Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project

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.

Moodle Hack/Doc Fest V will be held January 5-7, 2010 at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. The event 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. We also hope to test drive Moodle 2.0, which is scheduled for a beta release at the end of 2009.

With this Hack/Doc, CLAMP returns to its “pay your own way” funding model. Lafayette will be providing breakfast, lunch and snacks for attendees, but they will need to pay for their own transportation, lodging, and dinner. In addition to the conventional Hack/Doc Fest, we’re planning on coordinating a virtual component to Hack/Doc Fest that will allow people to participate from their own campuses.

Visit the event home page for more information and to register.

All of the NITLE schools attending Hack/Doc Fest are eligible for reimbursement of food, travel and lodging expenses of up to $1,200. Requirements for reimbursement are as follows:

1. The reimbursement deadline is June 17, 2009
   • Your receipts must be received by Lafayette by this date.
     
2. We are following the Lafayette College reimbursement rules for food, which allow $50 per diem, including one alcoholic beverage. You may include tips in your reimbursements.
3. The milage rate is .55.
4. Your receipts for lodging and travel must show a zero balance, which means that the receipt should include:
   • the cost of your ticket or hotel stay
   • the credit card charge (or other payment) showing your paid the bill
   • a final balance of $0.
   • Note: This usually means you need to use your final bill, not the confirmation (which typically shows the cost, but not your payment).
5. You must include all your original receipts. Printouts (e.g. for airplane ticket purchases) are ok.
   • Note: Scans of the receipts aren’t ok; we need the originals. We recommend that you make copies of your receipts before sending in the originals.
6. Mail your completed reimbursement to:
   • Kenneth Newquist
   • David Bishop Skillman Library
   • 710 Sullivan Road
   • Lafayette College
   • Easton, PA 18042-1797

The reimbursement form:

• Hack/Doc Fest Reimbursement Form (Excel/xls format)

Contact Information

• Ken Newquist
• newquisk@lafayette.edu
• 610-330-5759

Hack/Doc Fest is coming soon, and we’re starting to put together our list of possible tasks for the event. We’re in the process of gathering and reviewing the usability tests that a number of schools conducted in the spring, and we expect a good chunk of our work to be guided by those results.

As always though, we’re looking for suggestions from the community about things *you* want us to look at and work on. These can be bug fixes, hacks, functionality improvements, documentation, road testing, etc. 

Note: You don’t have to be attending Hack/Doc Fest to make suggestions — we’d like suggestions from the entire community.  Read the rest of this entry »

Hack/Doc Fest III was held at Reed College, January 7-9, 2009. The big issues tackled at the event were the Gradebook and Moodle usability (with the two colliding more often than not). In the Gradebook, we’ve created documentation explaining how to simplify and streamline it using existing Moodle options and one or two easy-to-apply patches. Read the rest of this entry »