Are either or both of the following developments planned for Moodle 2.0 of interest to you?

• Course completion - for tracking whether students have completed a course according to conditions specified by the teacher


• Community hubs - for enabling educators to publish their courses (for joining or downloading) to public or private communities

If so, your input on the evolving specifications would be much appreciated.

For Course completion, please see the Course completion spec, then join the discussion Course Completion for 2.0.

The Community hubs discussion RFC: Community hubs project for 2.0 about the Community hub spec can be found in the newly created Hub Servers forum.

Thanks in advance to Jonathan Newman of Catalyst IT for developing Course completion, and to Martin D and Jerome Mouneyrac of Moodle.com for developing Community hubs.

Hi Jason

Having been presenting at Moodle Moots in Oklahoma and San Francisco the last two weeks... I think your plan sounds good - focus on Moodle as a teaching technology, and include some technical / business areas too - so there is something for everyone

PMS initiative sounds interesting!

Stu

Schools, colleges and universities are not the only institutions deciding to use Moodle - it's becoming increasingly popular in the field of corporate education too!

Ireland's national airline Aer Lingus researched a number of learning management systems for their pilot training courses, and chose Moodle based on it's features, functionality and flexibility.

Moodle Partner Enovation Solutions stepped in to provide a range of commercial services for Aer Lingus, including consultancy, hosting, training, customisation and support. All Moodle Partners contribute a percentage of their earnings to the Moodle Trust, so by making use of Enovation Solutions' services, Aer Lingus has helped support Moodle development.

According to Conor Rock, Training Captain at Aer Lingus, "Enovation delivered on all of our requirements, Moodle has been universally well received by the pilots and we have reduced our training costs. What can I say - the project has been a huge success!"

For further details of the Aer Lingus - Moodle story, see Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere: Aer Lingus chooses Moodle for Online Pilot Training.

For more stories about using Moodle, please check our Moodle stories forum.

Stuart,

Thanks for the reply and I apologize for not responding sooner. Things have been hectic here.

I haven't talked with Manabu3 about the conference yet but am not really opposed to it, however, we are currently envisioning an academically oriented Moot that focuses first on using Moodle in various academic settings (e.g. language teaching, science, math, etc.) as well as use of Moodle to assist with curriculum and program management, and then as a secondary focus possibly hosting presentations with a more technical focus.

I am not familiar with the correct protocol for organizing a Moodle Moot so I guess I need to do a lot more investigation but we are definitely keen to host an official Moot so if the involvement of a local partner is necessary we'll be on it.

I did communicate briefly with both of the partners here in Japan about a year back with a proposal for development of a new enrollment plugin but ended up going with Moodlerooms in the U.S. as the two partners here in Japan were not in a situation to undertake the project. That project is in the alpha stage of development at the moment and will hopefully be completed later this fall and ready for contribution to the Moodle community. We are hoping to be able to present at the Moot we host (is that cheeky ) and explain how the plugin developed is allowing us to use Moodle as not just an LMS but also as a PMS (Program Management System).

Sincerely

Jason Hollowell

I'm pleased to announce that Moodle has a new Themes Manager - Patrick Malley.

Patrick is a History and Psychology teacher from Granger, Indiana. He is also a particularly helpful Moodler and helps moderate the Themes forum and the Themes database.

Patrick's job as Themes Manager will involve working closely with other theme developers and ensuring that lots of cool themes will be available for Moodle 2.0 and beyond.

A big thank you to previous Themes Manager Urs Hunkler for all his work, particularly the CSS re-work in Moodle 1.5 and for a number of high-quality themes including Chameleon, Custom Corners and our new moodle.org theme Moodle2.

I'm pleased to announce that two new Moodle language packs are now available - Marathi and Urdu.

Marathi is spoken in south-western India and is the 15th most spoken language in the world. Urdu is one of the official languages of India and of Pakistan. There are between 60 and 80 million native speakers of standard Urdu.

A big thank you to translators Usha Deo (Marathi) and Faisal Kaleem (Urdu), to translation coordinator Koen Roggemans, and to all our language pack maintainers listed in the Translation credits.

Moodle now has a total of 81 language packs. Selected language packs may be installed on your Moodle site via the language pack install facility within Moodle, or by downloading the zip files from download.moodle.org/lang. Please see the language packs documentation for full details.

Hello Jason

Well, Japan is not too far from New Zealand (everywhere seems equally far away, lol).

Are you in discussion with Manabu3, Moodle Partner in Japan?
http://manabu3.com/moodle/

I think Bill (MD of Manabu3) is in Tokyo?
info@manabu3.com

I'd love to visit Japan again, and would be happy to talk about Moodle Certification and some of the other areas I'm involved with (social-networking using Moodle, using Moodle in Business, etc.)

However, we are pretty busy, so can only attend events that do have a Moodle Partner involved in a major way - what I might term official Moots, rather than smaller(?) informal gatherings.

Stuart