I really like the direction that Moodle is developing with the new Sharing Cart block and emergent Moodle Community Hub functionality. Consider a teacher reviewing a variety of existing Moodle courses from their colleagues and browsing the content to find the good stuff. The Sharing Cart block enables them to copy the most useful Resources and Activities to their Sharing Cart block and drop into their own Moodle course with a couple of clicks, so easy to use. The only thing missing is the Sharing Cart doesn’t enable the copying of a complete topic in one hit; this would be really useful in significantly freeing up Moodle administrators in supporting teachers in backing up and restoring course content (Hopefully this will become available in the future development of this great new feature). And there’s more…with the Sharing Cart, Moodle can be connected with a Moodle Community Hub. A Moodle Community Hub is a more sophisticated repository system which enables multiple Moodle installs to network and share content, the Hub has some nice bells and whistles like user rating, most popular downloads, points systems for user who upload Moodle artefacts and more... a Community Hub example has been set up at http://ept3.sgu.ac.jp With the Sharing Cart Block and Community Hub I really like that individual resources and activities are freed up to be used between teachers no longer locked up and inflexible within a Moodle course and reliant on backup and restore. After reviewing the new features I’ve had a complete rethink on Moodle Administration with the view to creating a new administration system with Master courses for qualification stored in a Community Hub these can continually maintained and updated by a community of teachers with the best bits and pieces from their own courses using the Sharing Cart Block hmmm that would mean less grunt work for the Administrator…these new Moodle features are great!

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