“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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Moodle becomes art thanks to the “Word Art” exhibit in Butler University’s Irwin Library. Photo credit: Ken Newquist
During Day 2 of Hack/Doc Fest at Butler the team tackled a review of third-party plugin compatibility with Moodle 3.0 and 3.1, continued our accessibility work by testing new tools and documenting best practices, reacquainted ourselves with the Workshop plugin, and delved deeply into Moodle 3.1’s new Competencies feature.
Plugin Review
We compiled a list of popular 3rd party plugins for Moodle and then determined if they are compatible with 3.0 and 3.1. Of particular note were the following plugins, which list compatibility with 3.0 but not 3.1:
Course Overview
TurnItIn
McGraw HIll
Course Overview was tested under 3.1 and seemed to work just fine. That said, the way it is configured changed in 3.1; it is now difficult to get to all of the settings on one unified page.
Continuing our work from Monday, we created a “scroll of death course” — aka an exceedingly long course — with a variety of accessibility issues. The course was created using the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor, but edited using Atto.
As expected, Atto couldn’t fix much of what had been done incorrectly using TinyMCE, if for no other reason than it didn’t have the same editing options. Many of the problems in the course had to be fixed by going into the source HTML and editing it there.
Once the new course is completed, we’re going to create the following example courses that address the “scroll of death” issue while improving accessibility and usability:
an accessible course using stock Moodle
an accessible course with Collapsed Topics course format
an accessible course with the Grid course format
We also intend to look at an option that allows students to switch switch course formats (e.g. grid to topic) to help with accessibility. This requires the user to set a custom profile field called “accessibility” which — when toggled — lets them switch to a designated “accessible” course format.
Screen Readers
We spent some time experimenting with screen readers on Moodle and other websites. We started with ChromeVox, a plugin for Chrome that allows you to tab through a page and reads the elements to you. The lack of mouse support made it more difficult to use and there isn’t an obvious way to toggle the plugin on and off.
We experimented with TalkBack on Android. It works great, but it radically transforms the way you use your phone and introduces a number of double and triple click command for common tasks. It requires you to re-learn how to how to navigate your phone.
We also researched optical character recognition techniques and found ConvenientOCR is a plugin for JAWS. This plugin lets you mouse or tab over an image and then OCR it. We did not get to try this plugin, but it sounds promising. JAWS itself is an expensive piece of software that only runs on Windows, but there is a free trial version for those who want to check it out.
A number of schools are planning on turning off the PDF annotation component of Moodle until the issues with it are resolved. However, before turning off the feature we wanted to know how many people were using that particular feature at our institutions. We created an ad hoc query that looks for the use the annotation feature in Moodle assignments by identifying occurrences of “comments” and “annotations” in the database.
We fixed two issues with the CLAMP website. We’ve resolved the SSL cert error that occurred when you tried to browse www.clamp-it.org under https. We also fixed a bug that would redirect you to an account sign-up page when accessing http://clamp-it.org.
Printing Quizzes in Moodle
We continued looking at ways to print quizzes and documented a technique involving embedding a quiz within a “book” within Moodle. View the documentation.
Workshop
We revisited Moodle’s Workshop module and found it to be a good peer assessment tool and fairly easy to set up. The tool has different student grading options including
comments, no grades
comments and grades
rubrics (which are different than assignment rubrics)
Competencies
We spent considerable time at Hack/Doc reviewing Competencies and have come to the conclusion that it’s a complicated new system with an inherent workflow that isn’t well documented.
Here’s how the documentation describes Competencies:
“Competencies describe the level of understanding or proficiency of a learner in certain subject-related skills:”
In brainstorming use cases for competencies at our colleges the scenarios that stood out the most were those where some sort of interdisciplinary or cross-institutional outcomes needed to be tracked. For example, a writing program that establishes a set of skills that students should develop during their time at the college. Evidence of acquiring competency in those skills could be provided in a variety of ways:
Evidence submitted by students
Evidence submitted as part of a course activity
Evidence submitted by faculty for students.
Moodle Competencies handle this through three tools:
Competencies: The building blocks of the system, competencies establish a specific goal, and provide a mechanism for giving evidence that the goal has been met.
Competency Frameworks: A collection of competencies.
Learning Plans: A method for pushing out a particular set of competencies (possibly taken from multiple frameworks) to students.
The single biggest challenge with Competencies is that it assumes you have an existing offline workflow and framework and want to implement it in Moodle. If you have those things, we expect that the tool makes a lot more sense. If you don’t, then the published documentation isn’t going to help understand the usefulness of the tool or how to implement it at your college.
In addition, Competencies itself has an implied workflow that isn’t obvious to laypeople. For example, there is a process for students or faculty to request review of competency evidence. The per-student requests for such review appear on the “My Moodle” page, but it’s not clear if there is a place where faculty or learning plan managers could go to see the progress of an entire student cohort (e.g. not just an individual student’s progress toward meeting competency goals, but the entire cohort’s progress).
The development documentation does a much better job of explaining the purpose of Competencies and does a better job of explaining how the various pieces fit together.
