Moodle 3.0.2 and 2.9.4 Security Release

The Moodle Project has just released new versions that resolve a number of security issues.

Version 3.0.2 and 2.9.4 address these security vulnerabilities and include other fixes and improvements.

If you want to read more about the issues, you can check out the Moodle release news for the 3.0.2 and 2.9.4 versions.

We have released Bitnami Moodle installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2, Google, Oracle, VMware vCloud Air, DigitalOcean and Azure cloud images that fix these issues.

Have questions about Bitnami Moodle or the security issue? Post to our community forum, and we would be happy to help you.

Bitnami releases Open edX Cypress

We are happy to announce the release of Open edX's most recent version, Cypress. There are many exciting features in this release, and we look forward to hearing what you think in our review section!

The updates below are all included in your ready-to-run Bitnami Open edX image, so you can get started with them right away.

• OLI Hinting 
• Creative Commons Polling and Survey XBlocks 
• Learner Profiles 
• Course Search 
• Randomized Content Blocks 
• Single Sign On (SSO) 
• Performance improvements Security and stability fixes 
• And more 

For more information about the new features, visit the Open edX blog. 

We have released Open edX Cypress on installers, virtual machines and cloud images, so you can easily try this new release or update your existing Open edX. 

Have questions about Bitnami Open edX or anything related? Post to our community forum, and we will be happy to help you.

Online learning platform Open edX is now available on Bitnami

Bitnami is excited to welcome contest-winner Open edX to the Bitnami Library. Open edX is the open-source online learning platform originally conceived by edX, a nonprofit online learning destination founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University that offers courses from the world’s best universities and institutions. The Open edX platform provides development tools to create, teach, and manage courses, student experiences, and learning outcomes at Internet scale.

Online learning, both for small audiences and Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), are becoming a vital part of the global education landscape. In voting for Open edX in Bitnami’s monthly contest, users showed their strong demand to make it easy for colleges, universities, and anyone else to launch their own fully functional education platform in the cloud with just a few clicks.

Each Open edX instance can host thousands of courses and hundreds of thousands of learners.
Features like discussion boards, peer-to-peer, instructor-driven and automated assessments, simulations and activities, videos, social/community capabilities, and support for rich content types are part of the package.

The included course management system provides an array of authoring tools to help educators create effective course materials that foster the emergence of vibrant online learning communities.
Analytics and data visualization tools enable in-depth analysis of students’ interaction with the platform.

Get Open edX in just a few clicks with the Bitnami Open edX installers, Virtual Machine images (VMs), and cloud images.

New “Education & Research” category within the AWS Marketplace

Amazon Web  Services has just launched a new "Education & Research" category in the AWS Marketplace. With this new category of applications, educational institutions will be able to easily browse and select software focused on teaching and research. Among others, you can find the Bitnami Moodle cloud image which provides a one click deployment for Moodle, one of the most popular open source e-learning platforms.

The University of San Francisco, University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Medical School are just a few of the AWS users who are benefitting from these educational applications. AWS also provides education programs that enable the academic community around the world to easily leverage the benefits of Amazon Web Services for education and research. 

Moodle 2.5 released. New add-ons web installer and much more.

We are happy to announce a new major version of BitNami Moodle Stack. Installers, virtual machines and cloud images for both Windows Azure and Amazon cloud are already available.

Moodle, one of the most famous open source Course Management System, has added new interesting features for teachers, students and administrators in its version 2.5.

• Moodle now allows to award badges based on a variety of chosen criteria.  
• Important improvements to the usability of big complex Moodle forms, now non-essential settings on forms are collapsed by default. 
• It includes several enrolement-related improvements. 
• Ability to drag and drop media and text onto the course page.
• Support for all screen sizes (including phone and tablet) thanks to the Bootstrap-based themes.
• Add-ons can be installed from the admin web interface.

You can experience all these new features by launching a free demo server with BitNami Cloud Launchpad.

For a full list of improvements and new features please check Moodle 2.5 releases notes.

 

We would like to highlight the new admin tool for installing add-ons. The process for installing Moodle plugins in previous versions required the administrator to access the machine, download the plugin, uncompress it in a specific folder depending on the plugin type, then go to the notifications panel and update the application.

However, with this new tool, login into the system is not required. The administrator user can just go to the Install add-ons options in the left menu, and select the plugin directly from the Moodle plugin directory or choose a zipped file to upload.

The plugin will be validated and then you can confirm to install it.

Please note that although this is a great feature, allowing to install add-ons from the web interface currently requires to grant write permission to the web service group on Unix systems. If you are paranoid about security and you are ok with installing the plugins manually (as you always did with Moodle before) you can deactivate this feature as it conflicts with the Moodle Security recomendations. Check our wiki to learn more about how to deactivate the install add-ons option in the BitNami servers.