Cheap European Moodle 3.1.1 Hosting

What is Moodle?

Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments. You can download the software onto your own web server or ask one of their knowledgable Moodle Partners to assist you.

Moodle is built by the Moodle project which is led and coordinated by Moodle HQ, an Australian company of 30 developers which is financially supported by a network of over 60 Moodle Partner service companies worldwide.

What is New in Moodle 3.1.1?

Highlights

• MDL-53451 – Competencies support in Moodle
• MDL-52954 – Improvements to the Assignment grading user interface
• MDL-31989 – Global Search API allows to search forums, wikis and other content throughout the whole site. Installation and setup of SOLR server is required,
• MDL-52002 – Significant performance improvements in gradebook calculations
• MDL-48012 – Recycle bin plugin is now part of standard Moodle distribution: allow instructors to “undo” deletions of course modules and courses. Moodle Users Association project
• MDL-49279 – Add support in moodle plugins for exporting “Mobile app addons”

Forum

• MDL-372 – Allow to “pin” discussions to keep them always on the top of the list
• MDL-34160 – Allow forum email subject to be customised
• MDL-47365 – Add permalink option to forum posts
• MDL-51214 – Rename the News forum to “Announcements”
• MDL-44087 – Forum does not observe message notification settings for digest emails
• MDL-53050 – Highlight the selected forum post when deep linking with a #anchor

Assignment

• MDL-52397 – Feedback for Assignments is not sent if the assignment grade timemodified setting was set to two days ago
• MDL-52596 – Add a ‘maxperpage’ site wide setting for grading table size (to mitigate broken grading pages in large courses)
• MDL-52269 – Not obvious to tell if an assignment is in blind marking if user holds the “mod/assign:viewblinddetails” capabilty
• MDL-52270 – Difficult to cross reference users with their blind identities
• MDL-44598 – List student names on ‘grant extension’ screen
• MDL-52490 – Download selected assign submissions as a zip file
• MDL-52290 – EditPDF – Also show the total page number in the pagination
• MDL-52489 – “Download all submissions as a zip” should maintain the folder structure in students submissions

External tool (LTI)

• MDL-52154 – Rework LTI admin screens
• MDL-45064 – Option to add preconfigured external tool to the activity chooser
• MDL-52035 – Integrate LTI Provider support in Moodle as the Publish as LTI tool
• MDL-52821 – Compliance: Send tool_consumer_instance_description in LTI launch request

Feedback

• MDL-53738 – Feedback activity module will be enabled by default in new 3.1 installations. If you are upgrading to 3.1 we recommend you to enable it manually.
• MDL-52094 – Various improvements to UI and bug fixes, including:
  • Performance improvement to download responses as raw data in multiple formats (CSV, Excel, etc.) – now available on “Show responses” page instead of “Analysis”
  • Allow any characters in labels, do not display empty labels
  • Do not display empty pages
  • Map frontpage feedback to multiple courses without leaving the form
  • Improved display of automatic question numbers
  • Disable “Response time” for anonymous feedbacks
  • Use moodleforms to display feedback

SCORM

• MDL-45712 – Add Result field to the SCORM Interactions Report
• MDL-48680 – Add score and status submission events to SCORM activity
• MDL-42473 – Add group support to SCORM activity

Quiz

• MDL-52738 – Quiz attempt/review page should have a previous button to match next
• MDL-46092 – Add the OU styling of the Quiz navigation into Moodle core as the default
• MDL-46091 – Rationalise confirmations when you start a quiz
• MDL-52806 – Show right answers when manually grading automatically marked questions
• MDL-53304 – Immediate feedback behaviours should not show a disabled check button when you can’t use it

Workshop

• MDL-42190 – Option to delete a workshop submission
• MDL-50794 – Restricting file types as attachments to a workshop

Other activity modules

• MDL-51306 – Folder: Bulk download all files within a folder activity as ZIP file
• MDL-52414 – Lesson: Allow Default Settings for Lesson Module Settings
• MDL-51267 – URL/File: Make setting up a URL/File resource more obvious

Gradebook

• MDL-48634 – Option to rescale existing grades when changing max points
• MDL-52522 – grade_minmaxtouse should be respected for overridden categories
• MDL-51900 – Tab Down Grade Column in Single View of Gradebook
• MDL-52309 – Make Grade History report require user to submit parameters before the report starts running

Performance

• MDL-51374 – Do not purge entire databasemeta cache when there are structure changes (esp temp tables).
• MDL-51603 – Refactor downloading of csv, ods, excel etc files in reports and exports across moodle to stream progressively
• MDL-34925 – Improve bulk user export performance
• MDL-50385 – Performance improvement to the grade history report

Tagging

• MDL-50851 – Introduce tag collections – ability to separate independent tag areas
• MDL-52252 – Add tags to modules (Resources and Activities)
• MDL-25742 – Allow to search wiki pages by tags
• MDL-51283 – Rename “official” tags to “standard”, allow admin to set for each tag area how to use standard tags
• MDL-16855 – Add tag filtering to “Manage tags” page
• MDL-52707 – Allow tags to be combined

