Open LMS 3.8 Release Notes

Open LMS Release Date

Production Data Center Upgrade Schedule

• North America, Central America, South America (Virginia, USA datacenter): Clients will be upgraded according to their data center timezone:
  • Eastern, Amazon and Newfoundland-Labrador Timezones: July 9th at 12:30 AM – 6:30 AM EDT
  • Central Timezone: July 9th  at 12:30 AM – 6:30 AM CDT
  • Mountain and Pacific Timezones: July 9th at 12:30 AM – 6:30 AM PDT
• South America (Sao Paulo, Brazil datacenter): July 9th  at 12:30 AM – 6:30 AM BRT
• EMEA (Frankfurt datacenter): July 9th  at 12:30 AM – 6:30 AM CEST
• APAC excluding Australia and New Zealand (Singapore datacenter): July 9th  at 12:30 AM – 6:30 AM SGT
• Australia and New Zealand (Sydney, AU datacenter): July 9th at 12:30 AM – 6:30 AM AEST

Non-Production Sites Upgrade Schedule

We will upgrade non-production (sandbox) sites on Thursday,  June 11, 2020, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM ET. Non-production upgrades occur during North American business hours to improve the quality of the upgrade process and shorten the production upgrade window. 

Downtime will be required for your production and non-production sites during this window.

Open LMS Mobile App Update Date

31st July 2020

Open LMS live sessions

Join the Open LMS team as they provide an update on what’s coming on our latest release of Open LMS 3.8 and share other important news.

Open LMS en vivo: release 3.8 (Español) Wednesday 17th June (03:00 P.M. GMT – 10:00 A.M. COL – 11:00 A.M. EST)

Open LMS live: 3.8 release (Australia and Asia) Wednesday 17th June (01:30 A.M. GMT – 09:00 P.M. COL – 10:00 P.M. EST – 11:30 A.M. AUS Thursday 18th)

Open LMS live: 3.8 release  (Americas and Europe)  Thursday 18th June (03:00 P.M. GMT – 10:00 A.M. COL – 11:00 A.M. EST)

1. Upgrade to  Core 3.8.3

a. Recommended browsers:

Desktop:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari
• Edge
• Internet Explorer

Mobile:

• MobileSafari
• Google Chrome

For the best experience and optimum security, we recommend that you keep your browser up to date.

Note: Legacy browsers with known compatibility issues with Moodle 3.8:

• Internet Explorer 10 and below
• Safari 7 and below

For the full releases notes from Moodle.org, please see:

• Moodle 3.8 Release Overview Video
• Moodle 3.8 New Features
• Moodle 3.8 Release Notes

b. Moodle new features

– H5P integration

Teachers are now able to monitor and configure H5P content with a new Display H5P filter and Manage H5P content page. H5P content can be created in resources such as Page, Book, and Label.

– Forum grading and experimental view

Forum posts can now be submitted by students for assessment. Teachers can grade those forum posts, export forum discussions, and have access to a new summary report. 
Select and test a new experimental nested discussion view from the forum preferences page.

– Course overview page

Users can now filter courses by custom course fields on the course overview page. Admins have more options in terms of customization and settings on this page. 

– Calendar filters

Users are now able to filter the calendar view by month, day, or upcoming event. New session timeout alert

– Session timeout

New session timeout alert

– Option to include files in backup settings

Admins are now able to choose to exclude course files from a backup. 

2. Open LMS new features

A. New feature Spots link

Requested and voted by the Open LMS community! This new feature allows admins to add internal or external links to the Snap’s Feature spots, and by doing so compliment information that they want to share with their users on the home page of the platform.

The URLs can be added directly into the Snap’s settings page, in the Featured Spots section:

B. Collaborate plugin: new Admin and Teacher settings

We have updated our Collaborate plugin with new settings for the Admin and Teachers:

Teachers:

When creating a new Collaborate session, they are now able to determine if the participants of that session will have the capabilities to: share video feed, share audio feed, post messages, annotate on the whiteboard, or download collab recordings.

Admins:

The admins have now the possibility to choose if the Instructor settings are active or inactive on a site level:

• If active: The Instructor Setting module will appear on the Collaborate activity settings page. Teachers and content creators will see the default settings for the Collaborate session on the module and will be able to change settings for this specific activity.
• If deactivated: Administrators will define which settings Collaborate sessions will have on a site level. Teachers and other content creators will not be able to change those settings within the Instructor Settings module.

Important note: This setting changes capabilities at site-level but will only apply to new Collaborate sessions created after the setting change. By default, the Instructor’s settings are enabled and active.

C. PLD: New course end date event

Another enhancement requested by the community! PLD has a new event, the “Course end date”. With this new event, rule creators can define an action based on a number of days prior to or after the course end date.

An example of this could be a teacher scheduling an email reminding their students that the course is ending in 10 days, so they send the final assignment or participate in the forum discussion.

D. PLD: Backup dates

When a course is restored and it contains PLD rules with specific date and time events, the rule used to save the previous course’s specific dates as default. Now, teachers and admins are able to backup and restore a course and choose if the PLD rules, with the specific date and time events, should restore relative to the new course start date.

An example for this could be: A course starts on January 1st, and a PLD rule is set to trigger on January 12. If the course is restored and the new course start date is February 1st, then you can choose if the PLD rule should change and be triggered on February 12, respectively.

E. Conduit: Process improvement

Conduit file consumption was converted into ad-hoc tasks, which allow parallel execution of the file consumption. Before this development, files uploaded into the STPF Conduit folder could only be processed one at the time. Now, with this increase in Conduit’s queued capacity, up to 20 files can be processed every 5 minutes.

