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"Version 2.0 Moodle 2.0, our biggest release ever, is coming together after two years of development. It contains a huge number of core changes to the platform, most of which are designed to give 3rd party developers more flexibility, scalability and safety. The timetable is designed to deliver Moodle 2.0 in time for the new school year in the northern hemisphere and currently looks like this: * March 2010: Moodle 2.0 Beta release * April, May, June 2010: intensive beta testing and bug fixing (freeze on new features) * 1 July 2010: Moodle 2.0 production release You can track our current progress in detail on the Moodle 2.0 Planning document. Please remember that this document is frequently updated and details can change a lot! Draft release notes at Moodle 2.0 release notes. Please add notable items while they are fresh in your mind. The notes will be edited before the final release. System requirements Since Moodle 2.0 is such a major release, we are allowing ourselves some increases in the requirements. * PHP 5.2.8 is now the minimum version supported. (We are aware that several important linux distros are still shipping earlier versions like 5.2.6, but we need at least version 5.2.x for the new File API, and there are bugs in 5.2.7 and earlier that we could not work around.) This allows developers to write cleaner code using the more recent features of PHP, and will also improve user experience. * Databases should be one of the following: o MySQL 5.0.25 or later (InnoDB storage engine highly recommended) o PostgreSQL 8.3 or later o Oracle 10.2 or later o MS SQL 2005 or later * When upgrading to Moodle 2.0, you must have Moodle 1.9 or later. if you are using an earlier version of Moodle (eg 1.8.x) then you need to upgrade to Moodle 1.9.x first. New Community features * Community hub - Moodle.com Makes it easy for teachers to find other courses to download as templates fo

Adapted from-and extending-the recommendations found in Chickering and Gamson's, Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991), here are some of the most commonly agreed upon best practices for course design and development. They can be applied to both traditional and online courses, however some are particularly crucial to online course development.

CompendiumLD is a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface. It is being developed as a tool to support lecturers, teachers and others involved in education to help them articulate their ideas and map out the design or learning sequence. Feedback from users suggests the process of visualising design makes their design ideas more explicit and highlights issues that they may not have noticed otherwise. It also provides a useful means of representing their designs so that they can be shared with others.

Moodle.org competition winners and runners up for best course design in various categories. You can view the courses by using your Moodle.org login - easy to create if you don't have one. http://moodle.org/login/index.php

Eye tracking research on how students view a Moodle course page. 7 recommendations for course design.

The paper identifies a set of universal instructional design (UID) principles appropriate to distance education (DE) and tailored to the needs of instructional designers and instructors teaching online. These principles are then used to assess the accessibility level of a sample online course and the availability of options in its LMS platform (Moodle) to increase course accessibility.

NMC provides free, online professional development for educators. The NMC Academy offers online mini-courses on timely subjects such as mobile app design, teaching climate change, and e-book creation -- among many other subjects. Check out our catalog: http://academy.nmc.org/about-academy/courses/

This Moodle course covers only Moodle functionality. But the design itself, and their use of Topics format are not bad.

The Role of Student Peer Review and Assessment in an Introductory Project-Based Engineering Design Course UNSW 2007

Course Design Intensives workshop wiki containing links to all their workshop materials

Interesting video on using the HTML block as a way of creating links to navigate through course topics - avoiding excessive scrolling.

The navigation links on the left hand side are nice but for a completely new (for a learner) technical issue I would rather include the icons. Also, in Moodle 1.9.6 "Book" as a resource type was allowing for reaching the same outcome without complications of inclusing HTML blocks.

Winner of Cool Courses competition

A video on how to clean up a Moodle course by changing a static web page (with a video and some notes) into an online activity without having to start from scratch.

scroll down the long page to find best practice guidelines

An overview of instructional design principles that may be used to guide beginning instructors in the creation of online learning courses and materials that support learner engagement and knowledge construction.

"The Quality Matters Rubric is a set of 8 general standards and 41 specific standards used to evaluate the design of online and blended courses. The Rubric is complete with annotations that explain the application of the standards and the relationship among them. A scoring system and set of online tools facilitate the evaluation by a team of reviewers."