Tag: moodle 3.1

July 1, 2016

CLAMP’s Moodle 3.0 and Moodle 3.1 recommendations

The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP) recommends the use of Moodle 3.0.x and Moodle 3.1.x for use during the 2016-17 academic year. Our recommendation regarding 3.1 includes a caveat to wait for the Moodle 3.1.1 release.

While we have been keeping an eye on Moodle 3.0.x since its release, most of our testing time at Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2016 at Butler University was focused on Moodle 3.1. The newest version of Moodle introduces a number of enhancements including a greatly improved metacourse creation interface, a recycling bin plugin, an overhaul of the submission viewer for assignments, and a new “Competencies” plugin.

While we ran into no major issues during our testing of Moodle 3.1, there were two notable display issues that were scheduled to be resolved in Moodle 3.1.1:

Informal polling at Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2016 and the CLAMP Moodle Exchange indicates that a majority of schools plan to go with the 3.0.x release because it has been out longer and had more bug fix releases. This follows the typical pattern with new Moodle version adoption within CLAMP schools.

This document is not meant to be a comprehensive review of all of the changes in Moodle 3.0 and 3.1; the full list of updates can be found in the release notes for Moodle 3.0 and Moodle 3.1.

CLAMP has already released Liberal Arts Editions (LAE) of Moodle 3.0.4 and Moodle 3.1.0. The Liberal Arts Edition version of 3.1.1 will be released approximately a week after Moodle HQ releases its version of 3.1.1.

Update 7/28/2016: MDL-54165’s resolution still has user experience issues. Read the update in the “Assignment grading interface and document annotation” section of this report for details and an updated version of the ad hoc query for identifying courses that use the annotations feature.

Moodle 3.1 Improvements

Meta Course Link Improvements

Moodle HQ has major significant improvements to the Course Meta Link enrollment interface (see MDL-27628). As a result, CLAMP has removed its own version from the Moodle Liberal Arts Edition for Moodle 3.1 and is pleased to recommend the core solution.

Download selected assign submissions as a zip file

Moodle now allows users to select which assignment submissions they want to download, rather than having to download them all at once (see MDL-52490). This is a step forward in functionality but Moodle 3.1 also changes how the zip file itself is generated thanks to the implementation of MDL-52489 (“Download all submissions as a zip” should maintain the folder structure in students submissions”)

The new-style assignments zip file nests the assignment files in folders for each student, rather than using a single folder and prefixing each file with the student’s username and assignment info. This makes the assignment folder less browsable, and will cause teachers to drill down an extra level to view each students’ work. The plus side is that the files themselves are no longer renamed, but this may be offset by the need to browse an additional layer of folders.

Topic Blocks

Topic blocks can now be deleted, which sends their attached resources (but not the topic block itself) to the recycling bin. Topic blocks also can be renamed more quickly, just like activities and resources.

Pinned discussion topics

The ability to “pin” a discussion topic to the top of a forum was added in Moodle 3.1 and works as expected. By default, the teacher role and higher can pin topics, but that capability can be assigned to other roles in the system.

News Forum changed to Announcements

The “News forum” is now called “Announcements”, which is more in keeping with how that forum is used. The forum itself functions the same as before but colleges may want to update their documentation to reflect the change.

Grade Improvements

As of Moodle 3.0, the grades interface has been improved; there are now separate links for “Grades” and “Grade setup” in the Course administration block (see MDL-51051). The latter is the same as “Categories and items”, but makes more intuitive sense since that page is really about setting up and configuring the grade book.

Search Improvements

Search was improved in Moodle 3.1 (see MDL-31989) but it has additional dependencies that may be beyond the reach of many schools: it requires the installation of both the Solr server and the Solr extension prior to Moodle configuration and setup. Based on the documentation, the improved search respects user access and only returns items you have access to. It also appears to search just about all of the standard objects (e.g., book, assignment, forums, etc.). We did not have Solr setup at Hack/Doc so we were not able to test this further.

