About CLAMP

The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP) is a group of colleges and universities who collaborate to develop and support Moodle, with an eye toward the issues unique to a liberal arts environment.

What CLAMP does

The major work of CLAMP focuses on fostering collaboration and support around Moodle by hosting events, sharing knowledge, evaluating features, creating documentation, fixing bugs, and developing code. While much of the ongoing work is accomplished online using a variety of tools, CLAMP hosts events each year to provide opportunities for community members to learn, share, hack, and document together in person. CLAMP events have included:

  • Hack/Doc Fests – twice a year in varied geographical locations, developers and instructional technologists spend 3-4 days focused on hacking, documenting, testing, and sharing Moodle experience.
  • Moodle User Group Meeting – a venue to share knowledge and encourage networking amongst faculty, instructional technologists, and developers.
  • Moodle Development Workshop – an introduction to Moodle development practices and tools, including code standards and version control.
  • Git Workshop – basic and advanced Git usage, with a particular eye toward how it it relates to CLAMP and Moodle development.
  • Ruby Workshop – an introduction to the Ruby language and ecosystem as a platform for both web and system utility development.

CLAMP members are encouraged to participate in the Moodle community at large. CLAMP has provided funding for select members to attend and present at MoodleMoot events and is interested in opportunities to sponsor participation in Moodle related events.

Participating Institutions

Augustana College
Bard College @ Simons Rock
Beloit College
Brandeis University
Bucknell University
Butler University
Carleton College
Centre College

Colgate University
Connecticut College
Dickinson College
Earlham College
Gettysburg College
Hampshire College
Haverford College
Kalamazoo College
Kenyon College

Lafayette College
Lake Forest College
Lewis & Clark College
Macalester College
Mid-Michigan Community College
Mount Holyoke College
Occidental College
Reed College

Smith College
Swarthmore College
Trinity University
Union College
Vassar College
Wheaton College

Participation & Funding

 How CLAMP is structured and how member schools can participate and contribute.

Learn more

Get Involved

CME, Slack, and Twitter, oh my! Join the conversation with other CLAMP members.

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Join CLAMP

 Register online and contribute annual dues to become a CLAMP member school.

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CLAMP History

The development of CLAMP was originally funded by a grant from NITLE’s Instructional Innovation Fund. The goals of the grant were as follows:

  • Define a process by which Liberal Arts colleges can identify and prioritize bugs and desired functionality in each version of Moodle as it is released and adapted by the individual schools.
  • Support a Hack-Doc Fest during which institutions will work on bugs and functionality identified above.
  • Train programmers at the various schools in the required process of preparing bug fixes and modules for release through Moodle.org.
  • Create a funding and support mechanism for sustaining this collaboration.
  • Explore methodologies for handling those Moodle issues deemed, through the initial prioritization process, to be beyond the abilities of a Hack-Doc Fest.
  • Present findings regarding software development, training, and shared documentation at both an instructional technology focused conference and a library focused conference.

To ensure the sustainability of this project past the grant, we organized ourselves into a steering committee for CLAMP.

Steering Committee

CLAMP is governed by a steering committee consisting of elected participants from seven member schools. Each school serves a three year term with a staggered rotation for new schools serving each year.

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