Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project

The second day of Moodle Hack/Doc Fest saw a great deal of work squashing bugs, refining a new gradebook view, and completing TinyMCE 3 integration into Moodle 1.9.9+LAEv1.1.

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The first day of Moodle Hack/Doc saw the doc’ers tackling the Herculean task of evaluating Moodle 1.9.9 by running it through our testing script. Meanwhile the developers concentrated on setting up test instances of Moodle, cleaning up outstanding issues in Redmine, and beginning code revisions.

Developers

The developers created a methodology to document CLAMP code changes and have begun integrating them into our code. We reviewed all of the “resolved” tickets in Redmine, and closed them (causing the total ticket count to drop).

The Census module now allows for start and end dates for its reports and the latest iteration to Anonymous Forums is ready for testing. We’re also evaluating hacks to improve the “My Moodle” feature in Moodle.

Luther College’s Grader report was reviewed. We decided to offer the report as part of 1.9.9.+LAE.x, but we’ll be splitting out the logic that changes the way grades are calculated. The new report allows you to scroll left and right within the grader report, offers better color coding, and increases the usability of the default gradebook view. We are currently debugging display problems in Internet Explorer.

We also folded TinyMCE 3 into Moodle 1.9.9. and have begun testing it. We also resolved issues we were having with SSHing to our development server at Reed College.

We also created a survey asking institutions about what eReserves system they use and what, if any, integration they have done between that system and Moodle.

• Take the Moodle and eReserves Integration survey.

Doc’ers

The Doc’ers spend their time running through the Moodle evaluation script to determine if there were any problems with Moodle 1.9.9. Here is their preliminary report:

Bugs

• Quiz: teachers cannot add images as answers because they don’t get the editor
• RSS block titled Remote News Feed would make more sense as RSS News Feed
• Advanced upload of files: must complete comment field to upload response document; faculty may have embedded comments in the document instead.

Moodle Hack/Doc Fest VI for Summer 2010 is underway at DePauw University!  Our priority projects for the first day of Hack/Doc Fest are as follows. The lead person for each task is asterisked.

Hack/Doc Fest: Summer 2010 is coming, we’re looking for  suggestions for bug fixes, documentation and new features for Moodle  that the community would like us to address. You can add your requests by making a comment on this blog post. You don’t have to be attending Hack/Doc Fest to make suggestions — we’d like suggestions from the entire community.

Here are some potential items for Hack/Doc:

• Moodle 1.9.9: Liberal Arts Edition: We will be doing the 1.9.8 code merge before Hack/Doc Fest, so work on this edition will focus on debugging/testing so that we can release it ASAP after the event.
• Moodle 2.0 Beta Evaluation: There weren’t many tires to kick on Moodle 2.0 in January; we’ll be revisiting the new version (currently Moodle 2.0 Preview 1)

Moodle Hack/Doc Fest: Summer 2010 will be held June  23-25, 2010 at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Hack/Doc is being held in conjunction with NITLE Camp’s Moodle User Group Meeting, which takes place Tuesday, June 22, 2010.

As with prior events, Hack/Doc will feature programmers and instructional technologists coming together to improve Moodle. We expect to continue work on CLAMP’s Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition project, fix outstanding Moodle bugs, and craft new training materials.

• Learn more at Hack/Doc: Summer 2010 home page.
• Request Hacks, Docs, Bugs for Hack/Doc Fest: Summer 2010
• Register online.

Questions can be posted as comments below or emailed to Ken Newquist at newquisk@lafayette.edu.

Moodle Hack/Doc Fest for Winter 2011 will be held Tuesday, January 4 through Thursday, January 6, 2011 at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Additional information will be posted in Summer 2010. This will be CLAMP’s seventh Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, and our first to be held in a southern state.

Moodle Hack/Doc Fest for Summer 2010 will be held Wednesday, June 23 through Friday, June 25 at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. The event immediately follows NITLE Camp 2010, which will include a day-long session dedicated to Moodle on Tuesday, June 22. More information — inclduing registration details — will be posted Monday, April 12.

This will be CLAMP’s sixth Moodle Hack/Doc Fest. As with our earlier events, we’ll be focusing on adding functionally to Moodle, documenting new and existing features, and merging the latest updates from Moodle core into our Liberal Arts Edition of Moodle.

Here’s what the Hack/Doc crew at Lafayette College worked on during Day 1 of the event:

Courtney Bentley, Lafayette College: Went through the Documentation tracker in Redmine and updated all the queues. She posted “Moodle Roles Explained” to CLAMP-IT and is working on a supplementary document on on creating a “unlimited quiz time” role for students.

Sarah Ryder, Hampshire College: Quickmail: Found the can receive bug (needs to be committed). Looked into option for sending emails to everyone at once, but would require creating a whole new function. Decided that was a little silly.

Caroline Moore, Smith College: Did a lot of chatting with Dan Wheeler at Colgate about Simple File Upload. Looks like he took her edits and made them work. Caroline is in the process of testing that out. Would like to add a “Force Download” checkbox with Simple File Upload.

Charles Fulton, Kalamazoo College: Topic Import/Restore thing; applied fix from Tracker.  WIll add vote for it to Tracker. Spent time beating up on Chat.

Eric Merrill, Oakland University: Closed out a number of tasks related to theLuminis Message Broker plugin. Show version of LMB module, secure LMB importing; before you needed to have a secure htaccess file; now the module handles the security. Led a conversation about LMB integration, common problems encountered, what documentation is available, etc.

Steve Taylor, Vassar College and Sarah Ashley, Drew University: Worked on migration notes for moving from Blackboard to Moodle. We’re considering having a “Blackboard to Moodle” brownbag in the spring semester.

Mark O’Neil, Vassar College & Rosalyn Metz, Wheaton College: They spent time looking at a “daily” format for Moodle courses, but found that wasn’t really an option unless they hacked core code in Moodle. But they did find some alternatives they want to try out.

Jeanne Farrell, Diane DeMelo, Wheaton College: Documented differences between the Liberal Arts Edition and vanilla Moodle, creating a plain text explaination. They also looked at Bob Puffer, Luther College’s fixes for the Gradebook.

Rosalyn Metz, Wheaton College: Took on feature to backup a single section from a course.

Jason Meinzer, Reed College: Closing out code tasks in Redmine, looking at subgroups in metacourses.

Daniel Landau, Reed College: Version control wrangling and working on removing the zlib requirement for Assignment ZIP.

Virtual Participants

On the virtual front, our nine hack/dockers worked on:

• Roadtesting Moodle 1.9.7
• Coming up with an evaluation list for Moodle 2.0-Dev
• Worked on Simple File Upload

A complete list of bugs, feature requests, and road tests has been been posted to Google Docs. Attendees have edit access; everyone else has view access.

• Check out the Moodle Hack/Doc Fest V Task List

Hack/Doc Fest V is coming, we’re looking for  suggestions for bug fixes, documentation and new features for Moodle  that the community would like us to address. You can add your requests by making a comment on this blog post. You don’t have to be attending Hack/Doc Fest to make suggestions — we’d like suggestions from the entire community.

Update 1/4/2010:

• Moodle Hack/Doc Fest V Task List: A complete list of bugs, feature requests, and road tests has been been posted to Google Docs. Attendees have edit access; everyone else has view access.