Moodle 4.3 has landed at ETH Zürich

The Moodle Service of ETH Zürich (with staff of ID EduIT and UTL) announce the launch of Moodle 4.3 on our Course Moodle (moodle-app2.let.ethz.ch). This summer’s release focuses on a large number of practical improvements for lecturers and students.

New text editor

The standard editor ‹Atto› was switched to ‹TinyMCE 6›. TinyMCE brings you a modernised editor interface and new functionalities such as source code formatting and styling as well as a code highlighter filter to display your (HTML) style properly.

Screenshot of the editor close-up

The switch to TinyMCE is done automatically. The only exception: If you have set the editor preferences in your profile to Atto, you need to change your preference to TinyMCE or the default editor. Please note that the old editor Atto will be removed in one of the next Moodle releases. Check your own editor preferences by logging in to Moodle, selecting your profile preferences, then editor preferences.

Improved usability

There have been many usability improvements, too many to mention, however here are some important ones:

  • (Finally) your position on the course page will be retained when you press the back button from an activity or resource.
  • ‹Collapse all› and ‹Expand all› options have been added to the course index. This functionality replaces the old ‹collapsed topics format›. Moodle will automatically change the course format to ‹topics› where you can expand/collapse the course sections.
  • Students can hide the timer in a timed quiz.
  • The navigation in the book activity has been improved.

Bulk course activity editing

New bulk editing functionality is available for lecturers.  You can bulk duplicate or move activities, change the availability settings or bulk delete them if you don’t need them anymore. This update is thanks to the Moodle Users Association (of which ETH Zürich is a member).

Close up screenshot showing bulk editing

Quiz and questions

EduIT worked in partnership with the Berner Fachhochschule, the OpenUniversity, the Mittelschul- und Berufsbildungsamt of the Canton of Zürich, Catalyst, the Moodle Headquarters and others to improve quiz and question functionalities in the Moodle core. A few new features for people with teaching rights:

  • Teachers have more options for customising their own view of the question bank.
  • Better searching/filtering in the question bank, resulting in more flexible randomisation in quizzes.
  • Quiz display options now make it possible to completely hide the grade information.
  • Anywhere a teacher views questions, the version information is displayed.

There are a large number of other improvements. Have a look at the Moodle docs 4.3 and Moodle docs 4.2. If you love digging through release notes, look at https://moodledev.io/general/releases/4.3 and https://moodledev.io/general/releases/4.2, plus the minor versions until Moodle 4.3.5.

If you have questions regarding the new Moodle version, check out the official Moodle docs at https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/Main_page.

ETH Zürich’s Moodle service is also available via moodle(at)ethz.ch.

Happy Moodling!