The organization recommends upgrading to at least Moodle 2.4, rather than Moodle 2.3, because 2.3 will go out of official support when 2.6 is released in late 2013. Moodle core only supports the three most recent releases of Moodle and in December 2013 that’s expected to be 2.6, 2.5, and 2.4. Upgrading to 2.4 now avoids having to do a mid-year upgrade in January 2014.

This summer CLAMP will release three new versions of the Liberal Arts Edition on Friday, June 21, 2013:

• Moodle 2.3.7+Liberal Arts Edition v3.1
• Moodle 2.4.4+Liberal Arts Edition v4.0
• Moodle 2.5.0+Liberal Arts Edition v5.0

CLAMP’s own support for Moodle 2.3 will track with Moodle core’s and will end with Moodle 2.6′s release.

Current Version

When asked what version of Moodle they were running, 13% (3 colleges) reported running Moodle 2.4, which is the most current, stable release.

The largest contingent of schools 46% (11 colleges) were running Moodle 2.3; of these 9 were running the Liberal Arts Edition. This isn’t surprising — Moodle 2.3 was released in Summer 2012, and most colleges do major Moodle point releases over the summer months (with incremental security releases during the academic year). A few schools (12%, 3 colleges) are running Moodle 2.2.

A number of our member schools continue to running legacy Moodle. 30% (7 schools) were running 1.9 or older.

A little more than half (58%, 14 colleges) report running some version of the Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition (LAE) released by CLAMP.

Next Version

When asked what version they intended to upgrade to, five schools intend to upgrade to Moodle 2.3, while most are looking at Moodle 2.4 (30%, 7 colleges) or Moodle 2.5 (46%, 11 colleges). Those looking to upgrade to Moodle 2.3 should remember that Moodle core only supports 3 versions back; when Moodle 2.6 is released in late 2013, they will drop support for Moodle 2.3.

Several schools mentioned staying on 2.4 in order to keep in step with vendor support, either plugins (Kaltura, Panopto, Turnitin) or vendor hosting (Moodlerooms). Four of the Moodle 2.5 schools were on the fence about the upgrade, and mentioned falling back to Moodle 2.4 should the latest version have problems.

58% of respondents (14 colleges) intend to upgrade to some version of the Liberal Arts Edition.

Timeframe for Upgrading

Looking ahead, the vast majority of respondents (92%, 22 schools) plan to upgrade to a newer version of Moodle in Summer 2013. One planned an upgrade for Fall 2013; one was waiting on the outcoming of Hack/Doc Fest at Colgate to decide when to upgrade.

Membership Feedback

When discussing their reasons for upgrading to a particular versions, several schools mentioned drag-and-drop media (introduced in Moodle 2.3) and the Bootstrap theme (in Moodle 2.5). Other features of interest to people include grade restoration for all enrollment methods, the addition of badges, and integration with external calendars.

One of these projects was documentation; documentation for Moodle 2.4 is now available through Google Drive. While the Doc’ers were able to spend some time reviewing Moodle 2.5, we don’t have documentation complete for that version. That said, 2.5 is more about improving usability than it is adding features, so the 2.4 documentation should still be helpful for those moving to 2.5.

We had four presentations, all of which are available via YouTube. These included

• Theme Review: Afterburner & Formal White — Lou Taris, Wheaton College
• Syllabus Block – Kevin Wiliarty, Smith College
• Language Lesson development and progress – Daniel Landau, Reed College
• Custom SQL — Charles Fulton, Lafayette College

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

Joe Murphy was one of the founding members of CLAMP. He served on CLAMP’s initial ad hoc steering committee and played a pivotal role in securing a NITLE Innovation Grant to fund the organization. He transitioned to the CLAMP’s inaugural steering committee and helped craft the fledgling group’s bylaws. Mr. Murphy is the Director of the Center for Innovative Pedagogy at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH.

Charles Fulton holds the honor of being one of only two people who have attended every one of CLAMP’s Moodle Hack/Doc Fests, starting with Lafayette College in 2008. He served on CLAMP’s ad hoc Development Committee all that time and has shepherded most of its Liberal Arts Edition releases. He’s also one of the group’s resident git experts and co-led CLAMP’s Git Workshop in 2011 with Daniel Landau of Reed College. Mr. Fulton is a web application developer at Lafayette College in Easton, PA.

About the Awards

The CLAMP Recognition Awards are awarded annually to one programmer (e.g.; hacker) and one instructional technologist (e.g.; doc’er) to acknowledge outstanding achievement as members of the organization. These achievements include work on Moodle development, Moodle documentation, CLAMP organization and/or recruitment to CLAMP.

In 2012-13, the value of this award is $500. Learn more about the awards at CLAMP-IT.org.

We had three presentations, starting with Ken Newquist’s (Lafayette College) The State of Moodle, followed by Charles Fulton’s (Lafayette College) Moodle Grabbag Featuring  Roster View and Course Timer and Carly Born’s (Carleton College) Assignment 2.4 Overview. The presentations are available on YouTube. 

Doc’ers

Carly Born (Carleton College): Started with a document of what we wanted to test in Moodle 2.4; they have gotten around to almost all of it. A few people are looking at 2.3 documentation to see what updated.

Jason Bennett (Kenyon College): TinyMCE behaves strangely within iOS. Things also seen in Safari, but had trouble replicating. You could type indenfinitely, couldn’t regain focus on the field.

