Planet Moodle

Weighty thoughts about tags

2013-05-24T09:28:07+00:00

What order should tag clouds use? Should users be able to control it? And does it really matter?

That’s the thought I’m struggling with today. Back in the dim and distant Moodle 1. somethingorother, the OU shared its course tagging system used in LabSpace into core Moodle. It would never pass today’s stringent integration process! Its been updated into Moodle 2 but is a bit rough around the edges.

When I started working on the “upgrade LabSpace to Moodle 2″ project (which should be released to the general public real soon now) I realised that the course tagging in Moodle 2 was a bit broken.

So I fixed it. Or I thought I did. The changes went into Moodle 2.4. To be honest, I thought LabSpace was the only site that actually used this stuff, but apparently I was wrong!

This forum thread reports a bug that the tags are not displayed with the correct size for their weight. Basically, they look like this:

When they should look like this:

I’ve filed a bug https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-39800 and although I’ve not assigned it to me yet, I fully intend to work on this when I get back from my holidays.

In the main block, the tags are displayed alphabetically, and that’s fine – I can easily fix the weighting there. On the “more” page though users are offered the opportunity to change the order of the tags so that they can sort alphabetically, by popularity or by created date. The idea behind this is that it might be useful when the tag cloud gets big. This is just part of the full cloud on LabSpace:

The way the core Moodle tagging functions work, it would no longer be possible to offer the option to change the sort order. And since those functions are a bit creaky already, I’d like to get as much input from the community as possible on the usefulness of the feature so we don’t put effort into something that no-one really cares about.

I know there’s an argument that tag clouds are old-hat anyway because “normal” people don’t understand or use them. So perhaps it doesn’t even matter?

What order should tag clouds use? Should users be able to control it? And does it really matter?

Integration round 2013-05-24 - Catching our breath

2013-05-24T07:19:48+00:00

by Damyon Wiese.

Cold numbers:

27 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 84% success, not bad!

Notes:

It was a light integration week as many devs are involved in planning meetings in the new frontend/backend teams.

We are now in the on sync period. This means no new features will be integrated until for 2.6 until 2.5.1 is release and we split the branches. New features arriving in integration will be held until the end of this period.

Hot topics:

MDL-39697 - Bootstrapbase $THEME->layouts need 'Maintenance' is missing important options.
MDL-39673 - Backport MDL-38441 (stylesheet system problems with large sheets in IE)
MDL-28250 - Incorrect link to Creative Commons

Warm thanks:

To Mark Nelson, for his continuing awesome work on the forum and certificate modules (and for making the HQ office more entertaining)!

Cheers, Damyon

OU release dates and what that means for our plugins

2013-05-22T14:14:53+00:00

People frequently ask the question 'when will [an OU-developed Moodle plugin] be available for [a new or upcoming Moodle version]?' So I'm writing a blog post to cover it. Not very amusing I'm afraid...

In general, OU releases are about six months behind the community Moodle version (possibly seven months now the community schedule has been shifted). This is necessary to ensure reliability but also to give us time to update our plugins, while maintaining new feature development.

If you want to use a released, tested version of our plugins, you'll need to follow our release schedule. Or if you want to live life on the edge, you should probably find that the untested 'master' branch of our plugins will have been updated to work on the next Moodle version by about two months before our live release, i.e. about four months behind moodle.org.

This was probably hard to understand, so let me do headings and bullet points.

If you want a Moodle 2.4 version of our plugins...

(Moodle 2.4 came out on 3 December 2012.)
An untested version has been available in the 'master' branch of each plugin in GitHub since approximately the start of April 2013.
The tested version will be available in the MOODLE_24_STABLE branch of each plugin in GitHub at some point early in June 2013. (You can pester me online if I have forgotten to update it!)

If you want a Moodle 2.5 version of our plugins...

(Moodle 2.5 came out on 14 May 2013.)
An untested version will be available in the 'master' branch of each plugin in GitHub by approximately the start of October 2013.
The tested version will be available in the MOODLE_25_STABLE branch of each plugin in GitHub at some point early in December 2013.

Caveats

The above dates for our future releases are not definite and are subject to change!
You can extrapolate from this to Moodle 2.6 (June 2014 live date), Moodle 2.7 (December 2014), etc - although we might change our release pattern by then, who knows.
As soon as we release a new stable version, we stop supporting the previous stable version. For example, once we have a MOODLE_24_STABLE branch, there will be no more changes to our MOODLE_23_STABLE branch. If anybody wants to support these old branches, we suggest forking our GitHub repositories.

Occasionally asked questions

I want to use your plugin in a new Moodle version before these dates, does it work? No idea! Please try it. (Sometimes plugins intended for a particular Moodle version will actually work unmodified in the next version. Unfortunately there are lots of cases where this does not hold true.) If it doesn't work, you can feel free to file a GitHub issue, but we probably won't fix it sooner than those dates.

It doesn't work but I still want to use it before these dates, what can I do? Please fix it yourself and send us the patch. :)

I have a patch that fixes your plugin for the next Moodle version, do you want it? Yes we do! And thank you for fixing it. But because of how our release process works, the 'master' branch of our plugins has to refer to the release currently in development at the OU. For example, if you submit a patch now for Moodle 2.5, we won't be able to put it on the master version of the plugin until about the start of September 2013 (about a month earlier than the dates I gave above). Of course, if you've put your patch on a GitHub issue, then other users can still benefit from the patch sooner by applying it manually themselves.

Moodle Add-ons Book released

2013-05-17T14:43:06+00:00

One of the strongest reasons for using an Open Source GPL application is the freedom to bend it to your own requirements, to configure and customise it to your organisation’s business or process needs. With Moodle that often means using add-ons from the community. There is a wide variety of plugin types; some are simple and some are complex in both their installation and use.

To keep up-to-date with new add-ons, a few years back I started to active review them on this blog. Based on the reviews and on the experience of working with organisations using Moodle, I put together a list of “Essential plugins for Moodle”, which I have regularly updated and presented at conferences, including the recent Ireland & UK Moodlemoots and the iMoot in 2012.

Michael de Raadt is the Development Manager at Moodle HQ and has been actively developing Moodle plugins over the past few years including Progress Bar and Unanswered Discussions. In 2010 Michael wrote the book “Moodle 1.9 Top Extensions Cookbook” which showed examples of how the plugins could be used in teaching.

For the past year I have collaborated with Michael to write a book on Moodle add-ons and today we are delighted to announce that our book “Moodle Add-ons: Using add-ons to enhance your Moodle site” is now available to buy.

The book is available to buy on Createspace and on Amazon and other online retailers. For now it is just the paperback version but we will have the Kindle version formatted soon.

Our new book goes beyond the work we have done before, extending the presentations and reviews into a new context, providing more reasoned background about add-ons, their format and function, and on the process of evaluation.

Book Summary

The first three chapters explain Moodle add-ons in general, including the different types of add-on plugins available, how they are contributed and why people write an add-on. The book continues with a guide on how to install a Moodle environment to safely test add-ons, away from your production site, and explains how to install a sample add-on. Perhaps most valuable is the third chapter, which describes the many aspects an institution should consider before installing an add-on.

The rest of the chapters include comprehensive reviews on Add-ons broken down into the following areas:

Resources and Activities
Navigation
Course Tracking
Interface
Course Administration
Site Administration
Course Formats
Virtual Conferencing

Hope you have as much fun reading the book as we had writing it.

Order now on Createspace

Internationalized Jquery – how?

2013-05-17T11:13:53+00:00

… my next challenge! If there are any JQuery / JavaScript experts reading this, I could do with some advice.

In OU Annotate the Manager part of the system uses the SilverStripe language pack system so that we could potentially offer the user interface in other languages if we wanted to – or if we ever open-source it.

The toolbar javascript up until recently had a fairly limited number of language strings and so they were all gathered in the definitions.js file. But when I started integrating the code for the history pane and the search feature I realised that we’re now scattering language strings in a number of places in the system:

in the definitions file
in the views
in the controllers

The first two are arguably OK, but the latter really got me. So I’d like to do something a bit more consistent about internationalization support for the toolbar. I’d like to have a language file and use code like _t(‘thing’) in the views and controllers to display the appropriately translated text.

Which leads me to my dilemma.

The OU Annotate toolbar is based on JQuery, which doesn’t include language pack support by default beyond number formats, as far as I can tell. There are a number of candidate plug-ins available that would add this functionality but I have very little JavaScript experience and don’t feel confident working out which one to choose.

There’s only one in the JQuery plugins register. It’s only a couple of months old so its hard to tell if it is a flash in the pan, buggy etc.

I thought jquery-i18n-properties looked good at first. But the issues list has some nasties in it with problems like support in IE and on Android not resolved.

I did some more searching and found a handful of other libraries and DIY instructions that might be useful but I haven’t dug into in any detail yet.

So, if you have experience with JavaScript internationalisation and JQuery, I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this.

Moodle 2.5 is here!

2013-05-14T13:34:20+00:00

As promised Moodle HQ has now released the much anticipated Moodle 2.5. It is already available to download from the Moodle.org site and from GIT. The Moodle Docs for 2.5 are also available.

There are a lot of cool new things and improved old things in this release which are sure to make many users admins and teachers alike very happy. These include:

Badges (see blog/video post)
Installing Add-ons from inside Moodle UI (see blog/video post)
Forms improvements (see blog/video post)
UI Improvements (see blog post)
New themes (see blog post)
Drag and Drop updates
Assignment enhancements
Templates for essay questions in Quiz
Performance improvements

Starting with this release Moodle Docs will now have a page outlining the new release key feature improvements. Check out http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/New_features

For details on how to upgrade to Moodle 2.5 see here -> http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Upgrading_to_Moodle_2.5

For the full release notes check out -> http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.5_release_notes

Moodle 2 Tool Guide -> DCU version

2013-05-14T08:04:22+00:00

As you may remember I released a Moodle 2 version of Moodle Tool Guide which was created by Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz).

Now Mark Glynn of the Learning Innovation Unit at DCU has adapted it for Dublin City University.

Download Moodle 2 Tool Guide - DCU Version (pdf) - 763.85 kB Download Moodle 2 Tool Guide - DCU Version - PPT (pptx) - 306.47 kB

The other available versions of the Moodle 2 Tool Guide are:

English version by Gavin Henrick (@ghenrick)
Spanish translation by Alfredo Ruiz.
German version by Ralf Hilgenstock and Susanne Gebauer and Gerald Hartwig
Czech version by Bohumil Havel & Jan Trávnícek
Dutch version by Gerda Flim
Simplified Chinese Version by Sun Zhigang
Japanese version by Mitsuhiro Yoshida of Mitstek.com

Moodlemoot Edinburgh 2014 – confirmed

2013-05-12T17:03:03+00:00

As on the Moodlemoot.ie site:

It has been only a few months since Moodlemoot Dublin, but things have been progressing quickly.

We are delighted to announce that we will be running a Moodlemoot Edinburgh 2014 in partnership with Edinburgh Napier University. We aim to have a similar format to the two Dublin Moots, with training workshops, two days of presentations and then a developer hackfest.

We are currently working to finalise the dates and the venue and have narrowed down the decision after visiting a number of venues in the last few days.

However, we can confirm that the Moot will be held in Spring 2014 - more information as soon as this is confirmed.

The following have generously agreed to be the Moodlemoot Edinburgh chairs:

Dr Keith Smyth
Senior Teaching Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Higher Education
Programme Leader MSc Blended and Online Education
Office of the Vice Principal (Academic)
Edinburgh Napier University

Dr Mark Glynn
Head of Learning Innovation Unit
Dublin City University

We will be announcing the programme committee in the coming weeks too – we already have a number of people accepted as members and are in discussions with others.

As with the last two moots, the programme committee will be doing three tasks:

Setting the themes/formats for the Moot
Assessing and rating the submissions
Chairing sessions at the Moot

So if you want to put yourself forward for the programme committee on behalf of your institution – please get in contact with me in the next two weeks on info@moodlemoot.ie

See you in Edinburgh.