Usability

• MDL-27628 – Enrol meta: Possible to add multiple courses without leaving the form
• MDL-51818 – Move the profile ‘Message’ button to be next to the user picture
• MDL-52258 – Calendar now shows duration in calendar block
• MDL-53043 – Move user search box above the students list in the manual enrolments popup
• MDL-35590 – Navigation block redesign to meet ARIA specification
• MDL-49963 – Allow to message all participants when there are more than one page in participants list
• MDL-51354 – Help popup and improved name for events dropdown menu on the course and site logs pages
• MDL-53026 – Use inplace editable for editing cohort names
• MDL-51706 – Move plagiarism links to the top of the summary and full text outputs
• MDL-53382 – “Show all” link on participants page should be moved beneath the page switcher

Other improvements

• MDL-53057 – Add search feature to the File system repository
• MDL-48506 – Improve memcached cache store so that it is multi-site safe
• MDL-50661 – Restyle “Clean” theme to use Logo and Header in Frontpage with smaller logo option in other pages.
• MDL-36652 – When downloading an Excel spreadsheet of student logs, have the course short name included in the file name.
• MDL-53207 – Display stock avatar instead of own user picture from messages from fake users
• MDL-51698 – Markup the crumb trail so search engines understand it and leverage it
• MDL-53072 – Option to choose whether we include suspended users when auto-creating groups
• MDL-52869 – Convert inline activity name edit to use the inplace editable element

For administrators

• MDL-26935 – New capability to control role renaming
• MDL-28030 – Add config.php settings to allow plugins to rewrite output moodle_urls (eg clean / semantic urls)
• MDL-52752 – Administrators can specify an alternate URL to use for MathJax
• MDL-52219 – Completion tracking & availability should default to on for new installs
• MDL-52990 – Enable all emails to be themed, ie add 4 wrapper mustache templates
• MDL-53260 – Option to display CLI upgrade messages in English
• MDL-52386 – Allow to control field for flagging enabled/disabled users in LDAP authentication (useful for Active Directory)
• MDL-52383 – Calendar “Days to look ahead” should allow intervals up to 1 year
• MDL-49934 – Admins or managers should be able to retrieve assignments info via get_assignments web service

Security issues

There are no security issues included in this release, please refer to Moodle 3.0.4 release notes

For developers

Significant new areas

• MDL-31989 – Global Search API allows to index and search forums, wikis and other content throughout the whole site.
• MDL-49279, MDL-50032 – Add support in moodle plugins for exporting “Mobile app addons”
• MDL-53451 – Competencies support in Moodle (documentation)
• MDL-50887 – Implement plugins infrastructure for antivirus and create ClamAV plugin (documentation).
• MDL-51603 – New Dataformat plugin type for downloading data as csv, ods, excel etc (eg from table_sql export)
• MDL-50851 – Significant changes to Tags API, tag areas can now implement callbacks to display tagged items (documentation)
• MDL-46891 – Upgrade to behat 3.x (documentation)

Smaller new things

• MDL-51802 – Reusable element for inplace editing (documentation)
• MDL-30811 – Introduce notification stack to moodle sessions (documentation)
• MDL-52237 – Add a callback to inject nodes in the user profile navigation (documentation)
• MDL-51324 – New course chooser element for moodleforms (documentation)
• MDL-53311 – Reusable element for displaying tree similar to navigation tree (documentation)

Smaller changes in core APIs

• MDL-52954 – file_storage class can now convert between office documents (documentation)
• MDL-53274 – Throw exception (in developer mode) if page context is not set, otherwise it is easily missed in AJAX calls
• MDL-52826, MDL-52715 – Allow to use moodleforms in AJAX requests (documentation)
• MDL-51718 – Allow to specify scheme in moodle_url
• MDL-51700 – Ajax service should clean the return values of the external functions
• MDL-53962 – Changes to webservices XML-RPC API – it is now critical to specify parameters for XML-RPC calls in the correct order. Previously Zend may have been able to work out the order, our new implementation, at this stage, cannot.

Themeability improvements

• MDL-50464 – New renderer for RSS Client Block allows themes to customise its look

Changes related to particular plugins

• MDL-52013 – Allow mod_assign plugins to add calendar events
• MDL-48362 – Improve the enrol API to prevent logic in the UI (documentation)
• MDL-52996 – Allow Atto customisation for special-purpose plugins
• MDL-52781 – Improved validation on user fields when creating users from external datasources
• MDL-53304 – Changes to interactive question behaviour may cause the unit tests for your question type to break if you have followed the common patter. You will need to make changes likethis.

Deprecations

For full list of deprecations refer to lib/upgrade.txt and upgrade.txt files in the folder where the particular plugin is located. Here are the most major deprecations:

• MDL-49414 – Remove deprecated web services
• MDL-48621 – Deprecate the old events system
• MDL-52207 – Delete Zend framework

Why You Should Use Moodle?