Moodle 3.1 New Features

Recycling Bin

The recycling bin (see MDL-48012) works as expected and allows a user to restore deleted content such as resources. It is tied to the course, not the instructor so if one instructor in the course deletes something, another instructor in the same course can restore it. By default, items are deleted from the recycling bin after seven days, but admins can change the time limit.

Assignment grading interface and document annotation

Moodle overhauled the assignment grading interface in 3.1, providing a streamlined interface that bakes in PDF annotation. By default the new interface displays the submitted assignment file as a PDF with the typical grading fields (grade, comments, etc.) to the right.

There are two problems with the feature.

Converting to PDF: If the submitted document wasn’t a PDF, Moodle attempts to convert it to a PDF. This relies on having an obscure helper utility called “unoconv” installed on the server. If that utility isn’t there (and it’s likely it won’t be) then the conversion fails and the user is left with a blank PDF. This is an issue with Moodle’s requirement checking regime (if you don’t have unoconv, Moodle shouldn’t try to use this feature) that is actively being worked on in MDL-54165 “New grading interface should hide “editpdf” if unoconv is not enabled”. It is set to be fixed in Moodle 3.1.1, so if this isn’t installed, it won’t try and render the PDF.
The annotation tool is clunky: Even if everything is working as intended, the annotation tool remains clunky, being akin to adding a simple paint program to Moodle. Previously this was less of an issue because it was not front and center in Moodle’s workflow, but that’s no longer the case with the new assignment grading interface. Comment on MDL-54818 “Improve assignment PDF annotation” if this issue is important to you.

A number of colleges 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 in their courses. As a result, 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.

Update 7/28/2016: Moodle core’s resolution of MDL-54165 adds a new option to switch between three assignment views: PDF only, PDF and grading interface, grading interface only.

However, this does not resolve the issue that we identified at Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, which is that if the unoconv utility is not installed, a blank PDF appears instead of the assignment. This is potentially confusing to end users and we believe it would be better to default to only the grading interface, with no PDF, when the utility isn’t available.

A second design ticket, MDL-55145 “New grading interface should indicate why the document isn’t displayed in the review panel” was opened to deal with this issue. We strongly recommend that people weigh in on this issue with their opinions regarding the interface.

Annotations Ad Hoc Query: Further testing of our annotation query to determine whether annotation was used in a course revealed an error in the logic that caused it to return the wrong results. That issue has been fixed. Get the revised query. Note that it requires the ad-hoc database queries plugin to run (this plugin is included in the 3.0.x and 3.1.x versions of the Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition).

Competencies

Moodle’s documentation defines competencies as:

“Competencies describe the level of understanding or proficiency of a learner in certain subject-related skills. Competency-based education (CBE), also known as Competency-based learning or Skills-based learning, refers to systems of assessment and grading where students demonstrate these competencies. In Moodle 3.1 it is possible to create and apply frameworks for evaluating students against competencies in Moodle.”

We spent considerable time at Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2016 reviewing Competencies and came to the conclusion that it’s a complicated new system with an inherent workflow that isn’t well documented.

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 you 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 faculty’s “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.

Moodle 3.0/3.1 Plugin Review

We compiled a list of popular 3rd party plugins for Moodle and then determined if they were 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.

View the full list of third-party plugins.

About this report

This report was compiled based on work done at Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2016 at Butler University. The following individuals contributed to it: Jason Alley (Lafayette College), Joe Bacal (Smith College), Deryl Botta (Butler University), Kristi Burch (Centre College), Adam Dinnes (Beloit College), Charles Fulton (Lafayette College), Ken Newquist (Lafayette College), Ruth Schwer (Butler University), Jedidiah Rex (Beloit College), and Matt Wright (Butler University).

Questions about the report can be sent to info@clamp-it.org.

June 23, 2016

Hack/Doc Fest at Butler: Day 3

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.

Our “Providing an accessible option to Grid Course Format” documentation explains how to do this.

Course Overview on Campus

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.