Integration round 2013-05-10 - briefly before a releases week...

2013-05-10T17:58:07+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

91 issues have been successfully integrated with 11 rejected and 10 delayed. That is 89% success, great!

Notes:

QA, completed.
Moodle 2.5rc1, available.
Moodle 2.2.10, 2.3.7, 2.4.4, to be released next Monday.
Moodle 2.5 final, to be released along the next week. We still need one more integration cycle to add some fixes and improvements and to verify that everything is working together nicely.

Hot topics:

Ha! Everything is specially important these days. Security issues, forms, tests, themes, caches, courses... intense stuff!

Warm thanks:

To Jérôme Mouneyrac, for his amazing work with Moodle web services, hubs and all sort of interesting stuff, well done, man!

Ciao all, stronk7

Moodle 2.5 and the Bootstrap based theme – Clean

2013-05-08T07:27:52+00:00

Moodle 2.5 brings the a new theme into core. It is called Clean and it is based on the modified Moodle bootstrap theme which is maintained by Bas Brands which inherits styles and renderers from its parent theme.

The Original Bootstrap Moodle theme which is in the plugins database has over 8700 downloads since release. It was based on the Bootstrap CSS framework. It has minimal styling and can be used to create User Experience optimised themes. The framework was released by Twitter and has a huge following.

When you are looking at a course with the normal Clean theme enabled it would look like this:

When you shrink your browser (as it would be smaller on an iPad or mobile device) it looks like this (the blocks have jumped below the course sections):

Options

There are a few theme options which can change how it looks.

Navbar

The first option is to invert the navigation bar or not. This swaps the text and background colours for the navbar at the top of the page between black and white.

The two variations are shown below. This is certainly a neat feature.

Standard

Inverted

Logo

The second option within the theme is that you can upload a logo. This will appear below the breadcrumb and above the course content/block area as in the example below. To me the positioning is a bit odd, and would maybe be better being above the breadcrumbs, but I imagine that is not a big change to make when you clone it.

Logo positioning on Clean Theme

You can also specify some CSS here which is useful if you need to have a logo different to the standard 75 pixels in the theme.

Footnote

You can also add some content that will be displayed in the footer throughout your Moodle site. This is a neat touch for those who have to add privacy/copyright and other links or logos to the foot of every page.

Footer Text positioning on Clean Theme

So all in all a nice new addition to the Moodle theme family!

Demonstrating the improvement in forms in Moodle 2.5

2013-05-08T06:40:30+00:00

Moodle 2.5 has improved the usability of Moodle forms with a great step forward in providing the forms in a collapsed format and also providing the html editor in collapsed state by default too.

When you have a platform that has been built to cater for many different needs, one thing which happens is that there are usually a lot of options available to tweak the set up.

Moodle is no different in this matter. The settings pages when creating a course, or some activities (like quiz) have a lot of options available to enable each type of usage you can probably think of and also enabling you to configure it to how you want it to behave. For example a 1 hr exam no retakes and no feedback, or a 10 minute test with unlimited retakes and lots of question by question feedback.

Taking Quiz as an example it has settings to address so many aspects they are broken down into the following headings:

General (3)
Timing (5)
Grade (3)
Layout (3)
Question behaviour (3)
Review options (28)
Display options (4)
Restrictions on attempts (5)
Overall feedback (5+)
Common module Settings (4)
Restriction of Access (5+)
Activity Completion (4)

The number is the amount of settings under that heading.

As you can imagine, this makes for a long page which can be a bit intimidating.

The new collapsed form shows the required information and then has the balance collapsed into sections that if you want to change the default settings you can expand it to do so. The image below shows the new look and the video demonstrates the change.

Adding a quiz in Moodle 2.5

This is a great move and I know many will like this.

Moodle 2.5 – User Interface improvements

2013-05-08T06:32:56+00:00

The user interface has been an area that Moodle HQ has focused on since the release of Moodle 2. Each release has added some nice features and now it has come in for some nice improvements in the upcoming Moodle 2.5.

Settings Block – Administration Block

For those who have got used to the Settings block being there, it has now been renamed to Administration which really does make sense.

It is where all the module administration, course administration and site administration features were located so now it has a possibly more suitable name.

Moodle 2.4

Moodle 2.5

In addition to this, those reports which jumped out of the course admin block in Moodle 1.9 into the Navigation Block tree in Moodle 2, have been ushered back to the Administration block. Teachers will be glad to see them back where they used to be.

Drag and Drop

At this stage we are all used to dragging and dropping files into Moodle 2 – however now some more improvements have been made.

It is now possible to drag and image onto the course page and to create a label with that image inside it. You can then go in and edit the label as normal too.

Dragging Image to Course in 2.5

Added Image into a label in Course in 2.5

One of those features many liked in Moodle 1.9 was the ability to Jump to a section. With the newly implemented Section Per Page feature for course sections, Moodle 2.5 now improves this by adding the Jump To dropdown below the displayed section. The images below show how it was in Moodle 2.4 and how it is now in the upcoming Moodle 2.5.

One Section per Page in Moodle 2.4

One Section per Page in Moodle 2.5

Managing Add-ons in Moodle 2.5

2013-05-07T06:59:50+00:00

In Moodle 2.3 a new feature was implemented to enable site admins get alerts when a plugin that they were using in their Moodle site had been updated in the plugin directory. This would send the admin an email about the update. It was also possible to check for available updates through the admin user interface too. See release notes.

In Moodle 2.4 this was brought a step further. Not only did Moodle tell the site admin that a plugin update was available, but they could now update it through the admin user interface. This was a great step forward.

Now with Moodle 2.5 has take this feature to its next natural step, and enables a site admin to search for and install plugins from the Moodle Plugin Directory directly rather than having to upload via FTP. It is also possible to upload a zip of a plugin and not just pull from the plugins directory.

So what about checking the plugin?

The new system makes it much easier to manage the add-ons in the Moodle site. Once you select the plugin to install it will copy it to the server and validate it. There is a set of technical checks it goes through to validate and once it is complete you can then proceed to install.

Add-on package validation

Moodle then goes through the normal upgrade process.

Add-on Install Prompt

Once installed, it is the same as if you had done it manually.

The below video shows the process by which a site admin installs the block Progress Bar into the Moodle site just using the web interface.

Some things to note.

To make use of the feature requires certain permissions on the server to work which many managed hosts will not provide as it means that code they have not approved and audited themselves can be installed on a Moodle for which they are responsible. This is fair enough as it would be unreasonable to ask someone to stand over an installation that they do not control.

Also, it should be understood that as with any code change to a site it is always prudent to have a full site backup before any change is made. Where this feature is available in other applications like wordpress it always recommends that step too. When installing the add-on you have to tick an acknowledgement about this topic.

“I understand that it is my responsibility to have full backups of this site prior to installing add-ons. I accept and understand that add-ons (especially but not only those originating in unofficial sources) may contain security holes, can make the site unavailable, or cause private data leaks or loss.”

Lastly, it should be noted that where admins are using source code repositories such as GIT to manage their code this feature is not really usable on the live site, however would be useful in a test site where people want to try out a plugin before formally requesting inclusion into the managed implementation.

If you do not want to have the web-based admins install add-ons from the interface, you can just add the following line to your config.php

$CFG->disableonclickaddoninstall = true;

Open Badges and Moodle

2013-05-06T21:42:58+00:00

The soon to be released Moodle 2.5 comes with a new feature called Badges. So before I go through how it works in Moodle, let me address a few questions

What are badges?
How are they earned?
Who issues badges?
What about Badges and Moodle?

So what is a badge? or specifically what is an Open badge?

According to openbadges.org the central site about open badges, “a digital badge is an online representation of a skill you’ve earned” But Open Badges take that idea further allowing you to verify the skills through a credible organisation.

As someone explained it to me – “if a resumé or CV is a bunch of claims, Open Badges are a bunch of evidence”.

So just like a qualification in the “real world” carries the reputation of the issuing body, an open badge carries the credibility of the organisation.

But crucially, there are two key concepts

as open badges are not “proprietary” any organisation can create and issue badges and provide the verification of them.
users can collect these open badges from many organisations and then package them together to provide a full picture of their skills.

In general, normal certificates printed for a course that the person has been taken are not something that can be easily managed online. Yes, they can be scanned and uploaded but then anyone could edit that. Which brings the second aspect of certificates that they are not easily automatically verified. Some institutions have systems that can provide verification based on a unique code. There are also businesses that specialise in qualification verification..

So open badges solves multiple challenges at once by enabling both the collation and display, and the issuing and verification - thus assisting the issuing organisation, the learner (badge earner) and potential employers or people interested in those skills.

So how are they earned?

Anyone who completes a task/course/activity for which the organisation involves issues an open badge can earn one. Mozilla themselves issue a range of badges on http://badges.webmaker.org covering webmaker skills such individual skill as:

fixing or adding an image to a Mozilla Webmaker Project through proper use of the img tag
fixing or adding either a header or a paragraph to a Mozilla Webmaker Project by using the proper texts.
fixing or adding a list to a Mozilla Webmaker project by properly using the ordered and unordered list tags.

For more info on those badges go ahead and look into these over here -> https://badges.webmaker.org/

There are lots of other places you can earn the open badges already -> http://openbadges.org/community

So what about issuing open badges?

Those organisations wishing to issue badges need to put in place the infrastructure required to both award and provide verification for the badges. As mentioned it is free software and an open technical standard. This enables anyone who wants to and has the system or resources to put one in place to start awarding badges.

The below image from the Mozilla.org wiki shows the infrastructure at a glance.

The full information about issuing and the setup required are found here -> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges/Onboarding-Issuer#Diagram

So how does this relate to Moodle?

Through the new version, Moodle can be that infrastructure to issue and verify the badges.

So how does it work?

A Badge has a set of data in Moodle related to it:

A Name
A description
An image
The issuer Name
The issuer Email
The Badge expiry
A set of criteria defining how it is issued
A message to the user that is sent once it is earned

It is possible to set up Badges at site level or at a course level. What is the difference?

Site level badges are defined by the administrator of the site. The available criteria for awarding are:

Finishing a course or a set of courses with a minimum grade or by a certain date.
Completing a number of fields in the user account profile
Issued manually by a specific role (Such as a teacher, or a site wide departmental assessor)

Course level Badges offer a slightly different set of criteria namely:

Finishing the course (aka Course Completion)
Completing an activity
Or Manually issued by a role (such as teacher)

And of course it could be all of these, such as completing the course and being granted it manually.

Having both options available within Moodle enables the teachers/admins to use badges in a number of very creative ways

reward the on boarding process by encouraging profile field completion
reward individual activity completion such as participating in a forum
reward success at a course
reward success at completion a suite of courses – such as a full programme
reward a non-moodle based success through ad-hoc rewarding of the badge

What is the process?

Lets take the course based Badge.

Once the course is built with whatever activities that are to be completed and the completion tracking for the course has all been set up and defined, then the teacher can add a badge

They add the badge name, description, and image
They then configure the criteria to be used
Lastly they enable to badge.

This process is shown in the below video.

The a student can complete the criteria so that they are awarded the badge. This process is shown in the below video.

A Teacher is then able to look at the badges in a course and the recipient list of who earned the badge and when. This process is shown in the below video.

One last point – what is difference between a badge and a certificate in Moodle?

This is a question that has been asked me nearly every time I bring up badges with organisations I work with, but usually structured as “Which should I use – a badge or certificate”?

Certificate is a add-on activity in Moodle that will dynamically create a PDF for the learner to download and print as proof they have completed / achieved something. This is very much a digital delivery of an offline method of proof. So if a user wants to collect and present online the certificate they can, however there is no automated way to verify the authenticity of the certificate. Also, with a certificate the Name of the course and other data are visible on the certificate to provide context as it is usually printed out.

The Open Badge system allows for this verification and for users “taking with them” their digital rewards. Although the image for the badge does not show the same details, there is meta data included in the PNG to enable the verification of what it represents.

