Posted
3 days
ago
A heads up for anyone upgrading to the latest Moodle 1.9.6+, you'll find the password policy (in Site Administration > Security > Site policies) has been enabled and admins will be prompted to change their password on next login. Thus, if your site is for testing purposes only, you may wish to disable the password policy.
Posted
4 days
ago
I asked Ray if he would make a screencast about his new ForumNG features, and (after a little bit of convincing) he agreed! Finally, some variety in this blog.
Play screencast (note: will not work in IE7 - please use Firefox or
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IE8).
The screencast covers three minor features in about four minutes. The features will be included in the OU's March update.
Permalink (posts are always shown within discussions, but this gives you a link to the discussion with #p1231312 or whatever so that it jumps straight to the post and expands it automatically)
Important posts (moderators etc. can mark a post as important, this makes it a different colour and adds an ! icon)
Alert (if somebody posts an offensive message, students can report it; this directly sends email to a nominated person so they can check)
Ray was a bit negative about it but I think the screencast is really great! However it did take him a long time (mostly outside work time) to make, which isn't really fair, so I probably won't ask him to do another one... at least not for quite a while.
Two notes for those considering using our forum at other institutions:
1) The screencast shows our version, but outside the Open University, default text on the 'Alert' form obviously won't mention the OU or our code of conduct. Instead there is generic text that should be suitable everywhere. You can replace the text with something specific to the institution using a local language file, which is what we've done here.
2) We haven't updated the community version with these features yet - going to do a batch update around the end of the year or start of next. [Less]
Posted
5 days
ago
by
Helen Foster
by Helen Foster. The Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT) in Australia has selected Moodle Partner NetSpot to provide support for the introduction of the institute's new integrated e-learning solution "eLearn", based on Moodle
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, content repository EQUELLA and the Wimba Collaboration Suite.
As lead contractor, NetSpot will be providing a wide range of services to CIT, including implementation consulting, training, systems integration, load testing, Moodle configuration and customisation.
All Moodle Partners contribute directly to the ongoing development of Moodle software via funding or expertise, so by making use of NetSpot's services, CIT is helping support Moodle development.
According to Allan Christie, Founder and Managing Director of NetSpot, "CIT's choice of the best-of-breed open source learning management system (Moodle) combined with leading proprietary systems (Wimba and EQUELLA) adds value to the core LMS offering". [Less]
Posted
6 days
ago
Today I have been learning about password salting, a method of making encrypted passwords more secure and practically impossible to crack. Please see the documentation Password salting for the collected wisdom of posters in the forum discussion
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Moodle Salting and in our developer chat.
Elsewhere in Moodle Docs, I loved a talk page comment regarding a typo fix from documentation writer Chris Collman to Tim Hunt:
Keep doing the heavy lifting, sometimes I will find a grain of sand to put in the right place. [Less]
Posted
7 days
ago
A couple of weeks ago I came across an interesting report about the Open University (OU) and Moodle, The Open University UK: creating a win-win situation by sharing code and content. The report explained how cooperating with the worldwide Moodle
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community resulted in everyone benefiting.
Following his return to the UK after working at Moodle HQ in Perth for twelve months, Quiz module maintainer Tim Hunt has continued to contribute to Moodle in lots of areas. In addition to writing the documentation Development:Security, Tim has recently created a Custom SQL queries admin report.
OU wiki, OU blog and conditional activities developer Sam Marshall has recently announced ForumNG (new alternative forum for moodle 1.9). Like Tim, Sam is also a particularly helpful Moodler in the Using Moodle forums. For details of what other OU developers are currently working on, please see Sam's development update blog post.
A big thank you to all the OU team for their contributions to Moodle. [Less]
Posted
9 days
ago
I'm sure you all agree with me that we're very fortunate to be part of such a friendly and welcoming community on moodle.org.
However, newcomers (over a thousand every day according to moodle.org/stats!) don't always realise the unwritten
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forum rules that we choose to abide by and sometimes post in the wrong forum, or post the same question in several forums, or use "Please help me" as the subject line of their post etc.
Thus we've decided it would be a good plan to document our forum rules and moderation procedures, and so I've come up with a draft Moodle.org forums Code of Conduct. Comments on the draft are very welcome - please post in the Moodle.org design forum or use Talk:Moodle.org forums Code of Conduct. [Less]
Posted
10 days
ago
While the test site where you can play with the new workshop module is up and running, I am working on migration procedures to get current 1.9 workshop data into the new framework. I am following similar approach as Petr used for the migration of
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the Resource module. I personally call it Scavenger design pattern.
The basic idea of the migration is that all 1.9 tables are renamed using _old suffix and new ones are created as if we were starting from scratch. Then the upgrade script goes through all 1.9 records, transforms data into new formats and inserts them into new tables (marking old records as processed). Once finished, the new workshop core tables are fed up with the old data. Later during the installation, new workshop subplugins get created (allocators, grading strategies and grading evaluators). They find the old dead workshop tables and start picking data from them. At the end of the day, the new tables are populated with the old data.