Jedidiah Rex (Beloit College): Quickmail works in 2.4 thanks to Charles Fulton’s efforts. Working through Bootstrap in 2.5 and don’t see any loss of function. There’s a setting for inverting breadcrumb colors. A lot of the testing revolved around the forms interface, which involves a lot of collapsible options for things like settings pages for workshops, assignments, courses, etc. Wondering if admin can choose what areas are collapsed or not. Might say that the enrollment dates are more important to have open than whatever the defaults were. The weird wrapping of quizzes still happens in 2.5.

Coders

Charles Fulton (Lafayette College): The Moodle 2.4 candidate release is ready and available in CLAMP’s git repo. The Moodle 2.5 candidate release will be ready sometime tomorrow. He also got the CLAMP’s version of Quickmail working in 2.4. We’ll be testing it with 2.5 tomorrow.

Willy Lee (Carleton College): Concentrated on breaking (and debugging)other people’s stuff.

Nate White (Carleton College): Worked on Scheduler fork that lets you multiselect slots. Another branch removing a bunch of functionality; taking it back to just scheduling. Removing the ability of people to be “seen”.

Kevin Wiliarty (Smith College): Created a block that provides a printer-friendly syllabus view of the course. You can create a custom header and footer for the syllabus. It should work with most Moodle themes, assuming that they retained Moodle’s HTML markup.

Bob Puffer (Luther College): Worked on the gnarly Gradebook problem of sum of grades never ignoring ungraded items. The metacourse interface revision (which reverts the metacourse selection interface to look like it did in Moodle 1.9) is done; he’ll be making a small interface tweak tomorrow based on feedback from the doc’ers.

Tim Yale (Lafayette College): Automated testing for LAE-specific features using Selenium.

Daniel Landau (Reed College): Daniel made progress on Language Lesson and got some LTI-integration working. He’ll be demoing it with Carly Born at lunch on Wednesday (moved up from its previous lunchtime slot on Thursday).

Bill Junkin (Eckerd College): Looked at the mobile app for Moodle, using Moodle 2.4. Willy spun it up and found it doesn’t work. Then tried it with 2.5, and didn’t work there either. App may be misinterpreting address of the web server in our dev environment because we use a subdirectory install.

Daniel Landau (Reed College) upgraded Redmine was upgraded. Jedidiah Rex (Beloit College) began testing Quickmail under Moodle 2.4 and discovered that “everything except compose works.” Obviously some debugging is needed.

Kevin Wiliarty (Smith College) experimented with creating a block that lets you print a syllabus view of the course.

Carly Born (Carleton College) spent lots of time looking at Assignment 2.4. She also experimented with adding buttons through the TinyMCE GUI.

Here’s the list of presentations that will be given Colgate University. All times are Eastern Daylight Saving Time. The presentations will be available with a 7-second delay via YouTube and live via a Google+ Hangout.

Tuesday, 6/11/2013

• Noon-12:15 p.m.: Presentation #1 
  • The State of CLAMP — Ken Newquist, Lafayette College
• 12:15-12:30 p.m.: Presentation #2
  • Moodle Grab Bag: Roster view, Flavors, and other odds and ends — Charles Fulton, Lafayette College
• 12:30 p.m.: Presentation #3
  • Assignment Module in Moodle 2.4 — Carly Born, Carleton College

Wednesday, 6/12/2013

• Noon-12:20 p.m.: Presentation #4
  • Updates and new features to LAE Grade Suite, updates to Quickset block – Bob Puffer, Luther College
• 12:20–12:40 p.m.: Presentation #5
  • IPAL Demonstration — Bill Junkin, Eckard College

Thursday, 6/13/2013

• Noon-12:15 p.m.: Presentation #7
  • Theme Review: Afterburner & Formal White — Lou Taris, Wheaton College
• 12:15-12:30 p.m. Presentation #8
  • Syllabus Block – Kevin Wiliarty, Smith College
• 12:30–1:00 p.m.: Presentation #9
  • Language Lesson development and progress – Daniel Landau, Reed College and Carly Born, Carleton College
• 1:00-1:15 p.m.: Presentation #10
  • Custom SQL — Charles Fulton, Lafayette College

Using Google+

We’re using Google Hangouts in Google+ to share our presentations with those not at the event.

You’ll be able to participate in the Hangout in two ways:

1. Join the Hangout via Google+
2. Watch via the On Air video stream on Youtube

Joining via the Google Hangout will allow you to watch the presentations in real-time and participate via chat. The On Air video stream has a seven-second delay, and doesn’t allow for interaction.

Watching the Presentations

To participate via Google+:

1. Log into Google+ (http://plus.google.com)
2. Add Moodle CLAMP (moodle.clamp@gmail.com) to one of your Circles in Google+
   • You can do this by going to Circles in the lefthand navigation bard and then typing “Moodle CLAMP” into the Name field. Drag the resulting profile to one of your Circles.
3. Wait an open invitation to the “CLAMP Moodle Hack/Doc Fest Hangout”. You will see the hangout in your timeline as well as in the red box in the upper-righthand corner.
4. Join the hangout.

To watch via YouTube:

1. Go to the CLAMP profile page on YouTube:
   • http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdbJjkHE71h9nfJoXpYKaLA?feature=mhee
2. Wait for the video to appear.
3. Click on the video.

You can download the updates from their project pages:

• Moodle 1.9.19+Liberal Arts Edition v1.7.5
• Moodle 2.2.10+Liberal Arts Edition v2.2.8
• Moodle 2.3.7+Liberal Arts Edition v3.0.8

• Take the survey.