http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/2529

I'll be at DrupalCon Boston from March 3 through March 6, which I'm attending for the day job. While I'm keeping an eye out for stuff related to higher education, most of the sessions deal with developing Drupal for any environment, be it a campus blogging platform or a science fiction webzine. Here's what I've got lined up so far.

http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/node/2558

Moodle 1.9.0 is out. Among the new features:

• New Gradebook. That’s worth repeating … new Gradebook!


• Integrated Outcomes


• Performance enhancements


• Tagging is now a core function

So what does this mean for Lafayette? Well, we're not upgrading any time soon -- going from our current version (Moodle 1.8.4) to the new one (1.9) is a huge step, and it's not the sort of upgrade we'll do during the semester. But the release does mean we'll be able to start evaluating it on our test server.

Gradebook is probably the single biggest reason to consider upgrading; it has support for fractional grades (and there was much rejoicing!), which is probably the single biggest thing faculty have been demanding. Integrated support for Outcomes sounds cool, but we'll have to see how robust it is. The performance enhancements will be huge; the fixes to Moodle’s statistics-crunching cron alone are tremendous. I’m not so sure about tagging; I like the concept, but I’ll need to see how it’s executed.