I certainly see that people will be issuing badges for discrete parts of courses and also issuing badges & certificates for the full course itself. But time will tell.

Stopping work on SCORM 2004

2013-05-06T08:02:37+00:00

I’ve been the official maintainer of SCORM in Moodle since 2008 when we implemented full SCORM 1.2 support thanks to funding from Moodle HQ. Since then with the help of a handful of other developers in the community I have spent over one thousand volunteer hours supporting and improving the SCORM module and occasionally funds have been provided for my time by organisations to fix a particular issue.

SCORM 2004 is now over 8yrs old and despite many efforts no-one has been interested in funding the time required to complete native support for SCORM 2004 in Moodle – I’ve run some successful GSOC projects which which have been a great learning experience for the students involved but have not made a significant dent in the work required to complete SCORM 2004 support. This year we received no valid GSOC applications for improving SCORM 2004 support in Moodle.

I spent a lot of time discussing the opportunity to run a crowd-funded project to complete SCORM 2004 in Moodle but it’s hard to define a fixed figure that would allow us to complete the project and I wonder if such a large amount of my time could be spent on projects that are more current.

Full support for SCORM 2004 is already available in Moodle by using the Rustici SCORM cloud plugin for Moodle and I think it is more cost-effective to purchase a subscription to their hosted solution which is much more stable/reliable and feature rich than what we could provide directly in Moodle anyway.

There is also a new version of SCORM (Tin Can) and I think it makes more sense to focus development effort on that rather than continuing effort to get an old standard working within Moodle that so far no-one has cared enough about to fund.

I will continue as a volunteer to maintain support for SCORM 1.2 and AICC packages in Moodle and the new Tin Can work that is currently underway. I will also make best efforts to avoid regressions in the existing SCORM 2004 code.

I will no longer be spending any time as a volunteer to support or improve SCORM 2004 in Moodle, I will accept patches from community contributors to improve SCORM 2004 support as long as they meet coding guidelines and are easy to test. All existing SCORM 2004 bugs will be closed as “won’t fix” – these will only be re-opened if a community member provides a good patch with full testing instructions or if someone funds my time to continue the work.

Thanks to everyone who has spent time working on SCORM over the years – hopefully drawing a line in the sand over SCORM 2004 support will allow us to focus on more current developments like Tin Can.

Performance-testing Moodle

2013-05-02T21:45:37+00:00

Background

The Open University is moving from Moodle 2.3.x to Moodle 2.4.3 in June. As is usual with a major upgrade, we (that is Rod and Derek) did some load testing to see if it still runs fast enough on our servers.

The first results were spectacularly bad! Moodle 2.4 was ten times slower. We were expecting Moodle 2.4 to be faster than 2.3. The first step was easy.

Performance advice: if you are running Moodle 2.4 with load-balanced web servers, don't use the default caching option that stores the data in moodledata on a shared network drive. Use memcache instead.

Take 2 was a lot better. Moodle 2.4 was now only about 1.5 times slower. Still not good enough, but in the right ball park. This blog post is about what we did next, which was to use the tools Moodle provides to work out what was slow and fix it.

Moodle's profiling tool

When your software is too slow, you need measurements to tell you which are the slow bits. Tools that do that are called profilers. One of the better profiling tools for PHP is called XHProf. The good news is that it has already been integrated into Moodle, and there is documenation about getting it working. Basically, you just need to install a PHP extension and turn on some options under Admin -> Development -> Profiling.

Since we already had the necessary PHP extension on our severs, that was really easy. The option I chose was to profile a page when &PROFILEME was added to the end of the URL, but there are several ways to control it.

Profiling output

Once you have profiled a page, the results appear under Admin -> Development -> Profiling runs.

This just lists the runs you have done. You need to click through to see the details of one run. That looks like a big table of all the function that were called as part of rendering the page, how many times each one was called, and how much time each function was responsible for.

Inclusive time is the amount of time taken by that function, and all the other functions it called. Exclusive time is the time taken by that function itself. Some people, like sam, seem to like that tabular view. I am a more visual person, so I tend to click on the [View full callgraph] link. That produces a crazily big image, showing graphically which functions call which other functions, and how much time is spent in each one. Here is the image for the run we are looking at:

You can click for the full-sized image. The yellow and red highlighting is applied automatically to try to highlight places where a lot of time is being spent. Sometimes it is helpful. Sometimes not. The red box in the bottom right is where we do database queries. No suprise there. We know calling the database is one of the slowest things you can do in Moodle code. The other red box is fetching data from memcache, which also involves connecting to another server.

What you have to look for is somewhere on the diagram that makes you go "What! We are spending how much time doing that?! That's surely not necessary." In this case, my eye was drawn to the far right of the yellow chain. When viewing this small course, we are fetching the course format object 134 times, and doing that is accounting for about 9% of the page-load time. There is no way we need to do that.

Fixing the problem

Once you have identified what appears to be a gross inefficiency, then you have to fix it. Mostly that follows the normal Moodle bug-fixing mechanics, but it is worth saying a bit about the different approaches you could take to changing the code:

You might work out that what is being done is unnecessary. Then you can just remove it. For example MDL-39452 or MDL-39449. This is the best case. We have both improved performance and simplified the code.
The next option is to take an overview of the code, and re-organise it to be more sensible. For example, in the course format case, we should probably just get the course format object once, and then use it. However, that would be a big risky change, which I did not want to do at this time (just before the Moodle 2.5 release). This approach does, however, also have the potential to simplify the code while improving performance.
The next option is some other sort of refactoring. For example get_plugin_list was getting called a lot, and it in turn was calling the generic function clean_param to validate something. clean_param is quite fast, but not when you call it a thousand times. Therefore, it was worth extracting a simpler is_valid_plugin_name function. Doing that (MDL-39445) reduced the page load time by about 2%, but did make the code slighly more complex. Still, that is a worth-while trade off.
The last option is to add caching. If you are doing the same thing repeatedly, and it is slow, and you can't avoid doing it repeatedly, then remember the answer the first time you compute it, and reuse it later. This should be the option of last resort because caches definitely increase the code complexity, and if you forget to clear them when necessary you introduce bugs. However, as in the course formats example we are looking at they can make a big difference. This fix reduced page-load times by 8%.

So far, we have found nine speed-ups we can make to Moodle 2.4 in the core Moodle code, and about the same in OU plugins. That is probably a 10-20% speed-up on most pages. Some of those are new problems introduced in Moodle 2.4. Others have been there since Moodle 2.0. We could really benefit from more people looking at Moodle profiling output often, and that is why I wrote this article.

Integration round 2013-04-25 - rocket launch in 2w!

2013-04-25T00:58:42+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

66 issues have been successfully integrated with 6 rejected and 17 delayed. That is 92% success, wow!

Notes:

With just 2 weeks+ for releasing Moodle 2.5 (together with point stable releases), it's time to review all the documentation, release notes, all your issues containing the "dev_docs_required" label and ensure everything is ready for the masses.

Everybody is pushing hard, fixing issues, qa testing functionalities, reviewing code, adding automated tests, tidying themes... 24h/day! What an intense month!

Finally, you can take a look to the notes about yesterday's Developer meeting. Was interesting & fun.

Hot topics:

MDL-38898 - Bootstrap based themes now supporting D&D.
MDL-38441 - Better handling of IE CSS limits.
MDL-38565 - Important fixes to session-based caches.
MDL-39164 - Import of essay questions from multiple formats fixed.
And lots more in areas like themes, forms, usability, assignment, course, administration...

Warm thanks:

To Bas Brands, David Scotson, Mary Evans and everybody else because of the hard work with the new "bootstrap" themes that will lead to new amazingly responsive designs in the future.

Ciao all, stronk7

Integration round 2013-04-18 - Greater Manchester edition

2013-04-18T13:38:13+00:00

by Dan Poltawski.

Cold numbers:

65 issues have been successfully integrated with 11 rejected. That is 86% success.

Notes:

With the start of QA testing this week, our focus continues to be fixing, polishing and ensuring Moodle 2.5 is the most stable Moodle release yet. Thanks to all our QA testers, we are already have 68% pass rate, with 306 completed QA tests! Great job everyone!

Today, Martin Dougiamas introduced a new process to try and prevent issues being stalled on policy decisisons. We hope that with this new process we should be able to make progresss on tough issues and prevent frustrations arising from this.

Hot topics:

MDL-39203 - Dropbox repository stopped working after API changes
MDL-39021 - New theme, simple, based on the bootstrap base
MDL-35434 - Themes can now use the filepicker in admin settings
MDL-39063 - Improved interface for connecting to external openbadges backpacks
MDL-34674 - Use of browser spell check in TinyMCE
MDL-39087 - All plugin types can now be uninstalled
MDL-38309 - Tab functions are now converted to a renderer
MDL-38783 - Lots and lots of automated behat tests!

Warm thanks:

To Yuliya Bozhko (Totara), for her work integrating openbadges through code, documententation, collaboration and acceptance tests! thanks!

Ciao, Dan

Do different media affect the effectiveness of teaching and learning

2013-04-15T07:31:55+00:00

Here is some thirty-year-old research that still seems relevant today:

Richard E. Clark, 1983, "Reconsidering Research on Learning from Media", Review of Educational Research, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Winter, 1983), pp. 445-459.

This paper reviews the the seemingly endless research trying to ask whether teaching using Media X inherrently more effective than the same instruction in Media Y. Given the age of the paper, you will not suprised to learn that the research cited covers media like Radio for education (hot research topic in the 1950s), Television (1960s) and early computer-assessted assessment (1970s). Clark's earliest citation, however, is "since Thorndike (1912) recommended pictures as a labor saving device in instruction." Images as novel educational technology! Well, they were once. The point is that basically the same reserach was done for each new media to come along, and it was all equally inconclusive.

Here are some choice quotes that nicely summarise the article:

Based on this consistent evidence, it seems reasonable to advise strongly against future media comparison research. Five decades of research suggest that there are no learning benefits to be gained from employing different media in instruction, regardless of their obviously attractive features or advertised superiority.

Where learning benefits are at issue, therefore, it is the method, aptitude, and task variables of instruction that should be investigated.

The best current evidence is that media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition

Clark does not miss out on the fact that effectiveness of the learning is the only problem in education:

Of course there are instructional problems other than learning that may be influenced by media (e.g., costs, distribution, the adequacy of different vehicles to carry different symbol systems, equity of access to instruction).

Since this paper is a thorough review of a lot of the available literature, it contains a number of other gems. For example:

Ksobiech (1976) told 60 undergraduates that televised and textual lessons were to be (a) evaluated, (b) entertainment, or (c) the subject of a test. The test group performed best on a subsequent test with the evaluation group scoring next best and the entertainment group demonstrating the poorest performance.

Hess and Tenezakis (1973) ... Among a number of interesting findings was an unanticipated attribution of more fairness to the computer than to the teacher.

I wonder how much later research fell it to the trap outlined in this paper. I am not familiar enough with the literature, but presumably there was lots of papers about the world-wide web, VLEs, social media, mobiles and tablets for education. I wonder how novel they really were?

Today, computers and the internet have made media cheaper to produce and more readily accessible than ever before. This removes many constraints on the instructional techniques available, but what this old paper is reminding us is that when it comes to teaching, it is not the media that matters, but the instructional design.

Mediterranean MoodleMoot 2013

2013-04-12T07:06:49+00:00

For those intending to head to Tunisia for the Moodle Research Conference on the 4th, 5th October, before you book your flights maybe you should consider arriving a few days early and also attending the Mediterranean MoodleMoot 2013 which takes places in the same venue on the 2nd and 3rd of October.

As with other Moots, the content at the Moot will be more practice focused than research focused where users of Moodle – teachers/trainers, developers and administrators share experiences and case studies of where they have applied Moodle. It is a great opportunity to network with those using Moodle and those who are considering moving to Moodle.

According to the website – It will be possible to register for both the Moot and the Research Conference for a special fee.