 – Files are identified and queued every time the site cron runs, it was established a default of 20 files.

F. Conduit: Queue Management

With this new feature for Conduit, Admins are able to see all files that have been uploaded to the SFTP Conduit Folder and prioritize.

In the Files queued tab, Admins can find all files categorized in lists depending on the type of the file, there are up to seven different categories. Within those lists, Admins are now able to prioritize files they want to process next, by clicking the arrows and moving the file up or down the list.

In the Files in progress tab, Admins are able to view which files are currently being processed. Here files can no longer be moved.

G. Open reports redesign (Experimental) – CURRENTLY DISABLED (Date: 20Aug 2020)

A new technology, based on Angular and web components, has been implemented to redesign our Open Reports, with better aesthetics, user experience, technical functionalities, and of course, no Flash dependencies exist. For this 3.8 release, we have migrated 4 of our reports to this new technology: Recent activity, Quiz Submissions, Assign Submissions, and Forum Posts. The experimental Open LMS reports can be accessed through the Course administration menu, as a new link.

H. Centralized Content Management (Experimental)

We are happy to announce that with this new 3.8 production release, you have now available the Centralized Content Management tool!

Also requested by the community, this new Open LMS plugin wants to make the work for content creators easier, by offering them a centralized content repository, where they will be able to create Master Activities and resources and replicate those into course sections. Edit the Master Activity in its settings or contents and propagate those changes into all its replicated activities with just one click.

Current functionality

This is a new experimental feature, an as such we are very eager to receive your feedback on your experience using it.

We currently have the following functionalities with the Centralized Content Management tool:

1. Access the CCM:
   Right now, only site Administrators or site level Managers can access and try the Centralized Content Management tool. You can find it in the Administration menu, under Front Page Settings or, within a course, in the Course Settings.
2. Masters tab:
   Find here all Master resources and activities that you have created. Select a Master resource or activity to view all related Replicas.
   You can edit or delete any Master by clicking the corresponding icon. You can also delete a Replica here, which will unlink that item from the Master but not delete it from the course.
3. Create a new Master:
   In the second tab, you will be able to create a new Master resource, by copying an existing resource or activity. On the search box, please find the course that contains the existing activity and then select it by clicking on the plus (+) icon. This will copy the activity and create a new Master Activity from it, that you will now see listed in the Master tab.
4. Create replicas:
   After creating your Master Activity, you are now able to create its replicas. Enter the third tab, select the Master Activity that you want to replicate and search for a course that you would like to add the replica. Select the course and the section of the course. You can add more that one course for this process by clicking on the Add a course link.
5. Propagate changes to replicas:
   You can edit or update a Master activity and propagate the changes to all or some of its replica activities. On the Master tab, please edit your Master activity. After saving the chances, select the replicas that you would like to update with the new changes. Click on the propagate changes to finish the process. Please note that this can take up to five (5) minutes.

Special Considerations for this new feature:

• Please note that the creation of replicas or the propagation of changes to replicas can take up to 5 minutes.
• Right now, the Centralized Content Management tool supports only the resource type “Label”.
• Supported course formats:
  • Topics (Snap)
  • Weeks (Snap)
  • Collapsed Topics
  • Grid
• Outcome/competencies setting can only be replicated on courses that have the same competencies or that are on the same Learning path with the expected competencies.

3. User interface, User Experience, and Accessibility improvements

Reason	Fix made	UI Before	UI After
Feedback available link on Lesson activity in Snap is misleading – The link takes users to the course “user report” grade page. However, the feedback that is listed here is not the feedback added to the “essay comments” section during grading. Causing confusion as to why feedback isn’t displaying.	The link has hidden to avoid confusion and coherency with other Moodle themes, such as Boost
Nothing is displayed when a section is being deleted	The footer shows now the alert that a section is being deleted

Accessibility review and VPAT

Within our roadmap, each quarter, we have a devoted project and scope to improve accessibility issues within our platform. To identify AX issues, we focus on three main sources: 

• Issues found by the internal team, when reviewing a new Moodle version or general functionalities.
• Issues found by customers or final users that are particularly interested in improving the platform’s accessibility.
• Issues found in the VPAT. For two consecutive years, we have done the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, which allows us to identify AX issues in both the Boost and Snap theme.

Our new VPAT for 2020 is out, both for the Snap and Boost theme:

We are committed to improve our accessibility and make Snap the most accessible Moodle theme. That is why we cover each case and propose a corresponding solution for the issue:

• If it’s a Moodle core structure issue
  • We identify the issue.
  • We propose a core patch and implement the patch so that it is no longer an issue within Open LMS (In Boost and Snap if possible).
  • We send the core patch to Moodle so that they can implement the improvement to the community.
• If it’s an issue of the theme or an Open LMS feature
  • We identify the issue.
  • We propose and implement a solution that gets shipped on the next release.

We want to further improve our capability to identify AX issues early on, so we reviewed some of the most used accessibility tools, to help our developers when creating new features and functionalities. We have successfully integrated the chosen tool: Axe-core, that is an accessibility testing engine for websites and other HTML-based user interfaces. It’s fast, secure, lightweight, and was built to seamlessly integrate with any existing test environment to automate accessibility testing alongside out regular functional testing.

4. Updated plugins

a. Community Plugins

b. Open LMS Maintained Plugins

5. Bug Fixes and Minor Enhancements

6. Bug Fixes and Minor Enhancements included as hot-fixes