Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project

The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP) is launching several new committees and is looking for volunteers to serve on them. The goals of these committees are to support CLAMP’s efforts outside of our Hack/Doc Fests, help prepare our members for the jump to Moodle 2.0, and provide more opportunities to schools to participate in meaningful ways.

The four committees are:

• Development: work on bug fixes, develop existing and new functionality, and support the release of Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition.
• Documentation: Create and update generic Moodle documentation – including written, audio, and video –  that can easily be adapted to individual colleges.
• Event Planning: Plan brown bag lunches, special talks, and the biannual Hack/Doc Fests.
• Next Generation: research and prepare for the next major version of Moodle; today that’s Moodle 2.0, which has major changes to blocks, modules, themes, and core code.

Here’s the schedule of upcoming committee meetings:

• Event Planning – Monday, Dec. 6, 2010 @ 2 p.m. EST
• Documentation – Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2010 @ 2 p.m. EST
• Next Generation – Thursday, Dec 9, 2010 @ 2 p.m. EST
• Development – Friday, Dec. 10, 2010 @ 2 p.m. EST

Anyone at a CLAMP school can serve on any committee; no nomination is required.

• Sign up for a committee.

This year two of the inaugural members of the Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP) steering committee, Reed College and Earlham College, will be stepping down as part of our governance rotation. CLAMP is accepting nominations of member colleges to succeed them; terms are for two years.

The Moodle 1.9.9+LAE v1.1 Beta 1 is available for download. This is a beta release meant for testing only; it is not recommended for use on production systems.

• Code freeze will be on the end of the day on June 29.
• We will release Beta 2 on 7/2/2010
• The final version will be released on 7/9/2010.

This version of the LAE incorporates a number of bug fixes and new features developed at Hack/Doc Fest VI at DePauw University. We need help testing these features and verifying that they work for you.

• Go to the project home page to download the code.

Please post feedback as a comment on the project page. CLAMP members can post feedback to the Moodle 1.9.9+LAE v1.1 Beta 1 thread in the Redmine forum.

CLAMP is running a survey to learn what colleges are using for their eReserves system and what, if any, integration that system has with Moodle. We’ll use answers to this survey to help guide CLAMP’s development efforts in this area.

• Take the Moodle and eReserves Integration survey.

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)

The Collaborative Liberal Arts Project is now accepting registrations for the 2009-2010 academic year. Read more about CLAMP, learn how to get involved, or sign-up using our online registration form.