• Simple File Upload: Upload individual files without having to deal with the full Moodle upload interface
• Assignment ZIP: Download all the files associated with an assignment with one click.
• LAE Grader View: A cleaner, easier-to-navigate gradebook view.
• Anonymous Forums: A mod for Moodle forums that allows for anonymous forum posting (note: those in the administrator and teacher roles can still see the IP addresses associated with posts in the log file).

Full release notes and the release download can be found on the Moodle 1.9.9+LAE v1.1 project page.

• Code freeze will be on the end of the day on June 29.
• We will release Beta 2 on 7/2/2010
• The final version will be released on 7/9/2010.

This version of the LAE incorporates a number of bug fixes and new features developed at Hack/Doc Fest VI at DePauw University. We need help testing these features and verifying that they work for you.

• Go to the project home page to download the code.

Please post feedback as a comment on the project page. CLAMP members can post feedback to the Moodle 1.9.9+LAE v1.1 Beta 1 thread in the Redmine forum.

These passwords are MD5 encrypted, but recent changes in the code cracking landscape mean that it’s a lot easier to break these passwords than it used to be. Most CLAMP schools don’t use local authentication in Moodle, instead relying on external authentication like LDAP and not storing passwords in the Moodle database, but this can still be a problem for any locally-created accounts.

In addition to local user passwords potentially being easily crack-able, another danger not mentioned in the original email is that Moodle <=1.9.6 includes the admin account and its MD5-encrypted password when it does its a “full course” backup (one that includes course and user data). In addition, in Moodle 1.9.5 and 1.9.6, anyone with the administrator role will be included in these backups, regardless of whether they were a member of the course in question.

Because of this, CLAMP recommends that schools implement the steps below and then audit your admin and other local accounts to make sure that a) they’re still needed and b) they have new strong passwords.

Moodle 1.9.7 includes new roles capabilities that separate the ability to backup a course from the ability to back up course data. It also prevents administrators from being included in the course backup. We will be folding Moodle 1.9.7 into the Liberal Arts Edition during Moodle Hack/Doc Fest V and will release LAE 1.1 with this and other 1.9.7 enhancements in early January.

Recommended Steps

1) Disable backup functionality for teacher roles. You can re-enable backups later with the new Moodle releases, because the permissions for saving user data will be separate from the permission to create backups.

HOW:  Admin > Users > Permissions > Define roles:  Edit the teacher roles and change the capability for moodle/site:backup to “PROHIBIT”.

Disabling backups is a temporary fix; Moodle core is supposed to be releasing a Moodle 1.9.7 update that fixes these backup issues. When they do so, CLAMP will release its own patch for its Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition.

If you can’t disable backups, then you should still take the following steps:

2) Turn on the Password Policy for your site, which forces people to use stronger passwords.

HOW:  Admin > Security > Site policies > passwordpolicy

Note: this only affects local users, not externally authenticated users.

3) Add a “salt” to the MD5 password encryption that makes it harder to crack.

HOW: Add this line to your Moodle installation’s config.php file:

$CFG->passwordsaltmain = ’some long random string here with lots of characters’;

4) Change your admin passwords and makes sure that the password is a strong one.

5) Verify that Moodle is not caching your external authentication passwords. If you are using LDAP, the process is:

HOW: Login as an admin, go to Users > Authentication > LDAP Authentication and make sure “Hide passwords” is set to “yes”. If you’re making the change now, you’ll need to update your Moodle database manually to clear the cached passwords by setting the “password” field in the mdl_user database to “not_cached”.

6) Patch Moodle to fix the admin backup problem.

If you wish to restore the backup capability and want to ensure that admins are not incldued in the course backup, apply the LAE 1.0.2 admin backup patch (which prevents the inclusion of non-enrolled admins in the course backup). To apply the patch on a Unix system:

• Unzip the file and upload the patch to your [moodle directory]/backup/ directory
• Run patch:
  • patch -p0 < LAE102-admin-backup.patch

Be sure to test this on a development site before doing it on a production box.

Usability Testing Accounts

If you participated in the Moodle usability test project in the spring, we recommend that you delete or create strong passwords for local accounts created as part of that project.

1) Joe Faculty (joefaculty)
2) Joe Student (joestudent)
3) Jill Student (jillstudent)

and potentially

4) Admin User (admin)

This is not a true admin account; it’s just a local account without any rights or roles on your system, created because of the way Moodle’s been doing backups.

If your admin account is called admin, then you don’t need to deal with this; Moodle ignores the course’s “admin” user in favor of your own local admin user.