Such a procedure requires that 1.9 workshop instances are at least in sort-of-well-defined-coma state. Therefore I started to fix the most critical functional and security bugs in workshop 1.9. So far the most important one may be that the workshop in Moodle 1.9.7 will push grades into gradebook as expected during the Synchronise legacy grades procedure. Big thanks to all patient users who help me with testing both new features and fixes. [Less]
Posted
10 days
ago
Time for this week's development update. I did do a new ForumNG feature (in addition to the public release mentioned earlier), but I thought I'd talk about something different.
Usually, I mainly talk about what I'm working on personally, but
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in fact the others on my team are working on lots of other things... I don't think they are offended but even so it would be good if I don't leave them out all the time!
And I hope some people reading this might be interested in reading a wider range of what's being developed in the OU's learning environment, even though that's probably not directly relevant. (As a reminder, if you happen to be an OU student - this is not in any way official, all just my personal comment, and features discussed in this blog are generally some way in the future. The things I'm talking about now are due for March, and even if we get them all finished on time, that often means, only in courses which start after March, and often not all of them either...)
Not in any order:
Ray is also working on ForumNG features, as mentioned before. He's currently finishing off the 'report offensive post by email' feature. Not the most exciting feature, but a useful one.
Anthony has just finished various investigation tasks relating to Sloodle - a community project that integrates Moodle with Second Life. The OU is running a small pilot project using Sloodle so we needed to have a local developer who knows something about it.
Tim is working on his new quiz engine. I saw it today (in between pestering him to do things other than quiz) - the bit where you can change interaction model in the preview is really cool.
Al and Alan are working together on the OU-specific 'OU stats' (reporting) feature. This is probably not very exciting to most people reading this; basically it means we will provide better statistics about course usage to course teams etc., with nice graphs and so on. (The current version only has text tables.) It's beginning to come together quite nicely.
Mahmoud is finishing code that automatically transfers gradebook scores to the main University systems (well, it gets them as far as the department that runs said systems, anyhow). This is going to let courses make quizzes/assessments which are required in order to complete the course, but not scored in the usual way (i.e. you have to complete it but the actual score you get doesn't matter - it's just about doing it). Yes there is a good reason for this! I can explain that if anyone likes...
Because the deadlines for these don't work like normal exams, it needs this new automatic system.
Bryan (who is technically not on my team!) is working on a significant new feature for the OU wiki module (which is available for Moodle 1.9). The new feature is sort of a replacement for comments (comments are still there, but we will probably turn them off) - it lets tutors use the wiki to 'mark' group work via a new annotation system.
Later in this development, apart from 'more of the same' (continued ForumNG work, for instance) we should also be working on:
Mobile support for course pages (i.e. if you visit a course page using a smartphone, we will serve you a reformatted version that works better - at least until you enter an activity for which we haven't yet implemented a mobile version). We actually have a slightly unfinished pilot version of this in the December release, but you have to use a special URL to get it, and I think I probably shouldn't tell everyone what that is!
Integrating ePub support for [some] course content, so people can download a version formatted for any* ebook reader.
Minor improvements to the 'shared activities' system that nobody knows about. (Not sure I should put in a link to that one either, even though it is genuinely available already! Hmmm...)
* Where 'any' excludes Kindle, of course; my opinion is, unless they make a serious move toward open standards, Kindle should be kept well outside bargepole-range...
Well, that's it. Sorry if it was boring or confusing. Next week I'll post about forum developments again, including the new pirate flag feature! [Less]
Posted
10 days
ago
by
Helen Foster
by Helen Foster.
Many of our Moodle Partners specialize in providing Moodle integrations, including American company Remote-Learner who are offering an Enterprise Learning Intelligence Suite for Moodle (ELIS™).
ELIS, an
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integration of several open source solutions with Moodle, comprises a curriculum management system, the Business Intelligence software Jaspersoft and the Content Management System Alfresco. For further details, see Remote-Learner Announces Enterprise Learning Intelligence Suite for Moodle.
Remote-Learner have also been involved in integrating the Open Source Video Platform Kaltura with Moodle as both a new resource and assignment type, enabling teachers and students to easily add and edit videos from within Moodle. For further information, see Remote-Learner and Kaltura Announce Partnership to Bring Open Source Video to Moodle.
If you're looking to integrate an external system with Moodle, please consider making use of your local Moodle Partner. All Moodle Partners contribute directly to the ongoing development of Moodle software via funding or expertise, so by making use of their services you are also helping support Moodle development. [Less]
Posted
13 days
ago
Thought I'd add a post about this now instead of waiting for my regular Friday blog post.
ForumNG is now available as an optional add-on for standard Moodle 1.9.
If you run a Moodle 1.9.x installation, please feel free to try it
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out. However, do bear in mind that this is a pilot version and is sort of halfway between testing (i.e. earlier versions have been tested but we changed a bunch of things since). Please install on a test server first, and do not use for any real work unless you've verified for yourself that it is good enough for your purposes.
If you do find bugs please report them via the Moodle bug tracker. There's a link to that in the modules & plug-ins entry above. [Less]
