Moodle 2.5 will be released in May 2013. Since the 2.x series was introduced we have seen lots of incremental improvements but not much in the way of major new features for end users. Moodle 2.5 changes all that and has a number of major feature changes including a couple of real treats.
Open Badges. First up we have Open Badges. In March 2013 the Open Badges Initiative (OBI) standard was formally launched, and Moodle 2.5 becomes the first LMS to support this standard. Many folks will need a bit of background at this point. Put simply, open badges allow learners to represent, verify and communicate their skills, interests and achievements. They do this in a far more meaningful way than a simple certificate and in a more verifiable way than a statement on a CV. Any learning event could have a badge associated with it and issued by the learning provider, be they a school, college, employer, online training provider or face to face training provider.
Open Badges can be used in a number of ways:
- to communicate achievements to potential employers
- to motivate and engage online learners as they progress through courses
- to ‘level up’ within a course or learning path
- to gain acknowledgment and build reputation within online communities.
Importantly, a learner can earn badges from multiple learning providers (badge ‘issuers’), pull them into a single collection in an online repository (their ‘badge backpack’), and share their badges out with various audiences (badge ‘displayers’ or ‘consumers’). Badges may contain information including issuer, issue date, criteria, evidence or artifact, endorsements, and expiration.
Hopefully that background has stimulated your online learning taste buds! Moodle 2.5 essentially works as a ‘badge issuer’ whereby badges can be allocated for course completion or for activity completion within courses, such as an end-of-unit assessment. While there have been Badges plugins for Moodle previously, including one that is fully compliant with the Open Badges standard, it is great to have this included in core Moodle. We look forward to lots of interesting implementations of this new feature.
Image: Google Scholar results for “mobile learning” by year
So, here I am on the Learning Analytics and Knowledge MOOC again, or 
Image: My “What does your next LMS look like?” session on Tuesday morning
Moodle has a 
It’s that time of year when all the movers and shakers attempt to predict what will be big in 2013. Well there are no such predictions here. However, they do say you can predict the future by learning lessons from the past, so I’m going look back over the past year instead and ask: what was crap about 2012? (I should reiterate that these views are, of course, entirely my own…) 
This article is part of a series of blog posts reviewing academic studies into open source software quality.
Tin Can has been getting lots of people in a twist lately. Early adopters are tweeting and blogging about it and anyone who’s anyone seems to be dropping it into conversations to prove they’re at the cutting edge of learning technologies. It is certainly doing the rounds as the Next Big Thing. But ask anyone, “What is Tin Can? Explain it to me” and more often than not you’ll just get a shrug of the shoulders and a quizzical look.
Sept saw the launch of #MoodleBrighton, a monthly meetup for Moodlers in Brighton & Hove.