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Educate Online enters Indian education market to offer high-quality distance education

Educate Online enters Indian education market to offer high-quality distance education
Educate Online

Educate Online – the US based startup has expanded into Indian education market. The US based startup offers high quality distance education to every child in the world. The goal of expanding into the Indian market is to provide online learning opportunities to the local community and share the local edTech market.

Indian EdTech market is one of the rapidly growing segment in the country which is estimated at $2.8 billion and is expected to reach $10.4 billion by 2025. Educate Online has hired a team of local experts led by CEO Amit Saneja.

Educate Online offers a student’s full journey from international high school to career building. The whole journey of High-school education, University admission and then career planning will be on offer. Alexander Zheltov, CEO and co-founder of Educate Online, mentions:

We are sure that the Indian market has enormous edTech potential. Indian schools taught 250 million students, so we have a huge and perspective market to work on! That’s why Educate Online wants to use all its experience from other markets and insights from Indian market research to empower Indians to get a world-class education and educate 1000 local students by the end of this year, and in 2023 increase this figure tenfold.

For more details about the programs offered by Educate Online, you can check out their website here.

LearnR – Check out the new Moodle theme for Moodle 4.0

LearnR - Check out the new Moodle theme for Moodle 4.0
Learnr Moodle Theme

LearnR is a brand new Moodle theme developed by Chris Kenniburg who is the developer of popular Fordson theme. LearnR is a Boost Child theme designed especially for your learners. It utilizes the new features coming in Moodle 4.0 to provide incredibly structured navigation and pathways to course materials.

LearnR theme by Chris Kenniburg, builds on the new layouts and user experiences introduced in Moodle 4.0. The theme is developed in continuation to Fordson, Evolve-D & Pioneer theme and is focused on a student going from “login to learning” quickly and easily

LearnR Theme Demo
LearnR Theme Demo

The innovative features in LearnR theme are:

  • Consistency – LearnR pursues consistency by making all content full width with navigation that is predictable, simple, and structured for users.
  • Customized course header images which will provides visual cues for learners on which course they are in.
  • Ability to focus the learner with a single pathway to learning
  • Direct users on the homepage, dashboard, or my courses page with innovative “Icon navigation bar”
  • A latest course drop down menu automatically builds individual course menus for students based on the last 7 courses they visit.
  • An innovative “course section style chooser” allows the site admin to choose from pre-built section styles for course homepage

You can download the LearnR theme from Moodle themes database here. Kindly note that it is available only for Moodle 4.0 and not for lower versions. So please make sure to try if you are using Moodle 4.0 version.

Moodle Users Association – Top voted projects for Project Development Cycle: January – June 2022

Moodle Users Association - Top voted projects for Project Development Cycle: January - June 2022
Moodle Users Association

Moodle Users Association is the non-profit organization which connects Moodle users across the globe. The MUA allows the members to push for new features in Moodle Core by voting for them.Every year the Moodle Users Association goes through two project development cycles. Based on the votes received by MUA members, the projects are then pushed into Moodle core.

Atto Accessibility, Moodle Question bank Improvements, Course Overview in Dashboard etc are few examples of projects contributed by Moodle Users Association. At present, the MUA is in the middle of Project Development Cycle: January – June 2022.

There are 10 projects which have been shortlisted for the Jan-June 2022 development cycle. The top voted projects are as below:

  1. Bulk edit activities in course view page – 32957
  2. Team mode for Workshop – 31158
  3. Enhanced Forum Reports, Enhanced Forum Exports, and Enhanced Discussion Metrics – 16065
  4. Improve Moodle Reporting – 11554
  5. Make it possible to use completion criteria in if-conditions for grade calculations – 5383
  6. Moodle Wiki export and import – 4033
  7. Bulk upload of offline performances to assignment module – 3945
  8. Add the Ordering question type (qtype_ordering) into Moodle core – 3910
  9. Default Settings for Activities and Resources Completion Criteria – 1890
  10. Improve online text assignment submission screen – 1155

The shortlisted projects are currently under evaluation by Moodle HQ development team. The final project cycle voting will start in June.

