Within the e-learning team at Liip, we are very excited to see this new version of Moodle released for public consumption: it's various new features and performance improvements will power all our next Moodle client developments.

Let's review some highlights from the announcement:

New icons

During the 2.4 development phase, the Moodle HQ designers have worked hard to provide refreshed and modern-looking icons: this was long needed and will certainly help shifting the perception of Moodle towards a modern and nice-looking LMS.

See also:

• Visual comparison between icons in 2.3 and 2.4

Performance

The introduction of the MUC (Moodle Universal Cache) in 2.4 reportedly makes Moodle instances lighter on server resources and faster for user experiences. Its high configureability and flexibility (that allows the use of memcached, move session caches out of the database, etc), will allow us to fit its configuration to our various clients needs and we're eagerly looking forward to that!

See also:

• Caching in Moodle 2.4
• docs.moodle.org/dev/The_Moodle_UniversalCache(MUC title: Moodle Wiki: The Moodle Universal Cache (MUC) text: The Moodle Universal Cache (MUC))

Assignment improvements

Moodle 2.4 has also received a bunch of improvements in the Assignment activity. With these improvements, teachers can now:

• require students to explicitely acknowledge a submission statement;
• grade assignments offline;
• create “group” assignments (a work that has to be done by a group);
• implement “blind” marking, where students and teachers are made anonymous to each other in the marking process.

All the rest

There are plenty of other changes released in Moodle 2.4 (see the huge release notes page) and this blogpost would be kilometrical if we were to list them all, but here are some highlights of things that will be important to our customers or to us, behind the scenes:

• HTML5 is the default doctype;
• Cohorts can now be synchronised to course groups;
• LDAP authentication synchronisation now includes PHP 5.4 paged support;
• Integration of external calendars, such as Google Calendar;
• … and plenty other big or small changes all around the place that will make Moodle a better product yet again!

If any of the above change would look like an interesting improvement to your current Moodle installation, don't hesitate to get in touch with the Liip e-learning Team to discuss this opportunity with us.

Cheers, Didier