Key dates to keep in your diary:

17 June 2013: Submission of manuscripts
22 July 2013: Notification of acceptance
26 August 2013: Submission of the final copy of papers and posters
26 August 2013: Early-bird registration deadline
2nd-3rd October Event

Be sure to keep an eye on #medmoot13 on twitter for information.

Integration round 2013-04-11 - betaplus, more than a beta

2013-04-11T13:30:43+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

79 issues have been successfully integrated with 13 rejected and 2 delayed. That is 86% success, yay!

Notes:

Already running the continuous period, until May 13th, were we'll be releasing the new Moodle 2.5 together with minor releases of current stable versions. Everything is continuous these days, fixing, integrating, testing, discussing... a really intense and funny period.

Also, a new QA cycle is about to begin, with Automated Tests taking the responsibility about to verify everything is working as expected. Human intervention will still be necessary, but aiming to get (near) 100% automated coverage for next releases.

Finally, a new goal has been reached this week, and current 2.5 beta+ is passing unit tests for all database drivers, first time ever. Indeed that will lead to better and more reliable testing (unit tests, integration, acceptance...). More coming...

Hot topics:

MDL-38541 - Upgrade problems using rebuild_course_cache().
MDL-38935 - Quiz auto save working for essay questions.
MDL-38973 - Reattempts on blind-marking assignments fixed.
MDL-38634 - Display multiple folder contents in course pages working.
And lots more in areas like tests, xmldb/database, assignments, questions, enrolments...

Warm thanks:

To Adrian Greeve , for his continuous effort in all sort of annoying and important issues. Great work!

Ciao all, stronk7

Integration round 2013-04-05 - MATURITY β

2013-04-05T11:23:51+00:00

by Dan Poltawski.

Cold numbers:

88 issues have been successfully integrated with 15 rejected. That is 85% success, not bad considering its the last week of major changes in 2.5!

Notes:

As planned, we have moved to MATURITY_BETA and with a very busy week of changes.

We now have two themes without parents. This means changes affecting CSS will need to be update in both /theme/base/ and /theme/boostrap (see MDL-38906 for more details).

Core now has around 1700 behat tests and now is the time to get familiar with behat, run the behat tests for the areas which you are working and write new tests for features you are creating. Over the next month and a bit our focus will be on creating the best quality release yet, bug fixing and polishing Moodle 2.5, please join us and help in this effort.

Hot topics:

MDL-38708 - Ability to add images and files to course listings
MDL-38016 - Boostrap base theme lands in core
MDL-35073 - Openbadges integration
MDL-38538 - Quiz server-side autosave
MDL-38509 - Add-ons intallation from within Moodle
MDL-38481 - various behat tests implementing QA test functionality
MDL-37009 - Course listings now output through a renderer

Warm thanks:

To Marina Glancy (Alexandrovna), for all her work on improving courses for themes and format authors and for volunteering to maintain formslib. We miss you here in Perth (and so does formslib)!

Ciao! Dan

2nd Moodle Research Conference – Call for Papers

2013-04-04T06:43:28+00:00

I just received notification from the organisers, that the Call for Papers is now live for the 2nd Moodle Research Conference.

The Moodle Research Conference is going to be held on the 4th and 5th of October, in Sousse, Tunisia at the Mövenpick Resort & Marine Spa, located in downtown Sousse, by the sea. Sousse is one of the oldest cities in Tunisia with an authentic Medina, which has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. Sousse is very close to Monastir, one of the most famous tourist destinations in Northern Africa.

Sousse is about 140km south of Tunis Airport along the coast. There are a number of well-known airlines that fly into Tunis Airport including British Airways, Air France, Lufthansa, Alitalia and KLM. From early checks the prices via Gatwick, and other European cities the flights look quite reasonable. Sousse is also served by the Monastir International Airport. Sousse is only a few kilometers from the Enfidha-Hammamet International Airport. Although these are local, they have less major airlines flying into them.

The venue for the conference (Mövenpick Resort & Marine Spa) looks amazing – and for those who like wandering when not in the Moodle sessions, there are some amazing things to see nearby – such as the Sousse Medina & Ribat, Archaeological Museum and Catacombs, and within an hours drive the El Jem amphitheatre, and Holy City of Kairouan.

But enough about Sousse, back to the Call for Papers.

As the call for papers document outlines, Prospective authors are invited to submit manuscripts reporting original unpublished research and recent developments. This is one of the things that makes the conference different to the practitioner focused Moodlemoots which although they have some research presentations a lot of it is more practical.

The programme committee are looking for topics involving Moodle such as the possible topics below:

Experimental research involving methods and tools
Case studies on the effectiveness of teaching methods
Innovative plugins
Mobile learning
Learning analytics
Collaborative learning
Communities of practice
Interoperability with Moodle
Accessibility
Personalisation and adaptivity
Massive Open Online Courses

Research submissions must be papers up to 8 pages (including figures and references) or posters up to 1000 words in length. These will undergo double-blind peer review involving at least two program committee members. The deadline for submission of manuscripts is 17 June 2013. So this gives you plenty of time to finish that research paper you were working on, or write up the research you have ongoing.

The conference is being organised by the Italian Moodle Partner MediaTouch 2000 srl with the support of Moodle HQ and the CoSyLlab research group from the University of Piraeus. Local support will also be supplied by European Learning Centre, a consortium composed by ATI Engineering, MediaTouch 2000 srl and Star-t srl.

Full details on the Call for Papers and details on submissions check out the conference site http://research.moodle.net/mrc2013

Things I didn’t know about SCORM

2013-03-28T16:47:11+00:00

This week I was asked to revisit our OpenLearn SCORM packages because “its missing some stuff”. In the process I learned some things about SCORM that I didn’t know before, so I thought I’d share them here.

I always wondered why our SCORM packages looked just the same as the IMS CP ones and why would any-one bother. Well that’s because I was missing some stuff.

Firstly, I should have added the adlcp namespace in the manifest <manifest> tag

xmlns:adlcp="http://www.adlnet.org/xsd/adlcp_rootv1p2"

Then each <resource> tag needs to say whether it is a SCO or an asset

<resource identifier="x_s175_1_3_1_resource" type="webcontent" adlcp:scormtype="asset" href="Items/x_s175_1_3_1.html">

This wasn’t the change that I was being asked for though. The key thing we’ve always had missing from our SCORM packages has been the javascript API for communication with an LMS. You can do some clever stuff with this, like extracting student name, completion information etc and using it within your content. All we actually want to do is to report each section of the package as complete so that people can track them in their LMS.

Here’s how I did it:

I downloaded the Pipwerks SCORM API wrapper to do the heavy lifting for me. I put it in the same place as all the other shared js and css in our packages and made sure it was referenced throughout as a resource in the manifest and as a file dependency.

<resource identifier="Shared10" type="webcontent" adlcp:scormtype="asset" href="Shared/SCORM_API_wrapper.js"> <file href="Shared/SCORM_API_wrapper.js"/> </resource>

<dependency identifierref="Shared10"/>

There are a few of these APIs out there – I don’t know how you decide which one to use, but this one seems quite popular and recommended in a few places, including the Moodle developer docs!

In each of our html resources in the SCORM package I added the API wrapper in the <head>

<script type="text/javascript" src="../Shared/SCORM_API_wrapper.js"<>/script>

Finally I added the appropriate calls to communicate through the API to the html <body> tag’s attributes

<body class="mod-oucontent" id="mod-oucontent-view" onLoad="pipwerks.SCORM.init()" onUnload="pipwerks.SCORM.quit()">

Hope that helps some-one who has to follow in my footsteps – it turned out to be a whole lot easier than I thought it would.

Integration round 2013-03-28 - Easter break

2013-03-28T09:06:46+00:00

by Damyon Wiese.

Cold numbers:

61 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 4 delayed. That is 95% success, awesome! Notes: April 1 for code freeze for 2.5 (no it's not a joke!). Also remember - it's only a freeze for new features not bug fixes.

Hot topics:

MDL-25631 Course Import does not import Legacy Course Files (50 votes)
MDL-15727 Include jQuery library in Moodle core
MDL-37033 Decide Moodle 2.5 requirements and push them to environment.xml

And lots more in areas like acessibility, forms, renderers, javascript...

Warm thanks: To David Monllaó for his ongoing work on behat (it really is cool)

Dont eat too many chocolate eggs!

- Damyon

Adding Responsive design with SilverStripe

2013-03-22T10:50:12+00:00

My first real intro to the buzz around responsive design was at the Moodle developer meeting in Perth at the end of last year, and then again in Dublin for the UK & IE Moot in February.

In the middle of the two, I was asked to help make OU Annotate work better on mobile devices. Stage one, make the manager website better on smaller screens. Stage two, make the toolbar better on touch screens.

Stage 1 is now complete, and I’m impressed at how much easier it was than I thought. Admission: I didn’t code this myself, one of my excellent team did it for me. Here’s how he did it…

Create a new mobile css and add Requirements::themedCSS() for it in the main page Controller class. This css file has two parts

@media only screen and (max-width: 767px) { // phone specific css here }

@media only screen and (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 1024px) { // tablet specific css here }

Add a mobileMeta() function to the main page controller and call it from the main page template. This function addstag to the rendered page header. Because some of our pages aren’t intended to work on mobiles, this function is overridden to return nothing in those page controllers.

We had to change the structure of our page templates a bit so that we could reflow content more easily – for example the main annotations table is now just a set of divs so that they can flow vertically rather than horizontally on a phone. And we added some extra classes on things so we could style them more easily on different devices, including a .mobileshow class which hides/shows things en masse as the screen size changes.

we finally changed some terminology in our language pack to avoid saying “click” or “touch”.

So basically, because of the way Silverstripe follows MVC principles, keeping functionality and layout separate, this was all about HTML and CSS really. Probably this is the first time I’ve really appreciated this – usually it annoys me intensely because you have to work a bit harder to keep the two apart!

And for those of you interested in what it will look like… the tablet view is pretty similar, and the phone view is very cut down. Here’s a couple of pretty pictures to tell a thousand words.

Integration round 2013-03-22 - One week to code freeze

2013-03-22T07:51:30+00:00

by Damyon Wiese.

Cold numbers:

59 issues have been successfully integrated with 9 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 87% success, 3rd week in a row, (it's not a fluke)!

Notes:

Only 1 week to code freeze! (Read faster, you could be coding).

Hot topics:

MDL-38542 - Short answer questions don't handle zeros with wild cards well when "0" is given by a student.
MDL-38450 - Warnings on upgrade from 2.2.7 to 2.2.8
MDL-38215 - Error on workshop using Oracle
MDL-36395 - Search for users has max of 100 results
And lots more in areas like libraries, webservices, functional tests, caches, forms, quiz, glossary...

Warm thanks:

To all our themers, for their hard work making moodle look so good!

Thanks all!

- Damyon

Moodle and 2 Million users.

2013-03-18T20:19:31+00:00

The team here at Catalyst have been working on this exciting project for a while and now that it’s gone live we can finally post publicly about it – the Saudi Arabian National Centre for E-learning and Distance Learning(NCEL), an agency established by the Saudi Arabian government is now running what is the biggest ever Moodle site (as far as we know) with over 2 million users expected to use the system this month.

more info here: 1 2

Setting up a Moodle Development Environment on a Mac

2013-03-18T15:27:10+00:00

Having been an Ubuntu user for years, I am switching my main computer to a new Macbook Pro. This means that I now need to change the way I do things, and learn how to set up a Mac to be a developer station. So, here I go...

To begin with, I consulted with my colleagues +Justin Filip and +Amy Groshek, both Moodle developers and both power Mac users. They both pointed me to MacPorts as a starting point. Amy further advised me that although OSX comes preinstalled with PHP and Apache, I probably want to replace them both with MacPorts versions of the software. An opinion shared by a blog post Amy shared with me on setting PHP up using MacPorts. I'm going to use that blog post, and the MacPorts installation page to start my setup.

Now, one thing I need to be careful with is that this blog post is for up to version Lion. I'm running version Mountain Lion; so there may be some differences.

...and the first thing I run into is those differences...

