Category: Events

Hack/Doc at Hampshire: The Sprint Day

Wildflowers
Wildflowers on the Hampshire College campus. Photo credit: Bonnie Solivan

PDF annotation, instructor download files, accessibility, plugin and mobile app evaluations, H5P, and Moodle 3.3 review are among the topics that CLAMP queued up during the sprint day for Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2017.

The biannual Hack/Doc is being held at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. The event kicked off on Tuesday, June 20, 2017 with the sprint day. The event runs through Friday, June 23, 2017. The following tasks are queued up for Hack/Doc:

  • Improvements to PDF annotation–Google Drive is available as a backend in 3.3
  • New Course Overview block
  • Stealth mode for activities
  • Evaluate Poster plugin
  • Evaluate Lightbox gallery
  • Boost: how are folks using it? What are the gotchas?
  • Instructor download files: can we turn a core hack into a plugin?
  • Where do we stand with group and user overrides in various activities
  • H5P integration
  • Continue to look at accessibility in Moodle: discussion about Swarthmore’s PDF plugin, discussion about documentation
  • Review Moodle 3.3
  • Review Moodle Mobile 3.3
  • Better understand the Automatic Display setting in the URL resource
  • Package and test LAE 3.3.0 release

In addition, we are kicking around a number of group discussions:

  • How to use competencies
  • Are you tasked with preserving courses after the end of a semester?
  • Develop a survey for CLAMP schools (environments, event attendance)
  • Lafayette moving to a modified More theme
  • How do we use tools outside of Moodle?
  • How to handle streaming video in Moodle

Update after Sprint Day Activities

PDF Accessibility Scan

  • Swarthmore has a tool that scans through PDF documents in Moodle and checks them for images that need to be converted to text.
  • It was suggested that it be turned into a local Moodle plugin with a scheduled task to scan files.
  • Will be discussed more on Friday morning during our accessibility discussion with Rob Eveleigh, the Four College Accessibility Coordinator who works with Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Amherst, and Smith Colleges.

Poster Plugin

  • Used it in Clean and Boost
  • UX is not great
  • Block parking

Accessibility discussion scheduled

  • Rob Eveleigh, Four College Accessibility Coordinator working with Smith, Amherst, Mt. Holyoke, and Hampshire will be on campus and facilitating an accessibility discussion with Hack/Doc attendees at 10 a.m. Friday, June 23.

Group and User Overrides

  • Allowable in Assignment, Lesson, and Quiz
  • User overrides trump Group overrides
  • Extensions trumps overrides

Posts from Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2017 at Hampshire College: Homepage | Sprint | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3

New Moodle LAE Releases for 2.7.20, 3.0.10, 3.1.6, 3.2.3

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 their project pages:

The next stable releases on the 3.2 and 3.1 branches are scheduled for mid-July. Moodle HQ has ended support on the 3.0 and 2.7 branches. Moodle HQ released Moodle 3.3 today; CLAMP will evaluate it and prepare a beta at the forthcoming Hack/Doc Fest at Hampshire College.

These releases were developed, packaged, and tested by Joe Bacal (Smith College) and Kevin Wiliarty (Hampshire College).

Deadlines approaching for Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2017

This summer’s Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Hampshire College is coming up fast. The event will be held Wednesday, June 21 through Friday, June 23, 2017 at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. A pre-Hack/Doc documentation and coding sprint will be held Tuesday, June 20, 2017. The registration deadline is Thursday, June 1, 2017.

For this first time, CLAMP is making travel grants available for attendees. CLAMP will reimburse an applicant’s institution for travel costs of up to $500. CLAMP will make three grants available for each Hack/Doc event. Any employee of a liberal arts institution with significant responsibility for supporting or maintaining Moodle is eligible to apply. Preference will be given to first-time participants in a CLAMP Hack/Doc, applicants from schools which have never participated in a Hack/Doc before, and to applicants affiliated with institutional CLAMP members. Please see the CLAMP website for more information. The deadline to apply for a travel grant is May 10, 2017.

CLAMP has arranged lodging at the University Lodge and Holiday Inn Express. The deadline for lodging is Saturday, May 20, 2017.

Please see https://www.clamp-it.org/clamp-events/moodle-hackdoc-fest-summer-2017/ for complete information about the event or register using the online form. If you have questions about the event, please contact Sarah Ryder (sryder@hampshire.edu) or Charles Fulton (fultonc@lafayette.edu).

Hack/Doc at Lafayette: Day 1

The glass-fronted windows of Skillman Library reflect the evening light.
Skillman Library at Lafayette College. Credit: Ken Newquist

At Day 1 of Moodle Hack/Doc Fest we got down to work testing messaging and notification in Moodle 3.2, discussing CLAMP’s future approaches to documentation, reviewing H5P, and learning about changes to the Filtered Course list plugin.

The group began testing messaging and notifications in Moodle 3.2. We determined that the new interface is cleaner than the old one, and the use of a red dot to indicate when there are updates for the user (e.g. notifications, messages) is more obvious in 3.2 than in previous versions of Moodle. We learned that notifications from Moodle activities require cron to be running, and likely running at the recommended once-per-minute rate to be useful.

Several attendees huddled regarding CLAMP’s approach to documentation going forward and sense was that we want to move toward crafting documentation and scripts that could easily be used at CLAMP schools. This information could be written in Markdown and made available in some sort of online repository — e.g. github — but we haven’t determined the specifics yet. CLAMP would still contribute and update documentation on MoodleDocs as appropriate.

The developers got together to discuss the future of CLAMP’s development server, which is currently a physical machine residing at one of the CLAMP institutions. Going forward we are going to look at moving the development instance to a cloud-based hosting solution which would free us from the need to maintain our own hardware.

Attendees at Hack/Doc sit around a U-shaped table while a male presenter talks. A small Yellow Labrador puppy is laying down in the foreground.
Jason Simms (Lafayette College) talks about H5P on Day 1 of Moodle Hack/Doc Fest. Hank, a Seeing Eye dog in training, attended the presentation. Credit: Ken Newquist.

Over lunch Kevin Wiliarty (Hampshire College) did a presentation of Filtered Course List 3.0, which adds a lot of flexibility to the plugin, but adds a steeper learning curve for Moodle admins. After Kevin’s presentation, Jason Simms (Lafayette College) did a high-level rundown of H5P, which is an HTML5-based alternative to Flash that can be used to create rich web content such as videos, images, quizzes, charges, collages, documentation tools, finding the hot spot, guessing answers, etc. With the H5P plugin installed in Moodle, that content can then be embedded in courses. The HP5 website includes tutorials for content creators.

Other work included:

  • Integrating Moodle 3.2 into the Moodle Liberal Arts Edition.
  • Initial testing of the Boost theme in Moodle 3.2.
  • Extending a Moodle-to-Banner grades extract tool.

Posts from Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2017 at Lafayette College: Homepage | Sprint | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3