Included in the initial LAE release are:

• TinyMCE 2.x: A WYSIWYG editor that replaces the outdated HTMLArea editor that ships with Moodle. TinyMCE offers a streamlined interface, DragMath support, and better cutting and pasting from Microsoft Word.
• SimplePie RSS: A replacement for the deprecated Magpie RSS parser that included with Moodle. SimplePie RSS supports a greater variety of feeds than Magpie.
• Quickmail: An simple block that allows faculty to quickly send an email to students in a class. This replicates functionality founding other LMS systems.
• Filtered Course Block: A block that allows administrators to display a list of courses based on the current and future terms.

Visit the Moodle Liberal Arts Edition v1.0 page to download the full package or its individual components.

Update 11/4/09: There is a security release available for this version of the LAE.

Commonplace books were popular in the 18th century, but go back to the Renaissance. You read something; you want to keep it in mind; instead of memorizing it you write it down so you don’t have to remember it. This is something Jefferson used to keep track of his speeches; this is something that a number of writers and readers during the 18th century used also to communicate. You write down something, you write a comment, you take it to a friend’s house and they copy down things they think are interesting, and they write a response in your book. It’s kind of like Facebook groups in 18th-century form.

In class, I wanted students to get a sense of what this type of text world was like. So they kept commonplace books throughout the semester. The students kept notes of their reading; they would write responses to it, they would add in different things from our trips. Some of them would cut out pieces of brochures and glue them in, some would write long reflections, and then they would write responses to each other.

Toward the end of the course, I wanted them to think about the other dynamic of commonplace books which is that a lot of times when say Jefferson was putting a speech together or when someone like Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson wanted to publish in a magazine, you’d have to take something out of this manuscript world and get it into another medium. So the students constructed a course anthology, and it was up to them to decide the medium, and they wanted to use a wiki.

They thought this was the best way to publish a commonplace book that still looked like what an 18th century commonplace book might look like, just no longer in manuscript form. So students entered excerpts from their books. These are quotations, reflections, and responses to each other. Someone added a link to a museum we went to as a way of adding a memento rather than scrapbooking it in.

The benefits of using the wiki were that it was simple to set up, but it also opened up interesting discussions about changes between media, changes between anthologizing practices and got us into questions about what it means to work in a system where you don’t keep track of intellectual property. Nothing is attributed in the anthology, and the students wanted it this way. Commonplace books were about collective authorship so this was our chance to use some of the newest technology to construct one of the oldest types of media they’ve been involved in.

Sample commonplace book in wiki

Unlike my courses on European art music, for which there are numerous anthologies and CD sets or multiple recordings of canonical works, several other music classes I teach, and the way I teach them, require that I accumulate materials from several sources, especially recordings. For these courses, which generally center on popular music and non-European musical traditions, I have used Moodle primarily for four purposes: (1) creating a “virtual mixed tape” of listening and viewing examples for each class; (2) providing “liner notes” with background information to complement this assigned listening; (3) posting assigned reading; and (4) providing a clearinghouse for course-related resources and other items that come to my attention over the course of the semester. For these purposes Moodle has been an indispensable part of my courses. The annotations for the listening assignments have been particularly vital. These allow me to give the students some context for the recordings—personnel of performers, instrumentation, date and location of the recording, song lyrics, performance context, significance of the particular recording, etc.—and to draw connections with other recordings we’ve already listened to. Providing this information saves valuable class time; students can come to class with basic information and we can hit the ground running during conference. From a practical standpoint, it is remarkably fast and easy to upload materials and, more importantly, to adjust on the fly, since material can be shifted around or supplemented as necessarily.

Web page with summary

Listing of resources with "liner notes"

Setting up the summary to appear along with the resource

Audio file with summary

From a student in Advanced Creative Writing: “Professor Upton uses the Moodle site as a compendium of material to inspire our writing. She has links to dozens of major literary magazines, so that we can log in any time we need some inspiration. She also has links to visual art sites to stimulate us if we start running low on creative juices. In addition, she has posted links to exciting electronic content, like recordings of authors actually reading their work. She has really turned the site into a writer’s resource.”

Using topics format, but adding weekly indicators

I organized POL 359 by topic rather than by week, which allows for more of the course to appear on a screen at any one time; it also exposes the underlying structure of the overall course in a meaningful way and corresponds to how the syllabus itself is organized. The supplemental materials (e.g., Super Ballistics Videos) are grouped together with the relevant parts of the course, and assignments are placed exactly where they are due (e.g., after War at the turn of the Century, but before the next section on War between 1900 and 1945). Additional readings or readings from books that haven’t arrived at the bookstore yet can easily and quickly be posted (e.g., Biddle2004), and important handouts are posted early and prominently in the course (e.g., 01.1-01.2.Posen.graffle.pdf). This also means that when I need to refer back to those handouts I can pull them up on the projector for everyone’s reference rather than having to count on them bringing them to class every day. Similarly, they provide a handy place to store short video clips to be played in class, so I don’t have to bring my laptop: e.g., the Gettysburg videos. Finally, important items that could be changed are placed at the top (Syllabus, Endnote bibliographies, etc.).

Course layout by topic