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. These releases come three weeks ahead of schedule and incorporate a security fix from Moodle core. The precise nature of the fix will be disclosed on August 29.
The next stable releases are scheduled for mid-September. CLAMP evaluated Moodle 4.0 at the Winter 2022 Hack/Doc Fest and again at Carleton in June. Please see CLAMP’s reports from Carleton (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3) for additional details.
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-September. CLAMP evaluated Moodle 4.0 at the Winter 2022 Hack/Doc Fest and again at Carleton in June. Please see CLAMP’s reports from Carleton (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3) for additional details.
CLAMP has prepared its first Moodle 4.0 release. This contains updates to all the contributed modules to ensure compatibility with Moodle 4.0. You can download the release from the CLAMP code release archive. This release is something of a beta; we think it’s fine, but we know of at least one minor issue with anonymous forums that we intend to address within the next few weeks.
We expect the next stable releases from core in mid-July. CLAMP evaluated Moodle 4.0 at the Winter 2022 Hack/Doc Fest and again at Carleton last week. Please see CLAMP’s reports from Carleton (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3) for additional details.
Kristi contemplates infinity
Em flexes for the final plunge
Charles plummets for the sidewalk
Late Wednesday afternoon the Hack/Doc attendees were invited to the basement of Weitz to walk the plank. Not off the edge of a pirate ship, but through virtual reality, via a headset and Richie’s Plank Experience. In this experience, a wooden plank is placed on the floor and then mapped to a virtual location. Wearing the VR headset, each person “rides” an elevator to the top of a “building”, and the door opens, revealing the plank, swirling air, and long drop below. The goal is to overcome your sensory input and walk off the edge of the plank to plummet several hundred feet to the ground. The other people in the room see what you’re seeing but don’t get the same immersive experience.
It’s incredibly difficult. Almost everyone successfully “walked the plank” and plummeted in the end, but several needed multiple tries to do it. The objective knowledge that you’re standing in a basement, surrounded by friends and colleagues, is nothing against the sensory input that you’re hundreds of feet up and inches from disaster. The below video shows Kristi Burch during her second (successful) fall:
Grading with letters
A non-functional prototype of how a teacher would define the letter scale.
During Carly Born’s Moodle Showcase presentation on the grade book (see the Day 2 recap), several participants discussed the long-standing desire to grade with letters. Thursday, Hack/Doc attendees discussed what such a module might look like and prototyped the interface. Ideas:
This could probably be delivered with an advanced grading form, similar to rubrics or checklist
Teachers should be able to create direct mappings between letters and grade values
Students should see the letter and not the grade value
CLAMP will schedule a follow-up online event in July or August to determine the next steps.
Anonymous forums
Testing of the LAE 4.0 beta revealed one minor problem with the anonymous forums patch: the Moodle logs, restricted to teachers and administrators, show the actual poster of anonymous forum posts and not the Anonymous User. This is unexpected and probably true in previous versions of Moodle. CLAMP intends to correct this problem in the next stable releases, scheduled for mid-July 2022. Note that even with this patch, a teacher can always look at the course logs and see who was active on the forum at any given time, and the patch does not mask IP addresses.
Wrap-up
And that’s a wrap on the Moodle Hack/Doc Fest for Summer 2022 at Carleton College. A big thank you goes out to our participants, both in-person and online, to those who attended the Moodle Showcase talks, and to Carleton College for being such an excellent host. CLAMP will announce its plans for the Winter 2023 Hack/Doc Fest after the start of term this fall.
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).