The blog post tells me to turn off Apache:

"go to System Preferences, type Apache in it’s spotlight. It will highlight Sharing, but you just need to press return. Just make sure Web Sharing is disabled."

Unfortunately, "Apache" turns up nothing. And accessing "Sharing" direct doesn't offer "Web Sharing". I do a search for "Mountain Lion" and "Apache", and turn up several articles describing how to enable Apache in the absence of the "Web Sharing" option. It turns out that Apache is disabled by default with OS-X Mountain Lion. I'm guessing, I can skip this step.

The next thing I am asked to do is to install Xcode. This should be available in the Mac App Store, so I'm going to check there first. Searching for 'xcode' in the App Store I immediately find it. It defines itself as "everything developers need to create great applications for Mac...". Checking the "Installing MacPorts" page on the MacPorts site, the "Xcode" requirement is confirmed. So, I install it from the App Store.

Next, the MacPorts site is telling me I need to have the Command Line Developer Tools. The instructions say they can be installed from within Xcode 4, which I just installed. I find Xcode in my Applications folder and run it. It takes me through more installation steps, and then allows me to start it. According to the information on that page, simply running and accepting the license should be enough. But I find another page that points me to the "Preferences -> Downloads" section where I need to install the "Command Line Tools".

Next, both sites tell me to install MacPorts by downloading the dmg from the site. I think I'll follow that advice. The download runs me through a standard installation process, and I choose the standard method. It all seems to install just fine.

Having done that, I move on to installing MySQL. The blog post I'm reading recommends installing the MySQL server installation using MacPorts. After reading others, I decide to do just that. The recommended commands are:

sudo port install mysql5-server -- installs all necessary software
sudo port load mysql5-server -- configures MySQL to start at bootup
sudo -u _mysql mysql_install_db5 -- sets up necessary database tables
/opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password' -- sets a root password

Next, I will install PHP, Apache and some required libraries.

sudo port install php5 +apache2 +pear +fastcgi php5-mysql +mysqlnd -- installs all necessary software
sudo port load apache2 -- configures PHP to start at bootup

Then I will configure PHP with development settings:

cd /opt/local/etc/php5/
sudo cp php.ini-development php.ini

And enable it in Apache:

cd /opt/local/apache2/modules
sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apxs -a -e -n "php5" libphp5.so

Next, I can change where my Apache sites will run from. By default, they are in "/opt/local/apache2/htdocs", but I want them to be in subdirectory off my home. To do this, I edit the "/opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf", and change the two lines below as follows:

DocumentRoot "/opt/local/apache2/htdocs"

DocumentRoot "/Users/mikechurchward/www"

and

<Directory "/opt/local/apache2/htdocs">

and

<Directory "/Users/mikechurchward/www">

This allows me too store my web, and PHP files in my home directory. Some other changes in that file:

<IfModule dir_module> DirectoryIndex index.html index.php</IfModule>

AddType application/x-httpd-php .phpAddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

This should give me everything to run web and PHP.

Now, I reboot my computer and try to access a web page on my machine. It works.

Next, I need git. This looks like an easy task for MacPorts. A quick search concludes that "git-core" is what I should need, so I issue the command:

sudo port install git-core +bash_completion

This installs git-core as well as a variant known as bash_completion, which will allow the "tab" key to help complete git commands.

Now I use git to checkout a Moodle installation, and it works!

So, I will now navigate to my new Moodle codebase, and:

Moodle requires the iconv PHP extension. Please install or enable the iconv extension.

Okay. So I need to add more PHP extensions. Luckily, Moodle documents what I need.

To add the iconv extension, I enter:

sudo port install php5-iconv

then restart Apache:

sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart

Once more to the site and I actually move on the installation page!

To make my life easier, I think I will add phpMyAdmin before moving on.

sudo port install phpmyadmin

Then, since I have moved my webroot, I move it:

sudo mv /opt/local/www/phpmyadmin ~/www/

Then reconfigure it with:

cd /opt/local/www/phpmyadmin/sudo
cp config.sample.inc.php config.inc.php

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config'; // Authentication method (config, http or cookie based)?
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'root'; // MySQL user
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = ''; // MySQL password (only needed with 'config' auth_type)

When I try to run it, I get an error about socket connections not working. After a bit of research, I come up with this:

Create /opt/local/etc/mysql5/my.cnf, add the following to it and save [mysqld_safe] socket = /tmp/mysql.sock

...and...

Also to remain compatible with other programs that may have been coded to look for the socket file in its original location then add this symbolic link:
sudo ln -s /opt/local/var/run/mysql5/mysqld.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

That gets phpMyAdmin running. Now onto install Moodle.

I step through the initial steps of Moodle until I hit the "Server checks" page. This page tells me exactly what other PHP extensions I'm missing.

sudo port install php5-curl
sudo port install php5-openssl
sudo port install php5-xmlrpc
sudo port install php5-soap
sudo port install php5-intl

And reload the page. Success. The installation continues, and runs successfully.

I now have most everything I need... But I still need an IDE.

I've been an Eclipse IDE user for a very long time, but both +Amy Groshek and +Justin Filip are telling me that Sublime Text 2 is the way to go, so I'm going to see what its like. Now, to install and use it, I'm just going to use Stuart Herbert's page. No need to recreate that here.

So, at this point, I have a fully working development environment for Moodle working on my Macbook Pro. I'm sure I'll need more as I go along, but this is a good starting point.

Integration round 2013-03-14 - inside storms

2013-03-14T19:52:10+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

28 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 87% success, 2nd week in a row, yay!

Notes:

2w to code freeze, 3w to QA testing cycle to start and just 9w to release Moodle 2.5, c'mon!

Brains up, MDL-37033 is still unresolved! We need it landing ASAP to all supported branches.

yui, yui-modules, shifter, jshint, jquery, ajax.. discussions/ideas all over the place... will we rename some beloved platform to Joodle? Impressing stuff!

Hot topics:

MDL-38303 - Problem with session caches when switching of user.
MDL-35716 - New performance page about settings affecting throughput.
MDL-33424 - Problems restoring images from 1.9 backups.
MDL-38337 - Quizzes now observing their maxgrade global default.
And lots more in areas like libraries, course, functional tests, administration, quiz, lesson...

Warm thanks:

To Andreas Grabs, the Feedback activity maintainer for his continued work and dedication. Great work!

Ciao all, stronk7

Some thoughts on Moodlemoot Dublin 2013

2013-03-13T18:38:56+00:00

It is nearly three weeks since close to 300 Moodlers were gathered in Ireland for the Moodlemoot Dublin 2013. I would have blogged earlier, but things got in the way. This blog post just looks at some parts of the Moot from my memory.

I have included some of the images tweeted by the attendees – with attribution – if anyone wants theirs removed let me know.

It seems as if it was just yesterday that we were in the midst of a coffee break between the hectic schedule of panel sessions, presentations, pecha kucha and more. I am reminded of a quote from an attendee from last year – “It was 72 hrs. of relentless networking” – I think it was that, and more.

The level of participation at the Moot was huge with a big increase in the amount of twitter activity

6590 tweets on the hashtag (nearly 3000 on Feb 19th alone)
224 users tweeted
69 media items shared on twitter

The top 10 tweeters accounted for 2600+ of the tweets they were:

Danjatam 373
Fboss 347
Bbarrington 322
ghenrick 291
Niallj2000 279
Jmdh22 253
Stevewright1976 240
Wheelz24 181
SDCMoodle 172
Nrparmar 150

The level of interaction from outside of Ireland was helped in part by our trial of BigBlueButton for providing remote access to the conference Room B Stream. This was a test which had some local technical issues which have given us some good lessons learnt for next time.

The intention is that next year we will continue with this but more than likely every presentation will be streamed and not just one room.

A few quick thanks

Firstly many thanks to Martin and the rest of the Moodle team who were able to be in Dublin for the Moot. It was great to have ye all there.

Secondly the support of Mark Glynn and his colleagues from the Moot partner institution DCU, and the volunteers to help chair the sessions was really invaluable in having the Moot go as well as it did – serious kudos to them all.

The sponsors support and participation in the Moot also needs a mention – their involvement ensures that the Moot can take place. So be sure to check out their pages on the Moot site.

Most importantly the attendees are the core of a Moodlemoot. The contributions both as presenters and as participants in discussions, panels and the overall engagement of the Moot underpins the learning and sharing that takes place. This is what makes the a practitioner conference like the Moodlemoot so useful to so many. Hats off to you all.

A special thanks too for Lynn Scarlet Clark (@scarletclark ) who did the designs for the Moot – thanks again!

Lastly, a huge thanks to Marshall from AVTEK (who stepped in with his MacBook to help) – a number of beers are owed.

Monday 18th

Monday morning arrived and with it the first major influx of people registering for the pre-conference training workshops. People were registered on time, and coffee drank and then the workshops began. The day seemed to go well with a lot of engagement and effort going on in the four sessions – lots of tweets too nearly 1800 that day/evening.

Lunch came and went and the Baileys’ Cheesecake became a star.

Lunch Time Snacks – @ghenrick

We had made the decision to have the workshops broken into half days so that people could move between them to get a taste of a few different areas, which seemed to work well with 1/3rd of people doing one half of one session and moving to another. Next year will look at maintaining this or improving on it.

A good number went into town to have a look around Dublin but for those who remained at the venue – the evening began with wine and cheese reception and then moved onto the Quiz Night. Many glasses of wine and questions later the Sugarbabes team one. It was a relaxing evening overall, which was the calm before the storm.

@SamStegers – Drinks and cheese #mootie13

@caz_h – Finalists of the quiz nite #mootie13 blk eyed peas V sugarbabes or shud I say…. @SolentRoger V @danjatm

Tuesday 19th

Tuesday began the arrival of the balance of the attendees, lots more registering and the first panel session.

Moot Kickoff – @SamStegers “Are we all here? #mootie13″

The topic of the session was the future of online learning and we had a number of people on the panel including Martin Dougiamas, Ross Mackenzie (The Open University), Lars Smith (Hibernia College), Michelle Moore (Remote-Learner), and me. The current climate where disruptive education, MOOCs and Social learning seem to turn up daily in blogs and news articles made this a good topic to start the Moot off with. Each presenter gave a short 5 minutes personal view on where things were going and then we had a discussion and questions/thoughts from the floor.

@leonegately – At the opening of #Mootie13 listening to the founder of #moodle & panel on the future of online learning

I hope the session recording comes out well, as there was a number of interesting points made some of which were:

Surface learning vs. quality and depth of learning
Sustainable business models
Do MOOCs provide the depth of learning needed?
Where do people get the independent academic skills required to take advantage of surface learning?
Before we had MOOCs we had BOOKs

These themes and others tied in with the last panel discussion on the Wednesday where the globalisation of Education was tackled.

After the panel, for the most part I did not get to as many sessions as I had hoped, I gave some presentations including on Using Files in Moodle 2 and on Extending Moodle with Plugins. These slides and others should be up online by the end of this week. Most presenters have given us the presentations or links to them, so it’s a task for this week.

The afternoon session kicked off with a number of Pecha Kucha presentations which is a format that many seem to like now.

@moodler – @basbrands talking about the Think project #mootie13

The recordings will be worked on over the coming week or two. They were recorded in HD so fingers crossed on those. These will be going up into an archive.

The Tuesday evening saw most of the attendees travel by bus to the Clontarf Castle for the Conference Dinner. It is a lovely venue. The wine and food was only surpassed by the 80s cover band (okay, so if you didn’t like the 80s perhaps it was not going to light your fire, but there were people dancing till the end).

@Wheelz24 #mootie13 fantastic band tonight. 80s music rules.

Wednesday 20th

We were very lucky with the weather and Wednesday morning was particularly lovely.