The following are the 4 best benefits to insist students and teachers to use Moodle as an interactive study platform:

Moodle benefits the students with a learning environment which is fun, innovative and creative, and filled with purpose, to enhance their knowledge and help them in taking-up as well as completing assignments on-the-go.

Some of the features that can attract students along with teachers to use Moodle are as follows:

• Assignment Submission
• Discussion Forum
• Files Download
• Grading
• Moodle Instant Messages
• Online quizzes
• Wiki
• Gamification of study material and problems

The features mentioned above help a hesitant student to post queries, search for information over a certain topic, read daily posts and comments, take–up an online quiz and lastly play a game related to application based problems to help them reduce stress, release worries and build a sea of knowledge.

User Friendly Environment

How can teachers use Moodle effectively? When a student posts doubts or queries, Moodle has a friendly environment which connects many teachers around the globe to answer these queries and help a remote student. This is helpful since many places in the world are not accessible at the very moment physically but as internet has connected people around the world. Likewise, Moodle has been able to connect a student in need to a teacher indeed which is a real technological boon.

You will know that the “future is here” when there is change happening for the goodwill.

The prospect of open–source learning without the wastage of paper, pen or any other resources which are unceasingly getting scarce becomes a more than valid reason to opt for e-learning via Moodle. Students waste lot of time over social media platforms but if they can join Moodle and divert this valuable time over discussion forums or Moodle instant messages. They can solve two purposes at the same time which is making friends or social sharing as well as resourceful learning.

Accessibility, Even For the Shy Ones Among Us

Hesitant or Introvert students, the ones who cannot put forward their views or opinions – for them Moodle is a vital tool to possess where one can readily choose videos on any topic or a course.

Many teachers due to lack of confidence, resources or students can fall prey to wastage of their knowledge, but Moodle connects and gives these teachers an opportunity to impart education beyond a classroom. Every school can help the education system of the nation by using Moodle.

The change is the only constant in this world, and if it is for a good reason we must support it. Thus, the mantra of education and learning should be “Don’t doodle it, just Moodle it”.

Choose The Right Best European Moodle 3.1.1 Hosting

When it comes to choosing the best Moodle 3.1.1 hosting, we’re bound and determined to find out which company is providing the most value. There are some major components that make up a great host in our opinion, and those are Performance, Knowledge, Speed, Reliability of Support, and Pricing and the overall product offering. After reviewed many Moodle hosting provider, we highly recommend ASPHostPortal for your Moodle 3.1.1 hosting solution.

ASPHostPortal.com

Without further ado, ASPHostPortal.com was one of our top performers, and is especially impressive considering the $5.00 price point for their startup Moodle hosting plan. ASPHostPortal has been offering hosting services for more than 8 years and is a good option if you are looking for shared hosting. They offer great, reliable hosting at an incredibly good price that is hard to beat from a reputable company. Not only that ASPHostPortal also offers very reliable hosting with easy installation of Moodle 3.1.1, 24/7 support, and a long track record.

The following are some reasons why ASPHostPortal should be your choice.

ASPHostPortal – Uptime & Support Guarantees

They are so confident in their hosting services they will not only provide you with a 30 days money back guarantee, but also they give you a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

ASPHostPortal.com – Fully Support Moodle

All of their servers run the latest versions of Moodle so they will always be able to support your site. You will install Moodle site for free. ASPHostPortal provides multiple server locations, free CDN and advanced caching options to make both yours and your customers’ experience with Moodle really fast and enjoyable. They also make sure that your Moodle website is safer and better supported than anywhere else.

ASPHostPortal.com – Expert Support Team

Everything starts with impeccable support. The unmatched knowledge, experience, and dedication of their team truly make them stand out. They understand that people are the most important piece of the service they provide, and that is why they are at the top of the list. You’ll notice the difference the first time you talk to one of their Moodle experts.

ASPHostPortal.com – Offers Affordable Price

ASPHostPortal offers affordable price for Moodle hosting plan. Customers can start their Moodle site just from $5.00/mo. They are so confident that you will like their service, so they brave to offer a 30 day money back guarantee on hosting fees. Just cancel before 30 days, and they will refund your entire hosting fee. You can get cheaper price with their hosting promotion and free add-ons too, for more information just visits their official site at http://asphostportal.com.

ASPHostPortal.com – World Class Data Center

Their data centers are strategically located around the country to provide their customers with the highest levels of availability, service and support on the market. Their data centers located on US (Washington & Seattle), Netherlands (Amsterdam), Singapore, Hong Kong, United Kingdom (London), Australia (Melbourne), France (Paris), Germany (Frankfurt). Each Data Center is custom designed with raised floors. Each Data Center is equipped with HVAC temperature control systems with separate cooling zones, seismically braced racks, advanced early smoke detection and fire suppression systems. Their Data Centers are supported by some of the most powerful physical security in the business. They have 24/7 video surveillance, security breach alarms and Bio-metric thumb print scanners at every entryway.