Category: Events

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.

Winter 2022 Hack/Doc

CLAMP held the Winter 2022 Hack/Doc Fest online on its gather.town platform from Tuesday, January 11, through Thursday, January 13. CLAMP evaluated the present state of Moodle 4.0, which has not been released yet but has come along considerably since the November 2021 CLAMP Chat.

Overall, the attendees were pleased with the direction of Moodle 4.0. While we call out various areas of improvement below, no one encountered anything that they would consider a deal-breaker. That said, given that Moodle 4.0 is not released yet, we all expressed varying degrees of doubt that we would upgrade to Moodle 4.0 before the Fall 2022 term.

Moodle 4.0

New features

These are various new features we observed while testing 4.0; some are discussed in greater detail below:

  • Turn Editing On is now a slider in the Boost theme (and is fast)
  • Preferred language is now available under the profile drop-down (and is all selectable within the drop-down)
  • The Drawer feature (pops out from right) is available from the Dashboard as well as at the course level.
  • Content change notifications
  • Expanding and collapsing all topics blocks within a course is a nice touch.
  • Course index drawer allows for easy moving of content from one part of the course to another with less area to scroll. Unfortunately, there is no way to collapse or expand all the topic block sections in this area.
  • The Announcements forum and regular forums allow you to set a display period for a new post.
  • Boost theme does not have the previous/next links for the preceding and following activities/resources. One has to use the drawer course index to navigate through the activities/resources in that particular section.

Visual overhaul

The overall presentation of Moodle is much cleaner than in 3.11 and earlier versions. On the course page, there are two “drawers”, on the left and right, both of which may be collapsed or expanded. The left contains an outline list of all topics and resources in the course, with quick access to each. The right contains any blocks that you have added.

The center pane, as before, contains all the course content. Tabbed secondary navigation at the top links to the course itself, settings, participants,  the grade book, reports, and then “More” containing everything else. It does not appear to be possible, as of writing, to directly modify these navigational elements.

CLAMP will continue to update https://well.clamp-it.org/moodle4x with the latest revisions until Moodle HQ releases Moodle 4.0.

Gradebook Changes

  • Grades now condenses all the previous option tabs into a single drop-down menu that divides the selections into View, Setup, and More.
  • Gradebook setup – Add grade item and Add category buttons are now at the top of the page
  • Grader Report adds a gear icon to each student’s input for each grade item allowing the instructor to add an override, exempt, provide feedback, etc.

Activity Changes

  • Once an Assignment is created and saved, there are now tabs to allow access to the Settings, Overrides, Advanced grading, and More (everything else)
  • The instructor has an “Add submission” button in Assignment which adds a submission on behalf of the instructor? And then adds a “Remove submission” button to remove it. This is weird.
  • Forums also have similar options to access Settings, Advanced grading, Subscriptions, Reports, and More
  • The Quiz navigation is in the side drawer; there’s a floating timer when taking the quiz; the Question Bank Page has drop down allowing access to: Questions, Categories, Import, and Export.

Support email

The support email is now a required setting and will be exposed to users (MDL-72894). This is the email used for various account state notifications. It will now be available in a support “popover” that replaces the standard footer. If your site has an unauthenticated view of the front page, it will be exposed there as well:

CLAMP audited the existing usage of the support email to see if it could be safely set to the email address for the institutional help desk. We felt that the existing uses were too varied and proposed creating a new setting for a dedicated email address used in the support popover and nowhere else: MDL-73567.

New login notifications

Moodle now sends notifications when you sign in from a new location. The default text includes a call to action to change your password, which external authentication systems (LDAP, CAS) don’t necessarily support:

This is defined in a language string. If your authentication plugin defines changepasswordurl it will provide that if the plugin allows changing your password, otherwise it’ll point at the user profile. CLAMP has raised an issue with core to make the logic better for schools that use external authentication (MDL-73558).

Collapsing topics

Now topics can be collapsed or expanded at once using the “Collapse all” or “Expand all” link near the top of the page. By default, all topics are expanded on the initial visit, and the Moodle will remember the collapsed state when you return.

Edit mode

For courses using the Boost theme, there’s an “edit mode” slider that triggers a quick page reload. This replaces the traditional “turn editing on” button.

Drag-and-drop images

File drag-and-drop has been refactored a little to accommodate the new resource picker:

  • The image/file does not necessarily need to be dropped above the “add an activity or resource.” It can be dropped below and still appear as expected.
  • A message appears when hovering over “add an activity or resource” to confirm where to drop it (‘add file(s) here”) but you can still drop the image above or below “add an activity or resource.”

Dashboard quirks

The Dashboard now displays “Recently accessed courses” by default; starred courses and Course Overview can be added. Our traditional idea of the dashboard is now located in My Courses. My Courses does not allow for the viewing of the blocks drawer.

New or updated course content

Every activity module or resource now includes the option to trigger a notification to users that the content has changed. This is similar to existing behavior in Canvas. This must be checked each time you want to trigger a notification and is off by default.

New Course administration page

The “Course administration” appellation is now used as a catch-all for five related pages: Import, Backup, Restore, Copy course, and Reset. By default you land on the Import page, with a drop-down at the top-left providing navigation to the other pages. We thought this was a little confusing, and so have others within the Moodle ecosystem. There is a tracker item containing a discussion about a better name, such as “Import and restore”: MDL-73452.

Course Index Drawer Toggle Functionality

When clicking the name of a topic title in the Course Index Drawer, one is taken to that particular topic title. However, the state of the toggle is also changed. The Moodle management team at Lafayette College thinks the expected behavior should be for the toggle arrow to be the mechanism by which one could expand or collapse the topic in the Index Drawer. Clicking the topic title in the Index Drawer should not change the state of the toggle, and only take one to the anchored link of the topic. We reported this one to HQ as well: MDL-73556.

Course Index Drawer Lacking Course Home Link

The Course Index Drawer could benefit the user experience by providing a link to the course home or course title (effectively taking the user to the very top of the page). This would mimic behavior seen in the Boost course navigation down the left-hand side in Moodle 3.11. (MDL-73505)

Site administrators can submit assignments

We found a bug while testing the timeline block and confirmed it in the assignment module:

  • Teachers cannot submit assignments (expected)
  • Site administrators cannot submit assignments (expected)
  • Site administrators who are enrolled in a course can submit assignments (unexpected)

This last appears to be a change from Moodle 3.11. It manifests in at least two places:

  • The user sees the “Add submission” button on the assignment page
  • The timeline block lists the assignment for the user, and shows overdue notifications