@SamStegers – Moodlers, awaken you all!! The sun is out and it’s a good day to moot #mootie13

Wednesday started with a Moodle focused session where Martin Dougiamas presented about the Moodle future – his slides are here:

Moodle February 2013 from Martin Dougiamas

There is a lot of interesting information here and this will be one of the videos I am sure will see a lot of views.
Mark Glynn of DCU followed Martins presentation and Q&A with a call to action for European HE and FE institutions to get in contact with them and to come together to collaborate and co-fund Moodle customisations and plugins that particularly meet the needs of the European institutions. I will post more about this in coming weeks.

To end the session, I announced that in 2014 that I will be organising a Moot north of Hadrians Wall – in Scotland – but more on this later.

The other presentations on Wednesday covered a wide range of subjects including a number covering LTI, Tin CAN and Moving to Moodle 2.

There was no wrap-up session for the Moot, by design. This came mainly from the reality that a lot of flights were leaving at 6pm, or even some at 5:30 which meant some people were vanishing from 3:30 onwards so that it became harder to choose a time for all to stop without making it a much shorter day. We did receive feedback that a formal wrap up would be nice so we will look at reviewing this next year.

On Wednesday evening Martin Dougiamas presented to students at Dublin City University on managing an open source project. This was an interesting angle on Moodle, and one where I learnt stuff that I had not known before then, such as how some features of Moodle evolved to support Martin in writing his thesis.

Thursday 21st

The Thursday Moodle Hackfest was added to the schedule this year in direct response to feedback from the Moot in 2012.

@CityMoodle: #mootie13 hackfest about to begin with @basbrands @mudrd8mz @davosmith @tim_hunt and others

Although having developer training workshop on the Monday is a good thing, having a more advanced discussion driven developer-only day was something that we hoped would work well. From the feedback on the day and since from some participants certainly seemed to indicate this was a success and productive. Based on that it is definitely going to be repeated next year.

Next steps

There are still some things to finish off including linking the presentations from each of the presenters, finalising the work on the video recordings, which I hope a good portion will be done this week.

And then there is the future

Thinking about 2014, things have progressed nicely with the organising of the Moot for 2014 north of Hadrian’s Wall. Discussions are underway with a partner institution – and dates & venue will be announced in coming month or two.

The goal is to keep the format of the two Dublin moots and hold it at a Hotel Conference venue again but in partnership with a local Institution. More info when we have it.

Also there has been an approach for 2015 as well, which looks very promising too.

OU plugins updated

2013-03-12T10:36:24+00:00

Boring post but for info, the OU plugins on GitHub (ForumNG, OU wiki, OU blog, subpage, etc.) have been updated today:

The MOODLE_23_STABLE branch is now based on our latest live code from our March release last week, which includes patches/bugfixes.
The master branch includes our latest fixes from our 2.4 development release.

So anyone waiting for a 2.4 version, you might like to try it again. We think most of them basically work now but there may still be some problems (especially subpage might only work under certain conditions). If something's still broken in 2.4, feel free to file issues in the relevant GitHub project.

Integration round 2013-03-07 - messing the mess, shifting to the unknown

2013-03-07T23:10:11+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

72 issues have been successfully integrated with 11 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 87% success, very good one!

Notes:

Important: Everybody running Moodle 2.3.4+ with versions between 2012062504.08 and 2012062504.12 is highly encouraged to upgrade to latest version available (2012062504.13 or newer). MDL-37939 introduced one regression that was fixed by MDL-38173, but introducing another regression, finally fixed by MDL-38378.

Unluckily all the regressions, especially the last one, escaped all our eagle-eyes, both human an cybernetic. Will try to avoid the same to happen in the future. Many thanks to Gareth Barnard for his promptly report and fix.

Note the problem-free Moodle 2.3.4+ version 2012062504.13 recommended above is being built right now and should be available everywhere in a couple of hours.

With this integration cycle over, everything is in place for releasing Moodle 2.2.8, 2.3.5 and 2.4.2 next Monday, thanks everybody!

Once published we'll start a 2-months countdown for Moodle 2.5, that's 3 weeks for code freeze, gogogo!

Hot topics:

MDL-38149 - AJAX grading problem in activities with no grades.
MDL-38165 - Caches purging problems.
MDL-38101 - Problems with manual completion.
MDL-37127 - Migrate to shifter for YUI deployment. Worth reading!
And lots more in areas like courses, repositories, testing, navigation, workshop...

Warm thanks:

To Anthony Borrow, our Contrib/Add-on Coordinator, for his continuous collaboration with Moodle since... ever. Awesome, dude!

Ciao all, stronk7

Integration round 2013-03-07 - messing the mess, shifting to the unknown

2013-03-07T23:10:11+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

72 issues have been successfully integrated with 11 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 87% success, very good one!

Notes:

Note the problem-free Moodle 2.3.4+ version 2012062504.13 recommended above is being built right now and should be available everywhere in a couple of hours.

With this integration cycle over, everything is in place for releasing Moodle 2.2.8, 2.3.5 and 2.4.2 next Monday, thanks everybody!

Once published we'll start a 2-months countdown for Moodle 2.5, that's 3 weeks for code freeze, gogogo!

Hot topics:

MDL-38149 - AJAX grading problem in activities with no grades.
MDL-38165 - Caches purging problems.
MDL-38101 - Problems with manual completion.
MDL-37127 - Migrate to shifter for YUI deployment. Worth reading!
And lots more in areas like courses, repositories, testing, navigation, workshop...

Warm thanks:

To Anthony Borrow, our Contrib/Add-on Coordinator, for his continuous collaboration with Moodle since... ever. Awesome, dude!

Ciao all, stronk7

Creating learning paths using Diagram Editor

2013-03-01T15:25:32+00:00

Course sequencing allows for instructors to define a learning path through a given curriculum. It allows the course creator to define pre-requisite conditions between courses that are enforced by the LMS.

With Moodle 2 completion dependencies can be defined for a course, whereby course B can only be marked complete if course A is complete. Unfortunately this is not a true pre-requisite as the learner can start course B without completing A. Functionality in Moodle to allow true pre-requisites to be defined by the course creator is highly sought after by the Moodle community.

Over the last year Enovation has set out to overcome this shortcoming and offer true pre-requisite definition within Moodle.

Taking up the Challenge

In the Summer of 2012 Enovation started to look at how pre-requisites could be defined between courses. The first attempt of this was to define course pre-requisites in the course settings page.

A new settings section was added to define course pre-requisites.

The image below shows the new settings section and how pre-requisite relationships were defined between courses.

This enhancement required amendments to the Moodle core code and after consultation with the community a new approach using an enrolment plugin was developed. To read in detail about this work, please have a look at one of our previous blog posts - http://blog.enovation.ie/2011/06/course-prerequisites-in-moodle-2/

Enrolment Plugin

The enrolment plugin did not allow students to self-enrol in a course until they had satisfied a pre-requisite condition. Defining pre-requisite conditions using the enrolment plugin meant there were no changes to Moodle’s core code. While it was a powerful feature it was time-consuming and complex to define course paths. To overcome this we decided to develop a diagram editor tool for defining course paths.

Diagram Editor

A simple notation was defined to allow course creators to define a course path through pre-requisite conditions on courses. This notation consisted of two types of ‘gates’ and a course notation. Gates either had a ‘1’ or ‘ALL’ above it indicating whether all courses coming into the gate needed to be completed or just one before the learner can enrol in courses coming out of the gate provided.

The diagram to the right illustrates the ‘ALL gate’ where course 1 and course 2 must be completed before the learner can enrol in course 3

Moodle Plugin

The Moodle plugin for course sequencing is a powerful tool for the course creator allowing them to define a course path through a given curriculum.

Our plans for Diagram Editor

The next steps for diagram editor are as follows:

We need to make the code as robust as possible
We want to add a sanity check which will basically check, for example, that no course is impossible to reach
Release to the community
Other possibilities to start looking at then would be a diagram editor for creating lessons, sequencing topics/activities within courses, allowing for activities to be dragged and dropped on to course icons.

We would be very interested in your idea on how to develop diagram editor further, please let us know in the comments.

Integration round 2013-02-28 - to colonize or not to colonize

2013-03-01T00:18:01+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

39 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 93% success, near perfection, congrats!

Notes:

Next week, Sam and Aparup will be back to integration, once their 1-month integration leave has ended, welcome! At the same time, Dan will start his leave, enjoy! (note that there is 1 leave vacant for March, anyone?).

Next week is the last integration cycle before releasing Moodle 2.2.8, 2.3.5 and 2.4.2 (due March 11th). So it will be an intense cycle because, apart from the normal issues, we'll need to sort out and test all the security stuff.

Recently, core has passed the 500k NCLOC (non-comment lines of code) mark, that excluding all the 3rd part libraries bundled with Moodle, that's a lot!

In the funny side, and about how all we can be turning and turning for ages around the smallest detail imaginable (aka "bikeshedding"), take a look to CONTRIB-4142, part of some ongoing tasks to release a new codechecker version soon.

Hot topics:

MDL-38110 - Bad interactions between the MUC and unit tests.
MDL-37792 - Wrong user conditions for some resources.
MDL-35175 - Lesson attempts not shown if using groupings.
MDL-35641 - Backport flowplayer to Moodle 2.3.x
MDL-38225 - Incorrect links to entries in database module (1.9.x).
And lots more in areas like assignments, web services, performance, files, caching...

Warm thanks:

To Martin Dougiamas , we all wouldn't be reading (and writting) these lines, right now, without him!

Ciao all, stronk7

Integration round 2013-02-28 - to colonize or not to colonize

2013-03-01T00:18:01+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

39 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 93% success, near perfection, congrats!

Notes:

Recently, core has passed the 500k NCLOC (non-comment lines of code) mark, that excluding all the 3rd part libraries bundled with Moodle, that's a lot!

Hot topics:

MDL-38110 - Bad interactions between the MUC and unit tests.
MDL-37792 - Wrong user conditions for some resources.
MDL-35175 - Lesson attempts not shown if using groupings.
MDL-35641 - Backport flowplayer to Moodle 2.3.x
MDL-38225 - Incorrect links to entries in database module (1.9.x).
And lots more in areas like assignments, web services, performance, files, caching...

Warm thanks:

To Martin Dougiamas , we all wouldn't be reading (and writting) these lines, right now, without him!

Ciao all, stronk7

Moodlemoot take aways

2013-02-28T13:41:28+00:00

I wasn’t expecting to go to the UK and Ireland MoodleMoot 2013 in Dublin this year, but at the last(ish) minute, I was encouraged to do so and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of developers around – so much so that I regretted not signing up for the hackfest day at the end.

However, its not just to talk to like-minded individuals that it is worth going to conferences. It gives developers the opportunity to see the product we develop through different eyes – which helps us to build better in future, and gives positive feedback that people like our work which can be very motivating.

One of the main trends in discussions that I heard was about the importance of quality in learning. The messages I took away were around

the need for technology to allow teachers to focus on teaching not admin
in improving online learning we should focus on what we’ve lost from the classroom, not get carried away with “new toys”
the role of the teacher in facilitating a constructivist approach is critical
mentoring teachers to use tools more effectively, and to share best practice and course content, both within and between institutions
offer ways for students to support each other more to take the weight off the teacher a bit.

I’ll also be watching research.moodle.net as it evolves into a hub for research into Moodle and creating a feedback loop from that research into improving the system. Great things could come from that to make life better for all students and teachers.

From a more technical perspective, LTI was a big thing – lots of demos of how useful it can be, how easy it is, offers of support.

And if you’re interested in making Moodle perform at scale, then Jonathan Moore from Remote Learner and Simon Storey from Catalyst both had very detailed presentations. I must look out their slides as there was a lot on screen which I didn’t get time to write down!

Scotland next year apparently – and I hope I’ll be able to go again.

Responsive design and the Moodle course page

2013-02-27T14:02:07+00:00

There has been a lot of talk recently about responsive design and Moodle. Everyone has a view about it whether it is something to use or not use.

Before I bring up some points, I wanted to set down one definition of what responsive can be “to adapt the layout to the viewing environment”. It is a good idea to have a website look the best it can on any device, that is something I agree with – however Moodle is not just a website, it is a course and learning management system. So the remit goes well beyond a normal website.

