Tag: filescan

CLAMP Chat: Three Useful Add-ons

CLAMP’s fourth CLAMP Chat will take place on Friday, February 19, from 2:00-3:00 PM Eastern Time. Andrew Ruether of Swarthmore College will discuss three add-ons in use on Swarthmore’s Moodle site:

  1. Accessibility Filescan Block: displays information on the accessibility levels of PDF files within each course. We use this to make professors aware of the accessibility of their course files and to aid document remediation efforts.
  2. Turnitin Integration: plagiarism detection, grading interface, and student peer feedback system. Turnitin is best known for plagiarism checking, but the Moodle integration also includes a full-featured grading interface and robust method of assigning papers to students for peer review.
  3. Student name pronunciation: our method of having students record the pronunciation of their name in their Moodle profile. Although commercial products exist for students to record the pronunciation of their names, we’ve developed a system for doing this within Moodle that is free, easy, and lets us export the audio files for use in other systems.

The chat will take place over Zoom. Please register for the chat using this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIqdO-trDkvH9c6aNRooPMipDsxdc1gzFDX.

Hack/Doc at Swarthmore: Day 3

People sitting around tables
Hack/Docers hard at work in the CLAMP Executive Lounge. Photo credit: Charles Fulton

The last day of Hack/Doc, as usual, was a bit shorter due to attendee travel plans. We wrapped up around lunchtime after some discussions about Moodle 3.8 and accessibility.

Forum grading accessibility

We logged a third and final issue with the new forum grading tool and accessibility: MDL-67663. Again, some of these issues are specific to the tool, which some are broader problems with Moodle itself. We’ll continue to monitor the situation. A major related issue is MDL-64494, where Moodle core is tracking project-wide color contrast issues.

Filescan block

We discussed the future of Swarthmore’s “filescan block“, which evaluates the accessibility of PDFs uploaded to Moodle. Several schools, including Hampshire and Lafayette, have been using the block on their Moodle instances. CLAMP is going to organize a workshop this winter for interested schools to come together to develop a roadmap and implement changes, which an eye toward publishing the plugin on the Moodle plugins repository and incorporating it into the Liberal Arts Edition.

Roster

We have released a new version of the Roster report; you may now configure which fields are displayed for each student, including custom profile fields. This release is available on the Moodle plugins repository and will be incorporated into the next release of the LAE.

And that’s a wrap for this winter’s Hack/Doc at Swarthmore College. Warm thanks to Andrew Reuther and Swarthmore for their outstanding hospitality this week. If your institution is interested in hosting a future CLAMP event, please consider filling out our host interest form.

Hack/Doc Fest Winter 2020 at Swarthmore College: Event page | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3