Author: Ken Newquist

Project Suggestions for Moodle Hack/Doc Fest: Summer 2012

Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Kalamazoo College is a month away and 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.

We expect to work on the following:

  • Evaluation and testing of Moodle 2.3
  • Bug fixes and feature enhancements for inclusion in Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition 2.3
  • LAE Grader for Moodle 2.3

Call for Presentations at Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2012

A staple of recent Moodle Hack/Doc Fests have been informal, 30-minute long presentations given by attendees. At the Summer 2012 event at Hack/Doc we’re going to make these a bit more formal by giving them a sit time — during lunch on each day of Hack/Doc — and streaming the presentations to the folks attending virtually.

The schedule for presentations is:

  • 12:00-12:30 p.m., Tuesday, 6/12
  • 12:30-1:00 p.m., Tuesday, 6/12
  • 12:00-12:30 p.m., Wednesday, 6/13
  • 12:30-1:00 p.m., Wednesday, 6/13
  • 12:00-12:30 p.m., Thursday, 6/14
  • 12:30-1:00 p.m., Thursday, 6/14

In the past we’ve had presentations on Carleton College’s Language Lesson module, Reed College’s eReserves system, Luther College’s Google integration, and Eckard College’s IPAL web-based clickers. We’ll kick off this summer’s presentations on Tuesday with an update on Moodle 2.3.

If you’re interested in presenting at Hack/Doc Fest, please add a comment to this post.

Moodle 1.9.16+LAE v1.6.1 Alpha 1 Released

We’ve recently discovered and issue involving TinyMCE and Firefox 11 that causes the TinyMCE to stop working when you have more than one text field on a page. This problem appears in a number of places, including assignment view. The work around is to use a different web browser. The fix is to install an updated version of TinyMCE in Moodle. This 1.9.16+LAE v1.6.1 Alpha 1 release does this, baking in LAE_19_TinyMCE35b2 into the LAE v1.6 release.

This code has been tested, but be aware it is alpha code and should be thoroughly tested before being deployed on your own systems.

Day 3 at Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2012

Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2012 concluded at Tulane on Friday, January 14. The event culminated with the release of Moodle 1.9.16+LAE1.6 Beta 1, which is a maintenance and security release that folds in fixes from Moodle 1.9.16. We also finalized plans for Moodle 2.2+LAE2.0 Beta 1, our first formal Moodle 2 release.

New releases

We are releasing betas for two new Liberal Arts Editions at the end of Hack/Doc: a maintenance release for Moodle 1.9 and our inaugural edition for Moodle 2.2.

  • Moodle 1.9.16+LAE1.6
  • Moodle 2.2+LAE2.0
    • Anonymous Forums: Allows for anonymous posting to Moodle forums.
    • Filtered Course List Block: Lets administrators to display a block with courses based on a particular search string (e.g. the current term)
    • Simple File Upload Course Import Fix: The 1.9 LAE had a streamlined upload interface called “Simple File Upload”; this created a new file upload type in the database. Moodle 2 doesn’t recognize this custom file type, which causes course restores to fail when upgrading or restoring a course. This fix changes Simple File Upload content into regular Moodle 2.x files.
    • Quickmail: The LSU implementation of the popular Quickmail block, which allows faculty to easily email students in their classes from Moodle.
    • File Interface Exit Warning: In our testing we found that Moodle’s file upload interface can be confusing — it requires users to upload files, then click a save button, but the interface itself makes it look as though the file has already been saved. This tweak displays a warning message if the user tries to surf away from the file interface without saving.
    • Moodle 2.2+LAEv2.0 Beta 1 will be released on Wednesday, January 18, 2011

Moodle 2.2 Status Report

  • The Moodle 2.0 status report was reviewed, and all outstanding blockers have been evaluated. We plan on releasing a Moodle 2.2 status report — which will include a review of popular Moodle 2 modules — in February 2012.

Presentations

  • Kaltura by Deb Sarlin, Bucknell University
    • Deb gave an overview of Kaltura, a streaming media solution that integrates with Moodle.
    • She should an example of how video can be recorded and added to an assignment in Moodle.
    • We discussed the new version of the plugin for Moodle 2.2.
  • eReserves by Daniel Landau, Reed College
    • Daniel presented on his home-grown eReserves system for Reed College, which was programmed in Ruby-on-Rails.