A website reorganising the blocks, content areas, navigation, images on it depending on browser window size, or device can work, but what about when this is not a desired outcome? Are there cases where a block moving below the course page is a bad thing from a learning point of view?

I am approaching this not from a design point of view at all, but from a training point of view when I have trained teachers and course admins to use the blocks in Moodle to help support their learning delivery and administration.

Consider a Moodle course

There are a number of blocks that are used in a Moodle course that can be considered a key part of the course. What about the random glossary block? This can be a key part of the course content /layout providing a flashcard type experience on page loads to help introduce some content or trigger reminders, or offer supplementary information from one of the glossaries in the course.

Is the effectiveness of this block in the course reduced if the block is dropped under the course content sections ?

What about some other blocks which teachers use on their courses?

The calendar block with deadlines marked on it
The upcoming used to remind about key deadlines coming up.
Or the latest news block – showing the most recent headlines from the news forum
Logged in users – to help promote the inter-student communication

So from a teaching and admin point of view, is having the blocks dance around in a responsive way a good thing in a Moodle course if they have been placed there for a specific reason?

Should responsive design with a Moodle course try to take these kind of issues into account?

What blocks would you not want to “move around” in a responsive layout?

Should this be an issue? If a site admin went with a responsive theme, does this then limit the teacher in choice of blocks? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Just some random thoughts on the topic…

Incentives for Developers

2013-02-25T05:29:16+00:00

How do you encourage developers to be more productive?

A few months ago, I was intrigued by a presentation by Dan Pink, an American public speaker. Here is a version of that presentation (and there are a few similar presentations around, including a TED talk).

In the presentation, Pink claims that extrinsic motivators, specifically financial incentives (bonuses, raises, promotions, stocks,…), can be counter-productive to the goal of encouraging workers in certain circumstances. In the presentation, Pink refers to studies at MIT, so I went searching for publications for these studies and found Ariely (2005) and Awasthi & Pratt (1990).

While people can be motivated by financial incentives, the studies found that financial incentives can reduce performance for tasks involving a cognitive component. Software development certainly involves cognitive tasks, in fact programming is about as cerebral as you can get.

So if money doesn’t work, what does? Pink’s thesis is that employees will be more productive when they have a sense of:

autonomy,
mastery and
purpose.

Pink refers to cases at Atlassian and Google, where employees are reported (in the media) to receive many perks. I’ve been to Google, and while I did enjoy the free food, the work environment was certainly not anarchistic, in fact it seemed quite ordinary on the inside. What Pink emphasises is that these companies offer a degree of autonomy to their workers, that employees have the potential to develop professional masteries for their current job and for future jobs, and that employees are able to see a sense of purpose in what they do day-to-day.

Developer Incentives at Moodle?

Some aspects suggested by Dan Pink were already in place at Moodle, but some have been added or enhanced in recent months. I will describe how we offer a sense of autonomy, master and purpose to members of the STABLE team at Moodle (the devs who work on the existing releases of Moodle).

Autonomy

Apart from being a relatively relaxed working environment, there are some specific differences that may set Moodle apart from other development offices.

Devs choose, set-up and maintain their own development environments. Code meets at the repository, but how it gets there is up to the developer.
Using the Scrum framework, devs choose issues they will resolve from a prioritised backlog of issues. This ensures that the highest priority work gets done, but devs have a sense of ownership over, and responsibility for, the issues they choose.
After every two sprints (sprints are typically three weeks long), devs have a week to work on a project of their own choosing. The projects have to benefit the Moodle community, but is open to interpretation by the developer. This means that one week out of every seven, the developer is completely autonomous.

Mastery

Mastery is an area we could be working more on, but there are a few initiatives in place at Moodle.

Devs can nominate external training courses and are supported to attend.
Devs nominate areas of interest in Moodle and are allowed to specialise in those areas.
Devs receive in-house productivity training . There are also irregular presentations on development related topics related to the current focus of work (for example, in-code documentation writing, Web services, etc.)

Purpose

Purpose is something that Moodle has a lot of. Moodle allows many people to access education, some of whom would not be able to do so otherwise.

In saying that, it is easy to lose sight of that purpose when devs are focussed on lines of code while reading the grumbles of users on bug reports.

It is important t0 regularly remind developers that there is a community out there and they really appreciate the work devs are doing. We have, in the past, dragged devs to a Moodle Moot, where there is a lot of back-patting. We are hoping to do that again this year.

If you are a member of the community and wish to express your gratitude, please do so. Send me an email or post a message on the Moodle forums. It will really help.

Do these incentives work?

From my perspective, I would have to say “yes” – encouraging a sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose does help developers, their progress, as well as the general working environment. It’s hard to quantify the effect of making these aspects more obvious to developers, but I have noted some improvements since we have.

Our turn-over of staff is low. The devs seem are content and passionate about their work, particularly when they have a chance to work on what they are interested in. This really helps avoid slacking off when it comes to doing “more of the same”; with sufficient variety, developers are quite happy to switch to unstructured work and then back to structured sprints again.
General productivity is higher and being maintained. The number of issues being led through our process has increased and that is a good sign.
The STABLE team is producing some significant contributions to Moodle, and not always in the same way. We had a very colourful show-and-tell session last Friday with some very excited developers (including devs from outside the STABLE team). Here are some examples of what was put on show…

An optimised view for the Gradebook (Rajesh Taneja)

There are a number of issues relating to the usability of the Moodle Gradebook, which can become unwieldy. With some simple modifications, the Gradebook becomes a much more usable space.

See MDL-25544 for details.

Previews for Database activity uploads (Adrian Greeve)

Currently, uploading data into a Database Activity provides little feedback or control. Adding in a preview, with field matching, allows easier uploading.

See MDL-37503 for details.

A Moodle development kit (MDK) (Frédéric Massart)

The MDK automates many regular dev tasks including Git operations, adding information to issues on the Moodle Tracker and automation of site instantiation and population with dummy data.

This project has been quite a collaborative effort and is still growing.

Documentation is available on the Moodle Dev docs.
The MDK can be accessed from Github.

Integration round 2013-02-22 - Bug fix, bug fix, bug fix

2013-02-22T04:16:05+00:00

by Damyon Wiese.

Cold numbers:

45 issues integrated with 12 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 79% - oh so close!

Notes:

Really want to get over 80 next week!

Hot Topics:

* MDL-29938 - Webservice core_user_get_users

* MDL-31983 - Include Reports Under Settings block -> Course administration

* MDL-34800 - Turning AJAX on in Grader Report causes update button to disappear

* And more in areas like Assignment, Questions and Comments

Warm thanks:

* Bradley Shende for getting Martin up and dancing this week (and keeping us amused):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3FhrMkmPW4k

Cheers, Damyon

Integration round 2013-02-22 - Bug fix, bug fix, bug fix

2013-02-22T04:16:05+00:00

by Damyon Wiese.

Cold numbers:

45 issues integrated with 12 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 79% - oh so close!

Notes:

Really want to get over 80 next week!

Hot Topics:

* MDL-29938 - Webservice core_user_get_users

* MDL-31983 - Include Reports Under Settings block -> Course administration

* MDL-34800 - Turning AJAX on in Grader Report causes update button to disappear

* And more in areas like Assignment, Questions and Comments

Warm thanks:

* Bradley Shende for getting Martin up and dancing this week (and keeping us amused):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3FhrMkmPW4k

Cheers, Damyon

Integration round 2013-02-14 - New features hit master

2013-02-14T08:10:49+00:00

by Damyon Wiese.

Cold numbers:

40 issues integrated with 11 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 78% - lets get it over 80 next week.

Notes:

Behat is working nicely on our continuous integration server now (thanks to David for some fixes this week), make sure you don't break the behat tests!

Hot Topics:

* MDL-30637 - Simplify moodle forms

* MDL-35819 - Rewrite help popup to use moodle-core-notification and restyle

* MDL-5875 - Please show word count to teachers and students on forum posts

* MDL-34137 - Offer mod_label as an option when drag/dropping media mime-types

* And more in areas like Backup/Restore, Automated Testing and AJAX and Javascript.

Warm thanks:

* Joseph Rézeau for taking on some mforms fixes this week.

Cheers, Damyon

Integration round 2013-02-14 - New features hit master

2013-02-14T08:10:49+00:00

by Damyon Wiese.

Cold numbers:

40 issues integrated with 11 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 78% - lets get it over 80 next week.

Notes:

Behat is working nicely on our continuous integration server now (thanks to David for some fixes this week), make sure you don't break the behat tests!

Hot Topics:

* MDL-30637 - Simplify moodle forms

* MDL-35819 - Rewrite help popup to use moodle-core-notification and restyle

* MDL-5875 - Please show word count to teachers and students on forum posts

* MDL-34137 - Offer mod_label as an option when drag/dropping media mime-types

* And more in areas like Backup/Restore, Automated Testing and AJAX and Javascript.

Warm thanks:

* Joseph Rézeau for taking on some mforms fixes this week.

Cheers, Damyon

Annotate Spring and Summer

2013-02-08T11:11:07+00:00

Last week I was asked what’s been going on with Annotate recently. “Nothing much since my last post” I thought, but I was wrong! So here’s the update, as requested.

All the things I said I was going to do in December, I did. But that’s all a bit dull, so I’m not going to say any more about that.

I’ve just set up the test server for our March release, so instead I’ll focus on that. The biggest change we’ve made is to move most of the tools to edit your annotation out of the toolbar and into the comment window. This should make it a lot easier to use as everything you need to do is in once place, right by the text you’re trying to comment on.

Here are a couple of pictures to show what the new toolbar and comment windows look like.

Its also given us more space in the toolbar, so we can add the “people I follow” filter. And it should be easier now to create bookmarks with a single click. We have other ideas for things that can go in here too, like a search facility, quick update button, user defaults…

Finally, we’re offering a bookmark import service – from any standard bookmark file like your browser or Delicious creates.

Looking further forward, the June release should include improved groups for OU staff, improved bookmarklet accessibility, and improved availability of the toolbar on OU content. Longer term, we’re looking at improved mobile usability too.

Integration round 2013-02-08 - It's my first weekly release!

2013-02-08T05:45:55+00:00

by Damyon Wiese.

Cold numbers:

38 issues integrated with 12 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 76% - down a bit from last week.

Notes:

"Short forms" (MDL-30637) is up for integration next week.

Hot Topics:

* MDL-25853 - Calendar month block previous/next links broken on non course pages
* MDL-32652 - Make block drag-drop work throughout Moodle
* And more in areas like Quiz, Assignment, Scorm and Accessibility

Warm thanks:

* David Mudrák for his entertaining testing instructions and workarounds.

Cheers, Damyon

Integration round 2013-02-08 - It's my first weekly release!

2013-02-08T05:45:55+00:00

by Damyon Wiese.

Cold numbers:

38 issues integrated with 12 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 76% - down a bit from last week.

Notes:

"Short forms" (MDL-30637) is up for integration next week.

Hot Topics:

Warm thanks:

* David Mudrák for his entertaining testing instructions and workarounds.

Cheers, Damyon

Moodle 2 Tool Guide in Japanese

2013-02-05T10:33:06+00:00

As you may remember I released a Moodle 2 version of Moodle Tool Guide which was created by Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz).

Now Mitsuhiro Yoshida of Mitstek.com has created the Japanese version of the tool guide. You can download it here.

Download Moodle 2 Tool Guide for Teachers - Japanese version (pdf) - 313.3 kB

The other available versions of the Moodle 2 Tool Guide are:

English version by Gavin Henrick (@ghenrick)
Spanish translation by Alfredo Ruiz.
German version by Ralf Hilgenstock and Susanne Gebauer and Gerald Hartwig
Czech version by Bohumil Havel & Jan Trávnícek
Dutch version by Gerda Flim
Simplified Chinese Version by Sun Zhigang

OU Moodle plugins and 2.4

2013-02-01T12:06:18+00:00

Oh dear, it's my first blog post of the year. :)

There is probably something more interesting I could talk about, but we're getting a bunch of questions about 2.4 versions of OU plugins lately.

