Colgate Hack/Doc Fest: Day 2 – LAE releases, Moodle 2.4 vs 2.5, Rubrics

The second day of Hack/Doc Fest at Colgate University saw the creation of betas of the Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition for 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5, lots of work evaluating 2.4 vs. 2.5, and development work on language lesson, scheduler, and Selenium test scripts.

We had two presentations — “Updates and new features to LAE Grade Suite, updates to Quickset block” by Bob Puffer, Luther College and “IPAL Web Clicker Demonstration” by Bill Junkin, Eckard College. Video of the presentations is available on CLAMP’s YouTube channel. Finally we announced the winners of the CLAMP Recognition Awards for 2012-13.

Liberal Arts Edition

We determined that CLAMP will release three versions of the Liberal Arts Edition on Friday, June 21. These will be for Moodle 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5. They’ll include our initial bug fixes and selected third-party plugins (Quickmail, Filtered Course List, Anonymous Forums, Fast Date editing for Assignments) as well as version-specific additions.

We will officially be ending support for Moodle 1.9 and 2.2 and intend to end support for 2.3 in December 2013 when Moodle 2.6 is released (which follows Moodle core’s policy of only supporting the last three major releases).

2.3

  • Anonymous forums minor bug fix.
  • A backport of the Moodle 2.5 grade recovery logic for all enrollment types
  • A roster roster report that displays the profile photos for class participants on a facebook/yearbook style page

2.4

  • Anonymous forums minor bug fix.
  • A backport of the Moodle 2.5 grade recovery logic for all enrollment types
  • A roster roster report that displays the profile photos for class participants on a facebook/yearbook style page
  • Set file display by course: This allows teachers to set the default file display (inline or download) for an entire course. This helpful for PDF heavy courses.

2.5

  • Anonymous forums minor bug fix.
  • A roster roster report that displays the profile photos for class participants on a facebook/yearbook style page
  • Set file display by course: This allows teachers to set the default file display (inline or download) for an entire course. This helpful for PDF heavy courses.

Beta releases are out for all three versions via CLAMP’s git repository.

Doc’ers

Carly Born (Carleton College) reported on the doc’ers project which focused on evaluating Moodle 2.4 vs. Moodle 2.5. They determined that 2.4 focused on adding features, while 2.5 was about improving usability. Moodle 2.4 has new options for assignments, such as assigning grades to group of students, but 2.5 introduced collapsible menus as a way of taming Moodle’s expansive settings pages. In addition the 2.3 documentation was updated and expanded for 2.4 and is ready to be promoted on the CLAMP web site.

Sometime was spent further evaluating the Moodle app, but we had security concerns which have been reported to Moodle core. We don’t recommend using the app at this time.

Coders

On the coder side, Nathan White (Carleton College) continued work on refining a simplified version of Scheduler while Daniel Landau (Reed College) worked on Language Lesson. Tim Yale (Lafayette College) focused on a Selenium script to automate the testing of the anonymous forum which tests the “anonymous posting” and “user choses anonymity” options.

Dan Wheeler (Colgate University) dug into issues with fractional grading in rubrics and encouraged everyone to vote for MDL-33563 Rubric grades could be posted in decimal format