long period of inactivity, users now receive a notification that they have been inactive for a lengthy time period and are given the option to extend their session prior to timeout. Previously there was no notification that their session would end. If the session is not extended, the user will be informed that their session has timed out following its expiration.

Forum improvements

The brief video provides an overview of key new features of forums now available in our instance.

Key features

• Whole forum grading
  Forum posts can now be graded as any other activity using whole forum grading (direct or advanced including using rubrics). Grading can be done via the grading panel right within the forum alongside the posts.
  
• Access a forum summary report
  Accessed from the forum settings menu, the summary report shows detailed information about students posts and interactions with the forum.
  
  
• Export discussions
  From the forum summary report, you can export an individual student's posts or multiple students' posts.
  
  
• Experimental nested discussion view

Filter course participants

Instructors and site leaders can now filter the course participant list using more complex logic, more efficiently.

Accessibility improvements

There are a ton of accessibility improvements from major to minor, some of the most noticeable include:

• Back to top button (appears on the right side of the screen as you scroll further down the page away from the top of the page) provides a quick jump back to the top of the page.
• Thick borders around buttons and under hyperlinks to clearly indicate state of activity.
• Strong contrast buttons, highlights, and iconography.

Feature to avoid: Safe Exam Browser

Not to be confused with Respondus Lockdown browser which the university has licenses for, the safe exam browser is an open source alternative lockdown browser. We have tested this feature thoroughly and found that it does not function as expected - for example, it does not prevent screen recording. For that and many other reasons, Lehigh does NOT support this feature and strongly recommends you do not use it. Use at your own risk.