To recap the OU schedule:

We typically go live with a Moodle release about six months after it comes out, unless something goes wrong.
Development for our release takes a three-month period that ends about a month before our release.

In this particular case for 2.4:

We should have stable versions of our plugins for 2.4 (MOODLE_24_STABLE) in June.
We should have development versions (on the master branch) that work in 2.4 at some point between February (yes, I know it's February now) and the end of April.

Of course, some of our plugins from previous releases may continue to work unchanged - it depends whether any of the APIs in Moodle core were modified in a way that breaks our plugins in that release.

Where our plugins don't work in 2.4, feel free to file an issue on our GitHub site, but be aware that we won't fix it until our development period starts. If it's a simple problem and you want to fix it for us by submitting a patch, please do - we'll try to apply these patches early in the development period, i.e. more like February than April. (We can't apply them before the development period starts though, sorry.)

Integration round 2013-01-31 - catching gotchas

2013-02-01T01:04:05+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

63 issues have been successfully integrated with 11 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 85% success, will we beat it ever?

Notes:

After a lot of discussions, seeking alternatives, confronting them, the integration team has published one backporting policy aiming to steady stable branches. Take a look to it and feel free to comment here.

With the "training period" over (peer reviewing furiously, getting in touch with the rest of the team and their - bad - habits...), Damyon Wiese has started his role as integrator, welcome!

Some interesting ideas and changes are expected to land soon; stay tunned about possible changes in the current releases calendar, hack-a-thons and other interesting stuff.

Hot topics:

MDL-37545 - Fixes for some problems happening on caches init.
MDL-37734 - Some severe sqlsrv problems with transactions.
MDL-35611 - Behat integration with Moodle landed to master.
MDL-37640 - Zip problems under windows.
And lots more in areas like unit tests, themes, questions, database, ajax, courses...

Warm thanks:

To Matteo Scaramuccia, for his interest and collaboration in the forums, in the tracker along the past years, thanks man!

Ciao all, stronk7

Integration round 2013-01-31 - catching gotchas

2013-02-01T01:04:05+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

63 issues have been successfully integrated with 11 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 85% success, will we beat it ever?

Notes:

With the "training period" over (peer reviewing furiously, getting in touch with the rest of the team and their - bad - habits...), Damyon Wiese has started his role as integrator, welcome!

Some interesting ideas and changes are expected to land soon; stay tunned about possible changes in the current releases calendar, hack-a-thons and other interesting stuff.

Hot topics:

MDL-37545 - Fixes for some problems happening on caches init.
MDL-37734 - Some severe sqlsrv problems with transactions.
MDL-35611 - Behat integration with Moodle landed to master.
MDL-37640 - Zip problems under windows.
And lots more in areas like unit tests, themes, questions, database, ajax, courses...

Warm thanks:

To Matteo Scaramuccia, for his interest and collaboration in the forums, in the tracker along the past years, thanks man!

Ciao all, stronk7

Studio module

2013-01-30T11:25:29+00:00

Over the last couple of months I’ve been working on the specification for a new module for our student-facing Moodle. It will replace a number of bespoke websites that are currently running to offer the same functionality.

The elevator pitch is that design students in a bricks & mortar university have a room they can go to, usually called the studio, in which they do their design work and can see what others are doing. They might be inspired by that other work, and they probably share feedback with the other students so that they collectively improve. The studio module acts as a virtual design studio.

Students upload their own work, browse the work of others and make comments through Pinterest or Tumblr like activity streams. Sort of a multimedia forum. With a few bells and whistles…

Teachers structure for the work you need to upload in “slots” – imagine a forum where the teacher decides what the thread titles are.
And there’s a personal unstructured pinboard.
There’s a history of your work so you can see the slot content evolve through feedback.
There are progress indicators that encourage students to keep up to date with their slots and also to contribute more comments than content.
There’s some boring legality about the rights for the uploaded content.

And there’s some ordinary stuff like ratings, groups, backup, mobile view, moderator support, participation reports, email/rss notification, search…

Turns out that it is quite a complicated beast!

There are two areas which we’ve really struggled with. One is how to manage the volume of content when you’re looking at the work of the whole course cohort. We’ve got a complex set of filter and sorting options that should help it not be overwhelming using the normal date controls, slot names, tags, flags, ratings, most commented etc. But which sorts and filters are actually meaningful and useful?

The other complicated area is one I just alluded to: tags and flags. Tags being the standard text-entry field for the student to put keywords against their own content. But flags, I hear you ask? Well they’re sort of preset tags with a bit more weight in the user interface and are mostly applied by the student to some-one else’s content. “This inspired me”, “I need help”, “Favourite”. That sort of thing would be a flag. Really not sure if that’s going to work or not, especially as the academics keep inventing new flags, which isn’t really sustainable. And I suspect some “This made me laugh”, “I don’t know why I like it, but I do”, “Genius” may not get a lot of use and would be better merged into other flags. Flags show up with their own icons & count of times used, and you can filter or sort on them… like tags.

I have a feeling that both these areas will change significantly after the first prototypes. Hopefully for the better.

Integration round 2013-01-25 - got you, hidden tests

2013-01-25T12:40:24+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

61 issues have been successfully integrated with 11 rejected and 5 delayed. That is 85% success, not bad, but still...

Notes:

After all the QAs and major and minor releases, we are back to normal, peace & calm!

But there is not much time to relax, we are just some days away to finish all the planning for the next 2.5 release and start coding like crazy again. Also, all the regressions found since the 2.4 release are being furiously fixed.

Go, go, DEV and STABLE teams!

Also, we detected that our default configuration to run phpunit tests was ignoring a bunch of unit tests (10 unit tests with 32 test cases and near 700 assertions!). It has been fixed and from now the CI servers will prevent us to miss one unit test anymore.

Hot topics:

MDL-33652, MDL-37563 - Various upgrade problems.
MDL-37577 - Fix, for speed, some massive quiz queries.
MDL-36757 - Better handling of hidden grades.
MDL-35816 - Progress about various accessibility issues.
And lots more in areas like administration, assignments, questions, calendar, lessons...

Warm thanks:

To all our parents, for creating and educating us. This Community wouldn't be the same without their help on that.

Ciao all, stronk7

Integration round 2013-01-25 - got you, hidden tests

2013-01-25T12:40:24+00:00

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7).

Cold numbers:

61 issues have been successfully integrated with 11 rejected and 5 delayed. That is 85% success, not bad, but still...

Notes:

After all the QAs and major and minor releases, we are back to normal, peace & calm!

Go, go, DEV and STABLE teams!

Hot topics:

MDL-33652, MDL-37563 - Various upgrade problems.
MDL-37577 - Fix, for speed, some massive quiz queries.
MDL-36757 - Better handling of hidden grades.
MDL-35816 - Progress about various accessibility issues.
And lots more in areas like administration, assignments, questions, calendar, lessons...

Warm thanks:

To all our parents, for creating and educating us. This Community wouldn't be the same without their help on that.

Ciao all, stronk7

Moodle as the central hub of learning with tools plugged in –learning tool interoperability

2013-01-25T00:12:24+00:00

Late last year I went to Madrid Moodlemoot and gave a presentation with Juan Leyva on Moodle and Learning Tool Interoperability.

I should have released this slides ages ago, but here they are.

They cover a different view on things including (at the time) a summary of IMS LTI provider and consumer availability that I knew of. I know of more since then and will update this before I use parts of it again.

Just for ease of access here are some of the links from the presentation:

Some projects pushing the development ->

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/learningapps/

http://www.celtic-project.org/

Moodle 2.3 and 2.4 – some of the improvements since Moodle 2.2

2013-01-25T00:04:05+00:00

Many organisations will have upgraded to Moodle 2.2 last year, and because they are often locked into yearly upgrades only – they will be planning an upgrade in the coming summer.

So one of the questions that I am often asked is what has changed since a specific release?

The notes for each major release and minor release detail all of the changes for each release, so this presentation covers most, (not all) of the major changes that were released since Moodle 2.2 came out.

For the full list of release notes check out the following Moodle Docs pages:

Moodle Quiz Presentation

2013-01-24T23:56:09+00:00

I recently created a presentation on the Moodle Quiz, so I thought it worthwhile me sharing it here.

The quiz is really a powerful tool in the Moodle toolkit. If you are interested in learning more about it, below are some links to the Moodle Docs site and the Moodle forums.

Moodle Quiz Activity Docs: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Quiz_module

Different question types Docs: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Question_types

For discussions on the Quiz Activity check the Moodle Forums

Integration round 2013-01-18 - Happy new year!

2013-01-18T08:13:19+00:00

by Dan Poltawski.

Cold numbers:

90 issues have been successfully integrated with 9 rejected. That is 83% success, hurrah!

Since the last update, 547 issues were integrated, CVS was finally retired and Moodle 2.4 was released on schedule! Apologies for the interuption in service, we were kept busy!

Notes:

We welcome a new member to the integration team - Damyon Wiese, who will be rejecting an issue near you soon!

At the most recent integration team meeting we agreed to move towards a stricter policy on backports. We want to be more consistent and reduce uncessary regressions. In the general case, only bugfixes will be backported to stable branches, new features and improvements will not unless discussed and voted by integrators.

We politely request the help of developers on testing days by ensuring they pay attention to their isuses in integration. If an issue enters 'problem during testing' then we will either need to revert the changes, clarify with the tester or integrate a new fix for the problem reported. It is extremely helpful if the issue assignee makes absolutely clear on the tracker issue what needs to be done so the integration team do not need to chase them. This will help prevent the integration cycle running too long.

Hot topics:

MDL-36297, MDL-34344, MDL-34398 - Caching of HTML purifier strings, CFG and grouplib
MDL-31682, MDL-30070, MDL-37077 - New webservices mod_assign_get_submissions, core_message_xxx_contacts, core_calendar_delete_calendar_events
MDL-33688 - Add progress indicator to drag and drop file upload in filepicker

Warm thanks:

To Frédéric Massart, for providing outstanding peer reviews, MDK and Raspberry pi transportation, thanks!

Ciao! Dan

Integration round 2013-01-18 - Happy new year!

2013-01-18T08:13:19+00:00

by Dan Poltawski.

Cold numbers:

90 issues have been successfully integrated with 9 rejected. That is 83% success, hurrah!

Since the last update, 547 issues were integrated, CVS was finally retired and Moodle 2.4 was released on schedule! Apologies for the interuption in service, we were kept busy!

Notes:

We welcome a new member to the integration team - Damyon Wiese, who will be rejecting an issue near you soon!

Hot topics:

MDL-36297, MDL-34344, MDL-34398 - Caching of HTML purifier strings, CFG and grouplib
MDL-31682, MDL-30070, MDL-37077 - New webservices mod_assign_get_submissions, core_message_xxx_contacts, core_calendar_delete_calendar_events
MDL-33688 - Add progress indicator to drag and drop file upload in filepicker

Warm thanks:

To Frédéric Massart, for providing outstanding peer reviews, MDK and Raspberry pi transportation, thanks!

Ciao! Dan

Latest updates to Moodle released – 2.4.1, 2.3.4, 2.2.7 and 2.1.10

2013-01-14T08:56:24+00:00

Today Jan 14th, Moodle HQ has released the latest versions of Moodle.

The releases cover the following Moodle major versions

Moodle 2.4 (2.4.1 released)
Moodle 2.3 (2.3.4 released)
Moodle 2.2 (2.2.7 released)
Moodle 2.1 (2.1.10 released)

So if you are running a Moodle site, you should consider upgrading to take advantage of the bug fixes, improvements and security fixes.

The downloads are available from GIT, or from the download page http://download.moodle.org/.

Some Random Info

The latest 2.4.1 release covers 164 Moodle Tracker items here is a small extract of stats from it as to which component had issues resolved:

Assignment 16
Questions 9
Enrolments 9
Accessibility 8
Quiz 7
Forum 5

This was not all of them, just a count of the most effected components.