Posts from Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Butler University: Homepage | Sprint | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3

June 22, 2016

Hack/Doc at Butler: Day 1

The Holcomb Observatory and Planetarium and Butler University. Photo credit: Ken Newquist

Day 1 of Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Butler University saw the group delve deeply into Moodle 3.1’s improvements, the updated Moodle Mobile app, the mass action and collapsed topics plug-ins, options for printing quizzes and course pages, and accessibility best practices.

Moodle 3.1 improvements

Select assignments for download

This feature allows you to select which assignments you want to download, rather than having to download all of them at once. This is a step forward in functionality, but it does come with a change to the base functionality. The resulting ZIP file now nests the assignment files in folders for each student, rather than using a single folder and prefixing each file with the student’s username and assignment info. This makes the assignment folder less browsable, and will cause teachers to drill down an extra level to view each students’ work.

The plus side is that the files themselves are no longer renamed, but this may be offset by the need to browse an additional layer of folders.

Topic Blocks

Topic blocks are now easier to manage — you can delete them, which sends their attached resources to the recycling bin.

Recycling Bin

The recycling bin works as expected, allowing you to restore deleted content such as resources. It is tied to the course, not the instructor (e.g., if one instructor deletes something, the other one can restore it).

Assignment submission view and document annotation

As we discussed during the sprint, the assignment submission view has been revised. It now displays (or tries to display) the assignment as a PDF alongside the necessary grading fields (grade, comments, etc.).

There are two problems with the feature.

Converting to PDF: If the submitted document wasn’t a PDF, Moodle attempts to convert it to a PDF. This relies on having an obscure helper utility called “unoconv” installed on the server. If that utility isn’t there (and it’s likely it won’t be) then the conversion fails and the user is left with a blank PDF. This is an issue with Moodle’s requirement checking regime (if you don’t have unoconv, Moodle shouldn’t try to use this feature) that is actively being worked on in MDL-54165 New grading interface should hide “editpdf” if unoconv is not enabled
The annotation tool is clunky: Even if everything is working as intended, the annotation tool remains clunky, being akin to adding a simple paint program to Moodle. Previously this was less of an issue because it was not front and center in Moodle’s workflow, but the new submission view puts it front and center. Comment on MDL-54818 Improve assignment PDF annotation if this issue is important to you.

Both of these issues should be called out in the CLAMP Moodle Exchange for further discussion.

Pinned discussion topics

This works as advertised; many thanks for CLAMP’s own Charles Fulton for contributing to this feature. By default, the teacher role and higher can pin topics, but that capability can be assigned to other roles in the system.

News Forum changed to Announcements

The “News forum” is now called “Announcements”, which is more in keeping with how that forum is used.

Competencies

We began reviewing the new “competencies” feature in Moodle 3.1. Moodle’s documentation describes competencies as:

We’ve spent several hours looking at competencies and by the end of Day 1 we’d come to the conclusion that they’re complicated. They implement their own workflow involving “competency frameworks” — which hold collections of related competencies — as well as “lesson plans” which group competencies together for the use by students. We’re still getting our heads around the workflow; it would be helpful if the competency documentation did a better job of explaining how all the pieces were supposed to work together.

The dev documentation, which explicitly states it is out of date, does a better job of explaining the base assumptions behind the feature and how it’s supposed to work.

We did find a bug related to competencies: MDL-54721: Competency breakdown report: User selection is not working well. This bug is fixed in Moodle 3.1.1.

Grade Improvements

The grades interface is improved; there are now separate links for “Grades” and “Grade setup” in the Course administration block. The latter is the same as “Categories and items”, but makes more intuitive sense since that page is really about setting up and configuring the gradebook.

Search Improvements

Search was improved in Moodle 3.1 but it has additional dependencies that may be beyond the reach of many schools: it requires the installation of both the Solr server and the Solr extension prior to Moodle configuration and setup. Based on the documentation, the improved search respects user access and only returns items you have access to. It also appears to search just about all of the standard objects. (e.g. book, assignment, forums, etc.). We did not have Solr setup at Hack/Doc so we were not able to test this further.

Moodle Mobile

The new Moodle Mobile app works better in 3.1 and eliminates earlier versions’ need for a stand alone plugin. The app looks nice and you can now participate in certain activities, like quizzes, from the app, but it still frequently passes people off to the mobile browser version for much of their Moodle interactions.

