Category: Events

January 10, 2017

Hack/Doc at Lafayette: The Sprint Day

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

October 6, 2016

Moodle Webinar Series Kicks Off October 27, 2016

“Moodle Forums and Groups” will be the first topic of CLAMP’s new Moodle webinar series when it debuts at 11:30 a.m. (EDT), October 27 on Zoom (https://centre.zoom.us/j/271506274). The topic will be presented by Katieann Skogsberg, Associate Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at Centre College.

Future sessions will consist of a faculty member presenting a 20-ish minute session about a particular method or tool they utilize within Moodle for their teaching. Faculty from each of the 30+ CLAMP schools are invited to lead these sessions as we continue with the series.

Each of session will be broadcast live via Zoom for participants at other schools to watch synchronously and hopefully gather faculty for discussion after the presentation. Sessions will also be recorded for those who cannot make the live session, and posted on the CLAMP YouTube channel. Our hope is that members of the CLAMP community are able to schedule a shared viewing of these presentations, whether live or recorded, with members of their own faculty to use as a springboard for discussion of how the presented material could be used at each of your respective institutions.

August 18, 2016

Announcing Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2017

Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2017 will be held Tuesday, January 10 through Thursday, January 12, 2017 at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. A pre-Hack/Doc documentation and coding sprint will be held Monday, January 9, 2017. Lafayette also hosted Hack/doc in Winter 2007 and Winter 2010.

The lodging deadline is Thursday, December 1, 2016. The registration deadline is Friday, Dec 16, 2016.

July 25, 2016

Moodle & Accessibility Brown Bag on July 26, 2016

Join us for a Moodle and Accessibility Brown Bag on July 26 from 12 p.m.-1 p.m. EDT. The event is free and available online using the Zoom video conferencing software.

During the brown bag Ken Newquist (Lafayette College) and Jedidiah Rex (Beloit College) be discussing best practices for designing usable, accessible courses in Moodle. They will be showcasing a badly-designed, inaccessible, scroll-of-death style course that was created at Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Butler University in June 2016. They’ll then walk through several improved versions of that course.

They will have a brief Q&A between each course so participants can discuss their own problematic courses, best practices, and brainstorm other solutions to the usability and accessibility issues in the example course.

The brown bag will conclude with a discussion of possible next steps regarding Moodle usability and accessibility within the CLAMP community.

The presentation will be given using Zoom. Register for the brown bag using this link:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/c791fbc3efdfcef9d746f627e8486654

Note that Zoom does require you to download software to your computer; if you haven’t used Zoom you may want to allocate time to download the software prior to the meeting.

June 23, 2016

Hack/Doc Fest at Butler: Day 3

Moodle Hack/Dock Fest at Butler University attendees. (back row, left to right) Ken Newquist, Charles Fulton, Jason Alley, Deryl Botta, Ruth Schwer, Matt Wright (front row, left to right) Kristi Burch, Adam Dinnes, Joe Bacal, Jedidiah Rex

As the final day of Hack/Doc Fest at Butler wrapped up the team continued its accessibility work, reviewed the course overview plugin, and discussed our upcoming Moodle 3.1 recommendation.

Accessibility

On Day 2 we created a long “scroll of death” course with numerous accessibility issues baked in. On Day 3 we began building out the improved versions of this course using stock Moodle, the grid course format, and the collapsed topics course format.

Work on the courses will continue beyond Hack/Doc. Next steps include:

Evaluating the updated courses with various accessibility tools to verify that we truly fixed all the problems.
Writing a blog post describing the various issues with the badly-designed version and how they were addressed in the fixed ones.
Publishing the courses to a “Moodle Museum” category in the CLAMP Moodle Exchange.

In addition we discussed having a having a “Moodle Accessibility” online hangout in July and contributing the example courses to Moodle core for use in their demo site.

Related to these efforts we looked at how to create an “accessibility” toggle for the Grid Course Format that lets users switch between the grid-style course and the default topics course. Issue #23 in the Grid format project discussed ways of doing this but it took some experimentation to make it a reality.

Our “Providing an accessible option to Grid Course Format” documentation explains how to do this.

Course Overview on Campus

Matt Wright from Butler University demonstrated their use of the Course Overview on Campus plugin. The plugin replaces the default “my courses” page with a dropdown that lets the user browse through all the course categories on the system. How the courses are listed (e.g. title, short code, teacher) is configurable. The list still includes course-specific action items (e.g. a course assignment needs review) but it is concealed in a collapsed content area by default.

The category selected is preserved between sessions, so if user choses the “Fall 2016” category it will be there waiting for them the next time they log in.

Working on a Moodle 3.1 Recommendation

We will be working on our recommendation for Moodle 3.1 over the next week and hope to have it published on June 29. At this point we don’t see any major blockers, but there are a few things (like annotation in the assignment submission view, whether to turn on the Competencies feature, and improvements to cron) that colleges should consider before upgrading.

Posts from Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Butler University: Homepage | Sprint | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3