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.
Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2017 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.
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.
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
The bookshelves in Skillman Library, the location of Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Lafayette College. Credit: Ken Newquist.
HP5, PoodLL, Moodle Messaging and navigation/theme improvements to Moodle 3.2 are among the topics that CLAMP queued up at during the sprint day for Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2017.
The biannual Hack/Doc is being held at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. The event kicked off on Monday, January 9, 2017 with the sprint day. The event runs through Thursday, January 12, 2017. The following tasks are queued up for Hack/Doc:
Review Theme and Navigation Project 3.2 (including the Boost theme)
Review Messaging and Notifications Overhaul
Review Custom Guided Tours / Tutorials with an eye toward using it for a guided tour of the Liberal Arts Edition
Review the current status of the PDF converter and viewer for Moodle assignments.
Work on Smith College’s tool for generating a CSV for exporting grades to Banner
Look at H5P for streaming media within Moodle.
Look at PoodLL for audio/video recording in Moodle.
Revisit Moodle Mobile
In addition, we are kicking around a number of group discussions:
How do you do course creation? (templating, block layout, etc.)
Viability and interest in extending Scheduler to allow for instance-wide scheduling.
Discussion best practices for course templates
How do school’s organize help documentation (include video and screenshots, where is it stored). Consider what role CLAMP should have in terms of documentation, best practices, hardware/software/platform recommendations, etc.
Course design principles, which will include accessibility decisions
How do you present courses from multiple semesters to faculty and students?
How do you convey to faculty (and students) changes to Moodle or simply to showcase key features whether they’re new features (e.g., PoodLL or Turnitin integration) or features one might find helpful to revisit (e.g., glossary)?
Are folks conducting usability testing? If so, what’s your setup and what have you tested? If not, why not?
Posts from Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2017 at Lafayette College: Homepage | Sprint | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3