Out of the all above projects, which project you would like to see in Moodle Core? Share your views with us in the comments section below.

Moodle Partner network extended in Guatemala

Moodle Partner network extended in Guatemala
Moodle Partner network extended in Guatemala

Moodle Partner network is extended in Guatemala with the addition of new partner – Corporate Learning. In a recent news, Moodle HQ team reported the addition of Corporate Learning as the new partner. They have a strong clientele in Central America and has hosted MoodleMoot Guatemala for four years.

Corporate Learning have expertise which delivers custom development of Moodle, installation and configuration services on clients’ servers, Moodle cloud services and training programs. They have delivered solutions which helped their customers to focus on knowledge management and digital transformation.

After getting appointed as the official Moodle Partner in Guatemala, Álvaro Navarro, General Manager of Corporate Learning, said:

“As a certified Moodle Partner, we look forward to the opportunity this provides us to expand our services across sectors for the benefit of students in both traditional education and corporate or workplace settings.

We have been lucky to have a relationship with Moodle for several years. To formalise our relationship by becoming a Moodle Certified Partner reinforces our commitment to the Moodle community. Plus, the support and certification of Moodle guarantee the quality of our services.”

Moodle users from Guatemala can connect them through their official website here.

Moodle Administrators – How to disable new activities without disabling plugin

Moodle Administrators - How to disable new activities without disabling plugin
Moodle Capability Override

Moodle is the world’s most popular Open Source Learning Management System. It can be used to the learning requirements of all sectors from education institutions, corporate etc. It can be customized to adapt to all requirements for specific needs.

Recently, one of the Moodle administrator wanted to continue using the existing instance of an Activity plugin. However he want to remove any future additions of activity in the Moodle courses. Tim Hunt – the lead for Moodle’s Quiz module, came back with a simple & effective solution.

According toe the solution Tim shared, the future addition of any activity in the course can be disabled simple by removing the mod/add new instance capability from all roles. That will make sure that the teachers are not able to add new activity in their courses while keep the previous instances in place.

Let’s check the solution in details in below steps:

  1. Navigate to Site Administration > Users > Permissions > Define Roles
  2. Click the Cog wheel icon next to the teacher role.Moodle Administrators - How to disable new activities without disabling plugin
  3. On bottom of the page, you will see a search box, filter the plugin capability. Like in the below example, I am disabling the Mod/Simple lessons capability from teacher role.Moodle Administrators - How to disable new activities without disabling plugin
  4. Click Save Changes.

You need to repeat the same for all Roles to override the default permissions. What are the other helpful tips you have received on Moodle Forums. Please share with us in the comments section below.

Moodle 4.0 – Total 264 plugins received Early Bird Award

Moodle 4.0 - Total 264 plugins received Early Bird Award
Moodle 4.0 Early Bird Plugins

Moodle Plugin developers done a tremendously good job by updating their plugins to the latest Moodle version 4.0. The Moodle 4.0 was released on 19th April 2022 with a lot of new improvements especially on User Experience & Question Bank. Moodle plugin developers updated their plugins to get the Early Bird award for their plugins.

David Mudrak – the curator of Moodle plugins directory, announced the award of Early Bird Plugins. In total 264 plugins have received the Early Bird 4.0 Award for their compatibility with Moodle 4.0 before the release date. Out of 264 plugins, 214 plugins

The early bird award are given to the Moodle plugins if they have a tested working 4.0 compatible version available on Moodle release date. You can check out the plugins who received the award here.

Moodle 4.0 - Total 264 plugins received Early Bird Award
Image Credits – Moodle.org

However, this time the count is slightly lesser than it was for Moodle 3.9 & earlier versions. One of the reasons might be that there are major changes in Moodle core for Moodle 4.0 version.

