For the 2021-2022 Academic Year, Moodle has a few new features and design changes.
New Activity Chooser
Perhaps the most noticeable change is that when you click on the Add activity or resource link at the bottom of each topic section, there’s a new tiled presentation of the options. You can search for the tiles using keywords, use the tabs to display all options or just activities or resources, and if you click on a star in any of the tiles, create your own list of frequently used activities or resources.
Forum Summary Report and Whole Forum Grading
The Forum Summary Report is a new way to get overview statistics about engagement with individual forums as well as all the forums in your course in the aggregate. You can see how many original posts and replies each student has made, word and character counts, and dates of first and most recent posts. These can be useful for getting a sense of student engagement. The report also allows you to send messages to selected students.
Whole Forum Grading allows you to review all the posts and replies of each student on a single page and assign an overall grade for their contributions. The grades are then added to the Gradebook. This is more simplified way than in the past to use Forums for contribution to things like Participation grades.
Creating Interactive Activities Using H5P
You can create many different types of interactive activities using the new embedded H5P content creator in Moodle or uploading activities created by others that are shared on Open Education Resources repositories.
The video below, while using a slightly different Moodle interface, gives a short overview of H5P and it’s pedagogical possibilities.