Moodle 2.0 Triage

During the Moodle Hack/Doc Fest pre-meeting on Tuesday, 12/21/10 we discussed evaluating Moodle 2.0. That in turn gave  rise to a question of triaging evaluation tasks — what’s most important to our campuses? What’s most likely to break? What new features do we want to test?

Here’s our initial breakdown, based on Tuesday’s meeting. Please add your own suggestions and priorities as comments on this post.

  • Enrollments
    • gradebook and how enrollments work.
    • what happens when someone is unenrolled from a course, deleted from moodle, etc.
    • ways to get around auto-deleting student course information
  • Repository/Files
    • How does uploading of files work?
    • SMB mounts?
    • External repos?
    • User quotas?
  • Block and Module Evaluations
    • needed updates for database backend?
  • Restoring courses from 1.9, upgrading courses from 1.9
  • Thirdparty apps like plagerism tools
  • Moodle Luminis Message Broker Plugin
    • 2.0 beta in January

Our goal is to assess the state of Moodle 2.0 and determine what documentation is going to be needed, what code must be upgraded, and offer suggestions on when to make the move.

A list of major changes and additions to Moodle 2.0 can be found on the Moodle Documentation web site:

4 comments

  1. Bob Puffer says:

    Just a cautionary note:
    If I was only one school and I was testing this release for potential implementation, I would stop testing after I reached the first “Blocker” as there’d be no sense in continuing to test code that might change before I could honestly implement. Right now there are 249 bugs for 2.0 rated Serious, Critical and six Blockers. The release has a long way to go before it ceases to be a waste of time to systematically test it out. While I believe partitioning certain functionalities and testing them rigorously could bring benefit, I encourage us not to take any testing efforts too far, only to have to repeat the very same sequences in June.

  2. Bob Puffer says:

    Gary Anderson posted a day ago on the feasibility of creating a tool that would accurately read a 1.9 backup into a 2.0 site. His conclusion is that it would be quite feasible but no small endeavor. I think this would be a very good activity for CLAMP as it is a showstopper for me and others I know.

  3. Fritz Vandover says:

    -I see the item about restoring courses from 1.9 to 2.0. That will be a very big item for Macalester. We do a ton of restores and our faculty really like having that capability.

    -On a smaller note, I’d be interested to know how well 2.0 handles external content (video, audio, web) and whether it has better built-in players for accessing external and local media content.

  4. Ken Newquist says:

    @BobPuffer A lot of the feedback I’m getting from CLAMP folks is that they want to know more about what’s new in Moodle 2.0, what’s broken, what will break, etc. IMHO we need to test enough to get a good feel for the software so we can make recommendations.

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