But still it takes a great effort from all developers to keep the plugin regularly updated and maintained. We congratulate all plugin developers on putting their best efforts to update the plugins for Moodle 4.0.

Moodle Educators – How to reuse course activities within Moodle courses to save time

Moodle Educators - How to reuse course activities within Moodle courses to save time
Moodle Educators - How to reuse course activities within Moodle courses to save time

Moodle is the World’s most popular open source Learning Management System. It has been used by over 300+ million users around the world. Moodle teachers (educators) often need to create a similar activity multiple times in their courses. In this post, we will see how you can use the Moodle Course Reuse feature to import activities from another course. This feature can help Moodle Educators save a lot of time and be more productive.

Let’s say for example, a teacher is teaching English Language to the students. She may be using similar assignments for different grade students. So she can use the course reuse feature to import assignments from one course to her new course. This will add just the activity/resource settings/data and not the user data associated with it.

Reuse Moodle Course Activities/resources

To get started with reusing Moodle course activities/resources, you need to login as a teacher in Moodle. Then navigate to the course where you want the activities to be imported.

Moodle Educators - How to reuse course activities within Moodle courses to save time
Using the Course Reuse feature in Moodle course
  • On the top navigation menu, go to > More > Course reuse, select ‘Import’.
  • Choose the course from where you wish to import from and click Continue.
  • On the Import Settings page, you can choose blocks, filters etc.
  • If you click on “Jump to Final Step”, it will import all activities from target course to destination course. It will be good in case you are setting a new course altogether.
  • However, if you want to pick only a few selected activities only, please click on Next button.
  • On the Schema Settings page, you can pick the activities and resources include course sections.
  • Click Next and then Moodle will import the activities into your new course.

You can also choose to import activities one by one by using Moodle Activity Backup/Restore feature which we will be covering in next week. In case you are stuck anywhere with Course Reuse feature please drop in a comment underneath.

What are the other tips you are using on your Moodle for saving time and increasing your productivity. Please share with us in the comments section below.

Call for Proposals for InstructureCon 2022 open now

Call for Proposals for InstructureCon 2022
Canvas InstructureCon 2022

All Canvas LMS users – get ready for InstructureCon 2022 which is going to be held soon completely online. Like last year’s this year also the event will be free for all interested attendees. The event will be for one day each for four different regions.

The InstructureCon 2022 will be held as per the schedule below:

  • North America – 14 July 2022
  • Asia-Pacific – 18 August 2022
  • Latin America – 14 September 2022
  • Europe, Middle East + Africa – 28 September 2022

The InstructureCon 2022 Call for Proposals is currently open and you can submit your presentation proposals before 10th May 2022. The approval of presentations will be shared by 31st May 2022.

The event will be free of cost for all the participants and you can register through this link.

Understand the basics of Moodle Site Administration using free Moodle Academy Videos

Understand the basics of Moodle Site Administration using this Moodle Academy Videos
Moodle Academy (Image Credits - Twitter)

Moodle Academy is the learning hub for the global Moodle community which provides training courses for Moodle teachers, Moodle Site Administrators & Moodle developers. It also offers badges and certificates to demonstrate your new knowledge and skills about Moodle.

Recently, the Moodle Academy team released a series of Moodle Site Administration videos on official YouTube channel of Moodle. The video course Moodle Admin Basics is a free course designed to help you understand the basics of managing a Moodle site.

The course covers new features covered in Moodle 4.0 version like Site Admin Presets, customizing front page, using badges etc. The course is a must have resource for all the new Moodle administrators who are looking to get their hands dirty with Moodle.

Here are all the videos of Moodle Admin Basics course on Moodle’s YouTube channel:

Once you complete the course, you will receive a badge for course completion. In addition you can also request for a course completion certificate (which will not be free and provided with additional cost).

What are the other good training resources to learn Moodle site administration. Please share with us in the comments section below.