Category: Events

Hack/Doc at Carleton: Day 2

Beaver swimming in a river
On closer examination, this is a beaver

Following dinner Tuesday night several attendees strolled along the river and were excited to view and photograph a water creature, which they confidently (and baselessly) identified as an otter. Wednesday morning, a frank discussion with the locals and presentation of the photographs led to the more accurate if less interesting identification of a beaver.

Compared to Tuesday, Hack/Doc was more scheduled, with the three Moodle Showcase presentations over the lunch hour and a tour of the new science building on Carleton’s College (which had various fauna and flora, but no otters, false or otherwise).

Moodle Showcase

As part of this year’s Hack/Doc Fest, we incorporated the Moodle Showcase: three Zoom webinars covering different aspects of Moodle. All three are available on the CLAMP YouTube channel:

Using CodeCheck to Help Learn Programming (David Musicant, Carleton College)

Theming and Filters in Moodle 4.0 (Michael Spall, Idaho State University)

Taming the Gradebook (Carly Born, Carleton College)

Moodle 4.0 LAE release

CLAMP tested a beta of Moodle 4.0.1 with the various Liberal Arts Editions fixes merged in and confirmed that everything worked as expected. We did find one pre-existing bug in Anonymous Forums: the non-anonymous poster is shown in the course logs, which is restricted to teachers and administrators. CLAMP will address this in the next stable release. Please see the CLAMP code release archive for this and other code releases.

General Moodle 4.0 notes

The new home of course import, backup, and restore.

While playing around with Moodle 4.0 we noticed a few assorted issues/changes that didn’t justify a full section:

  • When editing is on for a course and you go into the gradebook, editing is STILL on!
  • Course import, backup, and restore are now grouped together under More > Course reuse in the top-level navigation.
  • The activity completion sidebar is only available in the Boost theme (not in Classic or LearnR).

Summer 2022 Hack/Doc Fest: Event page | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3


Hack/Doc at Carleton: Day 1

A harbinger of things to come

On their first morning in Northfield, Minnesota, the out-of-town attendees passed an uncomfortable silence. Each was separately aware of a singular phenomenon that had resisted all explanations. Finally, having traveled from the Fairfield Inn to Carleton’s campus, someone had the courage to ask if the others, too, smelled french toast with maple syrup.

Thus began CLAMP’s first in-person Hack/Doc Fest since Winter 2020 at Swarthmore College. The mundane explanation of this sensory experience was the presence within the town of a Malt-o-Meal factory. It is apparently quite normal for Northfield’s air to reflect whatever’s being made that day, though chocolate is more common than french toast. An extreme, if benign, example of a small town taking on the characteristics of the local employer.

Pronouns

Cereal questions resolved, CLAMP spent much of the first day at Hack/Doc tackling the display of pronouns in Moodle (see the Summer 2021 write-up for discussion of pronouns in Moodle 3.11). First, CLAMP submitted fixes for the Moodle 3.11 and Moodle 4.0 versions of the Attendance module so that pronouns would display correctly. This was an issue discussed on the CME and first reported to the maintainers by CLAMP members. Second, CLAMP tested viewing a student’s pronouns in the Participants list and discovered that this worked for teachers but not students and that giving students the necessary capability could inadvertently expose restricted user profile fields. CLAMP reported this to the Moodle tracker (MDL-75086).

Timed assignments

A new feature in Moodle 4.0 is timed assignments. This feature is still somewhat experimental and must be enabled first. Once enabled, you may choose to give an assignment a time limit. A student is prompted to begin the assignment, at which point a visible timer starts running. The time may be measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, or even weeks, and the clock continues running if the student navigates away. If the remaining time until the due date is less than the maximum time permitted, then the shorter time is used.

In the course of testing, CLAMP uncovered an interesting and important bug (MDL-75087). If the assignment takes file submissions, a student may click on “Add submission” directly from the dashboard and bypass the timer. The next time they visit the assignment the timer will start running, but for short-timed assignments, this is a significant flaw.

We also encountered a somewhat confusing situation: if a cut-off date exists and a student tries to submit when time has expired, they receive a “no permission” error message. It’s possible to see this in untimed assignments as well, so it’s not new, but the message could be improved. We didn’t get a chance to follow up on this issue.

Question bank improvements

Moodle 4.0 made several changes to the question bank. The question bank list view now exposes the following fields: Status, Version, Comments, Facility Index, Discriminatory Efficacy, Usage. Most of this information already exited but it’s easier to access. You may customize these columns and their sort order in the Site Administration.

Questions may now be versioned. You can’t set up A/B questions but you can choose which version the quiz uses. If you change the version mid-stream the change does not affect existing attempts unless you regrade. This versioning means that you also have access to question history.

LearnR theme

We took a look at the LearnR theme, which is the Moodle 4.0 replacement for Fordson, which a number of CLAMP schools use. LearnR is a Boost derivative with a number of features:

  • Allows the admin to set “unneeded blocks,” these will not be available in the Add a Block menu when this theme is active.
  • You can create custom “buttons” on the dashboard that link to your specified location
  • Marketing tiles could be used for links to other campus resources, allows for pictures.
  • Alert messages can be posted to Dashboard, along with general welcome information.
  • Can put activity navigation (prev & next) in several locations (upper right, footer, etc)
  • Can customize the course display on Dashboard, choosing from a variety of tile and horizontal layouts

We did find and report one bug: text for Authenticated User appears even when not authenticated: https://github.com/dbnschools/moodle-theme_learnr/issues/11.


Summer 2022 Hack/Doc Fest: Event page | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3


New Moodle LAE Releases for May 2022

There are three new Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition releases. There are no new LAE features; these are maintenance releases only. You can download the updates from the CLAMP code release archive.

The next stable releases are scheduled for mid-July. Moodle HQ has released Moodle 4.0; CLAMP evaluated the development version of 4.0 at the Winter 2022 Hack/Doc Fest. Please see CLAMP’s report for further details. CLAMP is preparing a beta release of the LAE distribution of Moodle 4.0 and will evaluate it at the forthcoming Hack/Doc Fest at Carleton College.

 

Registration open for Summer 2022 Hack/Doc Fest

Registration is now open for the Summer 2022 Hack/Doc Fest, which will be held at Carleton College from June 28 through June 30, 2022. CLAMP’s Hack/Doc Fests are twice-yearly unconference-style events dedicated to improving the Moodle experience for liberal arts colleges. This is CLAMP’s first in-person event since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The lodging deadline is May 6, 2022.

CLAMP is still accepting proposals for the Moodle Showcase, an online event accompanying the Hack/Doc Fest. Please review the Call for Proposals and consider submitting.

Summer 2022 Hack/Doc Call for Proposals and Save the Date

The Summer 2022 Moodle Hack/Doc Fest will take place during the last week of June 2022. This will be a hybrid event with two major components:

  • An online Moodle Showcase consisting of 20-minute sprint sessions for faculty and others to showcase creative and innovative ways to use Moodle.
  • A traditional in-person hackathon hosted at Carleton College. This is CLAMP’s first in-person event since the Winter 2020 Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Swarthmore College.

The Call for Proposals for the Moodle Showcase is now open. Please consider sharing your knowledge and discoveries during our sprint sessions (20 minutes). Please see the call for proposals (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-EBGHuenxf72QT6TdngjQyhBIRjVMwv9pOu0jpWhbbM/edit?usp=sharing) for a full description of the event and submission link. The CfP will remain open through May 15.

The hackathon at Carleton will take place from Tuesday, June 28 through Thursday, June 30. Registration will open once we’ve finalized a few details.