There are four new Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition releases. There are no new LAE features; these are maintenance releases only. You can download the updates from the CLAMP code release archive. The new releases are for versions 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4.
The next stable releases are scheduled for mid-October. Moodle 4.4 has been released; CLAMP evaluated it at the Summer 2024 Hack/Doc Fest at Bryn Mawr College.
Moodle doesn’t officially support a pronoun field. There’s a long-standing tracker item about this, to which various CLAMP schools have contributed over the years. Moodle HQ’s current plan is a custom profile field that ships with Moodle by default. This would be coupled with an even older request to allow custom profile fields to be shown anywhere in the “Edit profile” interface, instead of being grouped at the bottom.
That would be a welcome set of improvements and it’s a useful reminder that ever since the custom user identity change in Moodle 3.11 (which CLAMP also included in its subsequent Moodle 3.10 releases), it’s been possible to use a custom user profile to store a user’s pronouns and display them to teachers and students.
Custom user profile fields managed in Site administration > Users > Accounts > User profile fields. There are two important constraints: we’re going to use this field as a user identity field, so (a) it must be a text field and (b) its length cannot exceed 255 characters. The default size of new text fields is 2048 characters, so you’ll need to change that setting. Another setting to be aware of is “Who is this field visible to?” By default, it’s everyone. If you want students to see each other’s pronouns, leave it as is.
Now that the field exists, navigate to Site administration > Users > Permissions > User policies. You’re looking for the “Show user identity” field, which is a list of check boxes. These fields are exposed in certain places, such as the Participants list on the course field. Check the box next to Pronouns and save.
As a teacher or administrator, you’re able to see the pronoun field in the Participants list in any course. This is governed by the moodle/site:viewuseridentity capability so by default is restricted to teachers and managers. The pronoun field will also be displayed in the “User details” pane of a user’s profile, and this is visible to students if they’re enrolled in the same course.
As a student, you’re not able to see the pronoun field in the Participants list, but you can see it on an individual user profile, assuming you didn’t restrict its visibility. A student who clicks through the Participants list to an individual user profile will see that user’s pronouns, if set.
If you’re using the Roster report contrib plugin (included in the Liberal Arts Edition by default), you can configure it to display pronouns. Navigate to Site administration > Plugins > Report > Roster, and add your custom profile field to the list of “Profile fields to display”. Custom profile fields take the convention profile_field_{shortname}. The roster report will now display pronouns along with other fields.
If you have pronouns defined in an external system and need to upload them to Moodle, you can do that as you would with any other custom profile field. Create a CSV containing the proper information. At minimum, this should include a username column for identifying each user. Custom profile fields may be specified using the format profile_field_pronouns (for example). Navigate to Site administration > Users > Upload users. Upload the file. You will have an opportunity to review before it executes. When updating existing users, set “Upload type” to “Update existing users only”. You should set “Existing user details” to “Override with file”.
Moodle’s web services support custom user profile fields. The core_user_get_users_by_field function will include an array of customfields, including the pronoun field. In the same fashion, core_user_update_users accepts a customfields argument.
Moodle authentication plugins support mapping custom fields. This behavior is automatic and requires no additional work to implement. These can be updated when a user first logs in, and optionally every time they authenticate. This is useful if you have an external authentication system such as CAS, Shibboleth, or LDAP, and the pronoun field is released by that system. Navigate to Site administration > Plugins > Authentication, find your authentication plugin, then scroll down to the Data mapping section. Configure as needed and save.
As you can see, it’s possible support pronouns in Moodle without a core implementation and without doing custom development. The piece that’s still missing is pronouns getting integrated more tightly into different parts of the interface, but at least it’s possible to load pronouns into Moodle and display them to teachers and students.
CLAMP has prepared its first Moodle 4.4 release. This contains updates to all the contributed modules to ensure compatibility with Moodle 4.4. You can download the release from the CLAMP code release archive.
We expect the next stable releases from core in mid-August. CLAMP evaluated Moodle 4.4 at June’s Summer 2024 Hack/Doc Fest at Bryn Mawr College; please read the recap for details.
CLAMP held its Summer 2024 Hack/Doc Fest at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The primary focus of the event was evaluating Moodle 4.4. We’re happy to report that we encountered no major issues and no blockers to upgrading to Moodle 4.4 over the summer. Please read on below for for details of the various issues we discussed.
