It’s a cool and crisp morning at the foot of Brandeis University. Photo credit: Charles Fulton
PDF accessibility, the Course Overview block, preferred names, and Moodle 3.6 are among the topics discussed during the sprint (half) day at Brandeis.
The biannual Hack/Doc is being held at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. The event kicked off on Monday, January 7, 2019 with the sprint day, and runs through Thursday, January 10. The following tasks are queued up for Hack/Doc:
Evaluating Moodle 3.6, including changes to the Course Overview block
Improvements to how Moodle handles preferred names
Evaluating Swarthmore’s PDF accessibility tool
Evaluating Brandeis’ Support Staff tool
Exploring NameCoach integration possibilities
Improving the default behavior of course end dates and the number of sections in weekly course formats
Allowing users to view individual files from the folder resource
Packaging and testing the Moodle 3.6 Liberal Arts Edition release
We had a long discussion about the best ways to support preferred names, pronouns, and mononymous students. We’re hoping to develop some guidance and patches over the next few days for the first two issues. Mononymity remains a significant challenge.
Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2019 will be held Tuesday, January 8 through Thursday, January 10, 2019 at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. A pre-Hack/Doc documentation and coding sprint will be held the afternoon of Monday, January 7, 2019.
The lodging and registration deadlines are Friday, December 21, 2018. An additional lodging option is forthcoming.
The CLAMP Steering Committee is proud to announce the 2017-18 winners of the CLAMP Recognition Awards.
Chad Bergeron, Academic Systems Administrator at Brandeis University, is one of those members of the CLAMP community who is consistently willing to help out others. He is a very active participant in the CLAMP Slack workspace and the CLAMP Moodle Exchange forum, where he regularly offers solutions and insights as well as initiating productive discussions with his own requests for assistance.
Kevin Wiliarty, Senior Web Programmer at Hampshire College, has participated in CLAMP since he attended the Furman Hack/Doc in the Winter of 2011. He is a constant source of patient insight on the CLAMP Moodle Exchange and on Slack. He is always willing to share his experience with others and has mentored several developers within CLAMP. When CLAMP has needed help, whether to maintain the Filtered Course List or integrate the Liberal Arts Edition, Kevin has stepped up. CLAMP previously presented this award to Kevin in 2013-2014.
About the Awards
The CLAMP Recognition Awards are awarded annually to one developer (e.g.; hacker) and one instructional technologist (e.g.; doc’er) to acknowledge outstanding achievement as members of the organization. These achievements include work on Moodle development, Moodle documentation, CLAMP organization and/or recruitment to CLAMP.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new law promulgated by the European Union. It will take effect on May 25, 2018. The GDPR governs the storage and use of the personal data of EU citizens, or of anyone’s data by companies and organizations in the EU. It introduces stringent new requirements for the handling of such data, including giving people the right to request the deletion of their data.
Does this law affect my school?
We are not lawyers and this does not constitute legal advice. Based on discussions at the Centre College Hack/Doc and elsewhere, we suspect that the practical effect of the GDPR on our institutions would be limited. If you haven’t already, you should ensure that college counsel is aware of the law.
What is Moodle HQ doing?
Moodle HQ has announced a plan for supporting the GDPR and is publishing a guide for site administrators. Development work is in progress for supporting the GDPR. This includes creating a new Privacy API so that plugin developers may bring their plugins into compliance as well.
What is CLAMP doing?
Members of CLAMP’s Development Committee are following the progress of the discussions within Moodle HQ. At least one CLAMP-maintained plugin, CLAMPMail, stores private data and will be modified for GDPR compliance. When Moodle HQ releases new versions of Moodle which support GDPR compliance, CLAMP will release new versions of the Liberal Arts Edition within one week of that release which incorporate those changes.
CLAMP held its Winter Hack/Doc Fest at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, from January 8-January 11, 2018. This was CLAMP’s first visit to Centre. The event began with a half-day “Sprint Day” on January 8 and concluded on the afternoon of January 11.
Moodle 3.4
The group kicked the tires on the new Moodle 3.4 release and didn’t find any major problems. The most noticeable change is that the “Participants” list and the “Enrolled users” page have been merged. On non-Boost themes such as Clean and More both links still exist, but they now go to the same page. This may require some tweaks to existing documentation but on the whole it worked as expected.
Joe Burgess from Butler University evaluated the new Analytics functionality. Analytics API shows how to use predictive models. Moodle HQ is asking for individual institutions to submit data to allow them to create better models, but will maintain anonymity. To contribute data visit Moodle HQ. Currently they will need to be coded by the individual institutions. Reliability is difficult to assess as the models require time to pass so data can analyzed by the AI.
Charles Fulton (Lafayette College) and Kevin Wiliarty (Hampshire College) finished work on the Moodle 3.4 version of the Liberal Arts Edition and published updates to the Filtered Course List and CLAMPMail blocks.
Discussions and presentations
Lunchtime presentations continue to be big part of Hack/Doc. On Tuesday Jason Simms from Lafayette College reported out on his experiences at the US Moodle Moot, which was held November 6-9, 2017 in Miami, FL. Major highlights:
Moodle’s mission is expanding to: “empowering educators to improve our world”
Focus on introducing new functionality rather than refactoring existing features
Heavily targeting emerging educational, non-profit, and corporate training spaces
A strong emphasis on mobile and offline access to Moodle
Emergence of MoodleNet, with a goal to connect educators and user of Moodle globally
On Wednesday Andrew Reuther from Swarthmore College demonstrated the latest version of his PDF accessibility tool. The plugin runs whenever cron is set to run and evaluates the newest files first. Working on a small amount of files each time, it shows if the PDF is an image or text. It also evaluates scan quality. The database table keeps the content hash of the PDF, whether it was checked, page count, and OCR status. Teachers may add a block to their course to see a summary of their PDFs. Discussion focused on future improvements, including automatic OCR of files.
Wednesday afternoon we took a break from Moodle, as our host Kristi Burch led a tour of a new experimental classroom space at Centre. We explored features available in the room such as multi-point displays and the eBeam smart board, and discussed the uses of smart technologies in the classroom and the pedagogical implications of such tools on student learning.
Finally, on Thursday, the group discussed the forthcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation. This regulation governs the use of personal data for EU citizens, and could potentially affect US colleges with foreign students. The consensus was that evaluating compliance was a matter for college counsel, but that we should be prepared to act. Moodle HQ has announced a plan for supporting the GDPR and is publishing a guide for site administrators.
Bugs and features
No Hack/Doc is complete without bug reports and feature requests. Issues that came up at Centre included the following:
MDL-50763: add official support for a preferred pronoun.
MDL-61174: accepted file types does not update on focus change. Discovered by CLAMP while evaluating Moodle 3.4.
MDL-61161: grace period when displaying “In progress” courses. CLAMP will incorporate this feature into versions 3.3 and 3.4 of the Liberal Arts Edition.
MDL-61175: “Remind me to grade by” date does not roll on course restore with new start date
MDL-61200: Grade export defaults do not always apply as expected.
