Samaritans has developed a series of e-learning courses in Moodle to provide a cost-effective and convenient way for volunteers to be trained in their own homes.

Samaritans is a registered UK charity, with over 18,000 volunteers, which offers 24-hour confidential support to anyone in emotional distress.

E-learning offers great value for money, and can be organised to fit in with volunteers' personal schedules, as it can be carried out from any Internet-enabled computer, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Nigel Ross, Training and Development Officer for Samaritans, explains: "We extensively researched the industry standard for e-learning platforms and chose the open source learning management system Moodle because we were impressed by the robust and continually evolving platform that it offers as well as its large user base, including the Open University, NHS, local government and defence."

Moodle Partner HowToMoodle is providing Moodle consultancy, training, customisation and hosting for Samaritans.

For further details of how Samaritans are using Moodle to provide e-learning for volunteers, see the HowToMoodle Case Study - Samaritans.

Moodle Partners are a worldwide group of authorised service companies committed to financially supporting the open source Moodle project. They provide a range of optional commercial services for Moodle users around the world.

Our Moodle Books database now contains over 30 books and manuals in various languages.

Recently added titles include Estratégias Pedagógicas e Estudos de Casos (free download) by Lynn Alves, Daniela Barros and Alexandra Okada, plus a number of books from Packt Publishing:

• Moodle 1.9 Extension Development by Jonathan Moore and Mike Churchward
• Moodle 1.9 Theme Design: Beginner's Guide by Paul James Gadson
• Moodle 1.9 for Design and Technology by Paul Taylor
• Moodle 1.9: The English Teacher's Cookbook by Silvina P. Hillar
• Moodle 1.9 for Teaching Special Education Children (5-10): Beginner's Guide by Vanesa S. Olsen

Packt Publishing are kindly offering Moodlers 20% off the price of all their Moodle books and 25% off selected books. See the entries in the Moodle Books database for discount codes.

Remember that buying a book from the Moodle Books database helps support Moodle development, since a percentage of all sales goes to the Moodle Trust.

Thanks to everyone who took part in the Moodle 2 Theme Contest and congratulations to Caroline Kennedy for designing the winning theme, Splash.

Splash is cleanly coded, makes creative use of the Moodle 2 theme engine and was highly rated by the community.

Caroline’s theme will be included in Moodle 2.0 together with other cool Moodle 2 Theme Contest submissions.

Many thanks to Moodle Partner NewSchool Learning for sponsoring and running the contest.

Hi all!

I thought it was time to crawl out of my cave and post a little update here on how things are going with Moodle 2.0.

All of us working on Moodle 2.0 core are still plugging away hard on development. We're responding to all the feedback from people helping to test the series of Moodle 2.0 Preview Releases we've been doing (eg see the notes for Preview Release 4), and fixing hundreds of bugs and rough edges in the new features.

(I'd also like to announce that we are launching our first formal cycle of functional QA testing today, which is a great milestone for us. See Helen's recent post in Testing and QA forum and the QA testing page in the docs for details.)

If all goes well, it's looking like we should be able to hit a usable and feature-complete state for Moodle 2.0 in a couple of weeks, around July 20. You can follow the the main blockers in the tracker to see progress towards this. Unfortunately, I don't think we can call that a final release yet, because the testing period for much of it has not been long enough, so at this point we'll call it Moodle 2.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1).

This code will still not be a recommended upgrade for all sites, but if you are an experienced Moodle admin able to dive into PHP if required, and you urgently require the Moodle 2 features, and you find it works well enough for your particular use of Moodle, then the risk will be manageable. The APIs and Database will be completely frozen and most issues should be relatively cosmetic.

Testing and polishing will continue for probably another month or two, focusing on consistency, correctness and performance. This will also be a great window for developers to update their contributed plugins, as we'll be improving the documentation for core APIs with more examples of best practice for the new Moodle 2 platform.

Thanks for your patience everyone! We are getting close!

Cheers,
Martin (Founder and Lead Developer)

There are lots of Moodle conferences, or MoodleMoots as they are often called, coming up in the next 6 months:

• 6th French MoodleMoot - Troyes, France, 28-30 June (#mootfr10)
• MoodleMoot Italia 2010 - Bari, Italy, 2-3 July (#mootIT10)
  
• MoodleMoot AU 2010 - Melbourne, Australia, 11-14 July (#mootau10)
• US West Coast MoodleMoot 2010 - San Jose, CA, USA, 20-23 July
• US Midwest MoodleMoot - Goshen, IN, USA, 26-28 July (#mootusin10)
• MoodleMoot Austin - Austin, Texas, USA, 2-3 August (#atxmoot10)
• Moodlemoot Colombia 2010 - Bogotá, Colombia, 17-18 August
• MoodleMoot Hamburg - Hamburg, Germany, 8 September
  
• International Moodle Conference - Essen, Germany, 16-17 September (#mootDE10e)
• Polish MoodleMoot - Czestochowa, Poland, 4-5 November (#mootPL10)
• MoodleMoot Spain 2010 - La Rioja, Spain, 11-13 November

If you're organising a Moodle event and would like it added to the moodle.org calendar, please let me know and/or post in the announcements forum in the Moodle Conference Centre.

(Edited by Helen Foster to add additional dates - original submission Wednesday, 23 June 2010, 02:29 PM)