We tracked the improvement in activity cards and icons from Moodle 4.2 to Moodle 4.3 at the Connecticut College Hack/Doc Fest last January and we’re pleased to report that Moodle has made additional improvements. Whitespace is tighter and the icons themselves are smaller and more distinctive.
Moodle HQ has confirmed that Moodle 4.5 will be the last version of Moodle to include the Atto text editor. Support for TinyMCE has improved significantly over the last few releases. The Moodle plugins repository has over a dozen plugins available for TinyMCE now, and we didn’t encounter any problems working with it at Bryn Mawr.
We took another look at the free version of the Brickfield accessibility tool that is included with Moodle. The paid version offers feature parity with Anthology Ally. The free version scans the HTML of the course page. For experienced users, it can usefully call out issues such as outdated HTML tags (for example, <i> instead of <em>), missing alternative text, or missing descriptive link text. If you don’t know what you’re doing with accessibility, it can be overwhelming. For instance, Swarthmore tested in a continually-imported/exported course and found around 1,800 “errors,” which were mostly <i> or <b> or where that is the required notation for that discipline but it returned it as an error.
Swarthmore’s internally-developed accessibility filescan tool is now available on the Moodle plugins repository. This new version no longer requires a standalone processing server. The plugin scans PDFs in a course checking for language, text as text (as opposed to images of text), title, and tags. Used by itself, the Accessibility Filescan gives a snapshot of the PDF documents in your Moodle course and where you stand in terms of their accessibility to anyone who prefers to co-read, read with their ears, navigate without a mouse, etc. Used in tandem with Brickfield, it could provide useful overall knowledge-building when it comes to digital accessibility.
Jen Moore at Swarthmore used NVDA to evaluate the accessibility of grading activities. The testing went well and concerns about emojis turned out to be unfounded. See the following links for videos of the testing:
For reference:
Lafayette is exploring using a Moodle platform to create a centralized repository of course syllabi to assist with course shopping during registration windows. Requirements for this project include that it be searchable, that authentication is required, no restrictions on file types, and that the student information system remain the system of record. Lafayette explored using the database activity to deliver this capability. We created a database activity with fields for course code, name, description, prerequisites, and syllabus document, and then pre-populated all but the latter from our SIS.
We identified the following challenges with using the database activity:
The database activity is pluggable via the datafield type; Lafayette experimented with creating versions of the text and url fields that support “locking” via a separate permission. That approach could also allow creating a “files” field that supports multiple uploads.
As an alternative, Jeff Hopkins at Bryn Mawr demonstrated using Airtable to create a database submission form searchable through Moodle.
We looked at asynchronous backups when Moodle 3.7 was released (Summer 2019 Hack/Doc). We revisited because it’s now the default behavior for new installations in Moodle 4.4. Bucknell University already uses this setting in its production environment. When you launch the backup or restore (after choosing all the relevant settings), the task is handed off to ad-hoc task processing, and you can continue with editing your Moodle course. You are no longer locked out of Moodle until the process finishes, as you were in earlier versions of Moodle.
If you stay on the page, you will see a progress bar as the task is being completed behind the scenes. For the backup process (if you stay on the page), you can download the backup from the results page, and you can also restore it to a new course. If you navigate away from the page (for a backup procedure), you can click on the “Restore” link in the original course to find the backup file that you created. For the “Restore” process, if you stay on the page, you will be taken directly to the restored course. If you navigate away from the page, you can just look for the new course in the list of courses, or you can wait for the confirmation email that you will receive when the task is complete. The confirmation email message will have a direct link to the new course.
One issue Bucknell have discovered is that if there ever is a backlog of tasks to be processed, the backup/restore tasks get hung up as well. In other words, if several of your ad-hoc tasks are taking a long time to process, and if you haven’t increased the number of concurrent tasks that are allowed to run on your Moodle server, it’s possible that the backup/restore process can be delayed until those other processes finish.
There was a general discussion about “best practices” around backup and restore. Schools were surveyed for their policies to course retention, and several examples are given below:
The problem of restoring courses larger than the web server’s upload limit was discussed. Several schools manually transfer the backups to their Moodle server, then use Moodle’s command line tools to restore the backup file.
There is a growing need to help instructors become better acquainted with Moodle Gradebook. A recent CLAC email thread shows this lack of love for Moodle Gradebook is growing among our peer schools. We’ve developed a set of video tutorial scripts for basic Moodle Gradebook functionality. There are nine altogether, ranging from “Assigning Weights to Categories” to “Creating Ungraded Items in the Gradebook.” Each would be no longer than five minutes. See Gradebook Video Tutorial Scripts for all the scripts.
