If you'd like to meet up with other Moodlers in person, here's a list of Moodle conferences coming up in the next three months:

• 2016 MI Moodle Moot - Michigan, USA, 7-8 January
• MoodleMoot India 2016 - New Delhi, India, 6 February (#mootin)
• MoodleMoot Japan 2016 - Tokyo, Japan, 21-23 February
• MoodleMoot Ireland UK 2016 - London, UK, 22-24 March (#mootieuk16)

A big thank you to all our particularly helpful Moodlers on moodle.org, who help provide 24-hour Moodle support by answering questions in the community forums.

Particularly helpful Moodler (PHM) group membership is calculated automatically from forum posts rated as useful. If you post a question and receive useful replies, please provide feedback by rating the posts. Useful posts are also shown on the front page of moodle.org and are used to help improve our Moodle documentation.

The helping hand PHM group icon enables newcomers to moodle.org to easily spot forum posts from particularly helpful Moodlers. In addition to being added to a group, particularly helpful Moodlers are also awarded a PHM badge. Congratulations to the 263 particularly helpful Moodlers who have received a PHM badge in 2015.

Wow, Moodle 3.0 is here!

It's hard to believe 13 years have passed since I first released Moodle 1.0 right here - I still feel we are just getting started!

Compared with Moodle 2.0 in 2010, which is notable for having a large number of radical changes, Moodle 3.0 is a much gentler release.  In fact it could easily have been 2.10 if not for the fact that the mathematicians and programmers amongst us can not tolerate that kind of numerical abuse.     

In short, upgrades from any Moodle 2.x should be smooth!

A good way to look at Moodle 3.0 is as the end result of all the good work done in the last 5 years since Moodle 2.0.

That's not to say there's nothing new in Moodle 3.0 - there's plenty!  Our Moodle Tracker shows 269 issues were finished in the past six months, including a lot of smaller new features such as popular new quiz question types from Open University, new table editing controls in the text editor, tidier section editing on the course page, heaps of new mobile features and much much more.

For all the details see our New Features summary, the full Release notes or start watching our release videos:

All the downloads are on our downloads page as usual.

I want to personally thank each and every person who has contributed towards Moodle 3.0 and helped prove that a independent open source project can make software that really makes a difference in the world.

There are so many thousands of people in our community who play a part in making this happen - 

• The users and advocates who believe in the mission of a truly open source platform like Moodle and fight to get it installed and keep it running in their institutions.
  
• Everyone who joins in the community via forums, social media and MoodleMoot working groups to come up with new ideas for features.
  
• The admins and developers as individuals or groups who send reports and solutions into the Moodle tracker about things that need fixing.
  
• The developers, testers, documentation writers, managers and especially the integrators at Moodle HQ who take responsibility for bringing it all together with a high level of quality.
• Our Moodle Partners who pay for most of the development through their royalties to the project.

Thanks to you all.   Please go and make yourselves a celebratory Moodle mojito, preferably with mango juice in it.  

Now the work continues towards a big Moodle 3.1 release in 6 months which will have support for Competency-Based Education, major user interface improvements and have extra long-term support.  There are also new features coming soon on MoodleCloud, and we'll also have the new Moodle Users Association starting to have serious input into the roadmap starting in Moodle 3.2.  Exciting times!

Keep on learning and keep on Moodling!

Martin Dougiamas,
Moodle Founder

Moodle 2.9.3, 2.8.9 and 2.7.11 are now available via the usual open download channels: https://download.moodle.org or Git.

For those of you on our MoodleCloud free Moodle hosting service you will find your sites have already been upgraded to 2.9.3!

• Moodle 2.9.3 release notes
• Moodle 2.8.9 release notes
• Moodle 2.7.11 release notes

A big thank you to all our Quality Assurance (QA) testers, as listed in the Testing credits, who helped us achieve a Moodle 3.0 test pass rate of 100% in 3½ weeks. Congratulations to everyone who received a Moodle tester 2015 badge for running three or more tests in the QA cycle.

Thanks also to all our developers, who helped with fixing bugs identified through testing, so that tests could be reset and run again as quickly as possible. Thus we are all ready for the 3.0 release planned for 16 November 2015.

We're planning on releasing Moodle 3.0 in four weeks time, and so we're once again running a Quality Assurance (QA) testing cycle. The list of over 500 tests includes tests covering new features in Moodle 3.0.

If you can spare any time and would like to volunteer to help, please see the discussion Help needed with Moodle 3.0 QA testing for details of how you can be involved.

Thanks in advance for your help with our next version of Moodle!

There are lots of chances to meet up with other Moodlers in person in October and November at a MoodleMoot:

• Moodleposium 2015 - Canberra, Australia, 8-9 October (#mpos15)
• MoodleMoot Peru - Lima, Peru, 15-16 October (#mootpe15)
• Canada MoodleMoot - Montreal, Quebec, 20-23 October (#mootca15)
• MoodleMoot Spain 2015 - Mallorca, Spain, 22-24 October (#mootes15)
• 5th Western Balkans and Serbian Moodle Moot - Belgrade, Serbia, 24 October
• MoodleMoot Brasil - Brasília, Brasil, 27-28 November

If you're organising a Moodle event and would like it added to the moodle.org calendar, please let me know.

I'm pleased to announce that Moodle HQ is running another Learn Moodle MOOC, starting on 17 January 2016.

Teaching with Moodle: An introduction is for anybody who wants to use the Moodle learning platform for teaching, whether it be in a school, a university, a company or just personal interest.

If you're interested, please go to Learn.moodle.net and sign up now, then you'll receive an email reminder before the course begins.

Thanks to everyone who participated in our August 2015 MOOC and for your feedback, helping us improve the course for the future.

Moodle 2.9.2, 2.8.8 and 2.7.10 are now available via the usual open download channels: https://download.moodle.org or Git.

For those of you on our MoodleCloud free Moodle hosting service you will find your sites have already been upgraded to 2.9.2!

• Moodle 2.9.2 release notes
• Moodle 2.8.8 release notes
• Moodle 2.7.10 release notes