By default the app only syncs with its home Moodle over wifi, which could mean that faculty and teachers would miss forum posts and other updates while walking in and out of wifi zones on campus. The app also has calendar notifications, but these notifications started showing up at midnight, and there appeared to be no way to disable them. The app does not support push notifications from individual courses.

Generally speaking the app worked better on iOS than Android, particularly when it came to file handling. Android would store files it didn’t recognize in a hidden directory, which could lead to storage capacity issues on your mobile device. The app does allow you to control the size of this download space.

Our sense is that if your school has a good mobile or responsive theme, you should tell people to use that rather than the app, given that the app will most likely send them there anyway.

New tools for managing and displaying courses

We looked at the Mass Actions block, which allows users to quickly update multiple activities or resources within their course. The general sense is that this is a useful block to have installed, and that Moodle 3.1’s Recycling Bin component provides a good safety net should someone accidentally mass delete multiple elements from their course.

We reviewed the Collapsed Topics course format as way of controlling the “scroll of death” in which large amounts of information, resources, and activities can lead to exceedingly large web pages that take a long time to scroll through. Collapsed Topics streamlines the course by reducing the footprint of each topic. They can be expanded or closed as needed.

There have been reports of Mass Actions conflicting with Collapsed Topics, but we were not able to recreate those issues in Moodle 3.1.

Printing

We looked at ways to streamline printing from Moodle, specifically creating printer friendly views of quizzes (for accessibility or offline quiz taking support) and weekly course topics (for use as a syllabus).

We found the following:

Quiz

In Quiz settings, go to Layout and then choose a layout format a layout that gets all of the quiz questions onto one page. From here, there are a couple options…
- For editable text, the best tool we found was a Chrome plugin called Clearly (by Evernote). This plugin cleans up the clutter on the page and gives you text that can be pasted into a text editor.
- For a print and take exam, we found two options:
  - Print to PDF in Google Chrome cleaned all of the navigation clutter and allowed me to print a screen accurate version of the exam.
  - Evernote Web Clipper (Chrome/Firefox plugin) allowed the same, but added the ability to email/share an editable file.

Course as a syllabus

We looked at the following options for the Chrome web browser:

Print to PDF in Chrome can output a fairly clean page in some cases. There is a bit of navigation content at the top and bottom of the course content, but this can be fairly easily removed in Acrobat Pro. It works well for text heavy courses, but can be inconsistent on courses with a lot of photos or HTML content in Labels.
Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome will extract course content from the course page and allow you to edit and output a pretty clean document with minimal editing. The Firefox version will only detect content from the first topic section of the course page.
Save to Pocket plugin will only capture the Moodle login page, no course content.
Clearly plugin (a deprecated Evernote plugin) would only capture content from the first topic section of the course page.
Save to Google Drive plugin inserts all of the navigation links and block content into the middle of the course content. It also does not handle HTML in labels or photos in labels very well. Can’t recommend this option.

Accessibility

We spent considerable time discussing accessibility and universal design, both within Moodle and beyond. We’ve found a wealth of information which is worthy of its own post — in short we intend to build a list of accessibility best practices and then highlight them by designing a course with poor accessibility and then fixing it to create an new course with improved accessibility.

As part of this we leveraged the WAVE extension for Google Chrome to evaluate existing course pages at our home institutions. This uncovered a long-standing issue with how Moodle handles alternative text for its icons: for menu items it duplicates the text of the menu in alt text for its corresponding icon. This causes screen readers to read the text twice. MDL-46226 Pix_icon should not have the same title as alt attribute discusses this issue, but it hasn’t been revisited since 2014. We need to comment on this tracker to note that is an ongoing issue.

We’ve also setup a new #accessibility channel in the CLAMP Slack Team so that we can continue our conversation after Hack/Doc. The CLAMP Slack team is available at https://clamp-it.slack.com; join the team using “CLAMP’s Request access to services” form.

Posts from Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Butler University: Homepage | Sprint | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3