We looked at ways to facilitate alternate grading methods in Moodle such as Specs Grading and Un-grading, etc. We tried to use the Outcomes feature of Moodle to accommodate this need. If it is not feasible, perhaps we can design a better way to make this work.
Outcomes differ from Competencies in that Outcomes can be created by teachers at the course level. You can assign a custom scale to an Outcome and then associate that outcome with any number of assignments. You can then use that scale to assess students for any of the assignments associated with that Outcome. Those Outcomes still show up as grade items in the gradebook, but you cannot weight those outcomes. That’s not going to work out well for Specs Charts. We didn’t get a chance to test whether you can get around that limitation by putting the outcome in a category and then weighting the category.
Swarthmore is encouraging faculty to post .tex files—as opposed to PDFs of .tex files—to Moodle for a most-accessible outcome for students, as they can choose their output preference. In other words, if they download the .tex, they can open it in their preferred .tex reader and then render, or convert, it to whatever output they prefer—PDF, HTML, something else? The challenge is that process for converting a .tex file into an HTML file using PANDOC is fiddly, involving multiple steps on the command line. CLAMP has published documentation for this (Converting LaTeX to HTML using PANDOC) derived from Swarthmore’s testing.
Brickfield supports .tex files, but we did not have access to the paid version in order to test remediation. We did have access to Anthology Ally but it has no options for converting a .tex file. There are no plugins on the Moodle Plugins repository offering LaTeX conversion. SensusAccess can convert a .tex file to an .html file, though the output lacked headings. It might be possible to build a local plugin that wrapped PANDOC and converted .tex files on the Moodle server itself, but there were challenges with that approach. The consensus at Hack/Doc was that working with faculty to remediate their files locally would be more fruitful.
There is a new feature that allows you to customize a welcome email when users are added with self-enrollment or manual enrollment method. The default is that this is on and the welcome message comes from the teacher in the course. This default can be changed in the admin settings so that no message is sent at all.
It’s now possible to configure the default grade export method. This is done in Site administration > Grades > General settings. The default is OpenDocument spreadsheet; other options are Plain text file (CSV), Excel spreadsheet, or XML file. Microsoft schools should probably choose Excel.
This works! You can divide questions between sections and create separate grades for each section. You also can move questions between sections, even after students have started taking the quiz.
There is a new feature in Moodle 4.4 that allows you to set a user tour so that it will always appear. This feature does work as advertised, but we were at a loss to come up with a use case for our institutions.
The browse list of users page was rebuilt as a system report in Moodle 4.4 and bulk actions are now available there, instead of building the filter and then switching to the bulk users actions page in prior versions.
We flagged a pair of navigational issues, one fixed and one not. We’d noted that in Moodle 4.2 using the back button to return from an activity to the main course page you were returned to the top of the course page, even if you’d been in the middle of the page. That issue was fixed in Moodle 4.3. A similar but related issue is that toggling edit mode returns you to the top of the page, instead of scrolling to your original position. Moodle HQ will not fix the issue.
Ellucian is investigating large numbers of student drops not making it to Moodle. Additional concerns were raised about what happens to manually enrolled people who are supposed to be in the course (TAs, Writing Assistants, etc)
Macalester ITS tested this functionality and found that in the default settings of a bulk load, as compared to the live change processing of ILP), drops are not processed. That being said, in the interface there is an option to process drops. Selecting the toggle in the ILP bulk load creation tool for “Process inactive or dropped enrollments” causes ILP to send deletes for users who were at one point registered and no longer are.
Macalester tested this functionality on their test site:
Conclusion: ILP bulk loads with the “Process inactive or dropped enrollments” toggle active will process drops that weren’t processed by the real time messaging of ILP and leave in place manually enrolled TAs, etc. Depending on the scale of the failing drops Macalester may schedule bulk loads for overnight processing to ensure drops are processed correctly in Fall 2024.
There are three new Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition releases. There are no new LAE features; these are maintenance releases only. You can download the updates from the CLAMP code release archive. The new releases are for versions 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3.
The next stable releases are scheduled for mid-August. Moodle 4.4 has been released; CLAMP will evaluate it at the Summer 2024 Hack/Doc Fest at Bryn Mawr College and release an LAE version in early July. CLAMP evaluated Moodle 4.3 at the Winter 2024 Hack/Doc Fest at Connecticut College.
