The Open LMS Product team is happy to announce the release of WORK 4.0:
- Production upgrade on Tuesday, January 21, 2025 from 12:30 AM - 6:30 AM local datacenter time
- A sandbox upgrade was delivered on Monday, December 23, 2024
Upgrade to Core 4.5.1
As part of this release, the team reviewed the code of 4.5.1 and upgraded the underlying systems, adding the corresponding fixes, improvements, and security patches. The previous version of WORK was based on Moodle™ 4.3, so this release incorporates all the changes in 4.4 and 4.5.
Release Notes
For the full release notes from https://moodledev.io, please click on the following links:
4.5.0 Release Notes
4.5.1 Release Notes
Moodle™ 4.4 highlights
Refined Course Page Look
Activities and sections are now clearly defined, with colors indicating whether a section is hidden or available.
New Single Section Page View
By clicking on a section title students are taken to a page showing just that section’s content. This helps them better focus on their learning.
Teachers also have the single section view available when editing and previewing the content.
Updated Activity Icons
Icon design has been tweaked to be less prominent and now features an updated color palette adjusted to provide better accessibility. The palette has been tested against four common forms of vision deficiency to help optimize the experience.
Ordering Question Type
The Ordering question type is now part of Moodle core 4.4. It displays several items (words, phrases, images, or other media) in a random order which must then be dragged into the correct sequential order.
Quiz Improvements
It’s now possible to add grade items to quizzes, meaning that along with the overall grade, a quiz can have grades for specific sections or groups of questions.
A useful “last saved” timestamp is displayed in the quiz navigation block to reassure students that their attempt is being recorded.
Forum Improvements
Admins can now set defaults for Announcement forums in new courses.
Teachers can easily post to all groups without the need to expand the Advanced settings. The “Post a copy to all groups” option is now available directly on the screen when adding a forum post.
Bulk Actions
Administrators will find new filter options in the Users page, including bulk actions like Delete, send a message, add to a cohort, and force password change.
User pictures are now part of the user list and admins can download the list of users in different formats.
New Notifications
Enabled by default in new sites, notifications now include welcome messages for manual enrolments and warnings of un-enrolment due to inactivity.
Site administrators are now notified when a scheduled or ad hoc task is repeatedly failing. Initial notifications following the release are likely to highlight tasks that have been failing for weeks or months. These task failures can be investigated by Open LMS Customer Success, but in most situations they’re likely to be having a negligible impact on the site.
TinyMCE
TinyMCE is now the default editor in new and upgraded sites.
Improved Image Handling
Image handling is more streamlined, giving a better user experience.
Authenticate via SMS
Multi-factor authentication now includes the option to authenticate via an SMS code.
Show/hide Password
Admins can toggle login password visibility from the Manage authentication screen.
Custom Sections
You will now find Topics format as Custom sections.
Moodle™ 4.5 highlights
New AI Subsystem
The new AI subsystem supports AI tool integration natively in the platform. Currently, it supports OpenAI and Azure AI via API. The tools support text generation, image generation, and context summarization.
Subsections
If enabled by the site administrator, a new option allowing for the creation of subsections will exist for users with course editing permissions. These can be collapsed or expanded to provide more flexibility in organizing content.
Assignment Improvements
Key actions are now provided at the top of the screen, with new filter options to limit the need to scroll the page to complete actions. A new sticky footer enables quick access to bulk actions from the grading screen.
Additionally, there are new options to set default grade and scale types as well as the ability to automatically grant extra attempts.
Screen Recording
TinyMCE now supports the ability to record the screen of the user and embed the resulting short recordings in forum posts or other areas where the editor is enabled.
New Notifications
There are new notification options for users whenever a due date for an assignment is coming up or an assignment is overdue. There are also notification options for when a quiz is about to open.
Quiz Enhancements
You can now select specific questions to regrade instead of regrading the entire quiz. Admins can disable 'sticky' defaults where the previous question settings are used automatically. Additionally, question bank category management has been modernized and supports options such as drag and drop.
New and Updated WORK Features
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A new option to convert cohorts managed by local_profilecohort to Dynamic cohorts has been added. If you have local_profilecohort cohorts on your site you'll now see those as available to migrate in the Dynamic cohort user interface. The migration will attempt to recreate the relevant rules for managing user membership, but requires a manual review before enabling the rules.
- The Open LMS ecommerce solution now uses the Open LMS notification framework to send messages (where configured) when a user purchases products for themselves or for other users. These can be configured under the General tab of Site administration, if ecommerce is enabled on the site.
- When using the Open LMS ecommerce solution voucher feature you now can edit the total number of unredeemed uses available for a given voucher. On the manage vouchers page you now can edit a voucher and check an option, "unlock purchased voucher" to make the "Maximum users per voucher" and editable field. You can reduce that number, if there are redemptions still available, to the total of redemptions already claimed. For example, if a user purchased 20 uses and has redeemed 5 already, it would be possible to edit that voucher to 5 or above. When editing the number you are required to put in a description of the change. That description is included in the log created to track that change.
Bug fixes and minor enhancements
- The language packs have been updated for Open LMS features.
- The course modules report source has been fixed to display completion status (if configured) under all valid scenarios.
- Under certain conditions the certification report source would report an inaccurate recertification date. This has been corrected, and it should always display the same date in the report that is displayed to the end user.
- The completion enabled column (which appears in multiple report sources) would sometimes be blank instead of using the expected options of “yes” or “no”. This column should now always display an expected value.
- In certain scenarios users that let their certification expire would not be removed from a Dynamic cohort that was using the "Valid certification" status as a criteria. Users that let their certification expire should now be removed from the cohort unless the "keep users" option is enabled.
New Experimental Feature—Call for Feedback
Open LMS is happy to introduce a new feature for managing instructor-led training - mod_iledt. This new feature is disabled by default and isn’t yet recommended for production use. We’re introducing the feature in this release to provide customers with the opportunity to explore the feature and provide us with feedback.
Open LMS plans to enable this feature by default on new sites in our next release, 4.1, coming March 2025. In the long term, this feature will replace the face-to-face module. The plugin provides a method for creating different training tracks, adding sessions to the tracks, and allowing users to register for training.
For this release we recommend customers explore the feature on a sandbox site.
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