Moodle News :: Blog

http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=19&rid=4151

New course management program to replace WebCT from Adelle Whitefoot, The North Wind

http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=19&rid=4136

High school from home from Bridget Jones, Auburn Journal

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=156948

by Helen Foster.  

Samaritans has developed a series of e-learning courses in Moodle to provide a cost-effective and convenient way for volunteers to be trained in their own homes.

Samaritans is a registered UK charity, with over 18,000 volunteers, which offers 24-hour confidential support to anyone in emotional distress.

E-learning offers great value for money, and can be organised to fit in with volunteers' personal schedules, as it can be carried out from any Internet-enabled computer, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Nigel Ross, Training and Development Officer for Samaritans, explains: "We extensively researched the industry standard for e-learning platforms and chose the open source learning management system Moodle because we were impressed by the robust and continually evolving platform that it offers as well as its large user base, including the Open University, NHS, local government and defence."

Moodle Partner HowToMoodle is providing Moodle consultancy, training, customisation and hosting for Samaritans.

For further details of how Samaritans are using Moodle to provide e-learning for volunteers, see the HowToMoodle Case Study - Samaritans.

Moodle Partners are a worldwide group of authorised service companies committed to financially supporting the open source Moodle project. They provide a range of optional commercial services for Moodle users around the world.

http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=19&rid=4128

U New England in Australia Adds Moodle to LMS Lineup from Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology

http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=19&rid=4117

NCCCS LMS Feasibility Study Now Available from Jonathon Sweetin

System administrators or users may find problems that developers can not reproduce or can not diagnose. I would like to describe my approach.

First step is to try to replicate the problem on the my own development machine which is usually very different from the original server. If I can replicate it then I can probably fix it and when it finally works for me it will probably work on the original server too.

If I can not reproduce it I usually try to get the same data (db dump, backups, etc.) and ask for the exact steps to reproduce it, preferably with screenshots. The full db dump is always the best way, unfortunately privacy regulations often prevent admins from sending it to me even in encrypted form.

The next step is to try to replicate the exact server environment – that is OS version, PHP, database, configurations, etc. If I can not replicate it on the same software then I might eventually give up and wait till somebody else manages to reproduce it or I have to keep reading the code until I find the bug.

If I manage to reproduce the problem on the same sw, but not on my own test server then the problem may be a PHP or database version specific bug or it may be outside of Moodle code. You would probably try to use different PHP and database version first, then search through respective release notes or bug trackers.

As you can see a lot of these diagnostics can be done easily by sysadmins that have access to the original data – of course they have to know a bit about PHP, SQL syntax and Moodle internals. The more time the reporter spends on a bug report the higher chance the bug gets fixed quickly.

In the next post I am planing to describe my typical security review, hopefully it will be a bit less boring,

ciao!

Moodle has a new language pack, Dzongkha, thanks to Tenzin Dendup and translation coordinator Koen Roggemans.

According to the Wikipedia article, Dzongkha language, Dzongkha is the official language of Bhutan, South Asia and is spoken by around 600 thousand people.

There are currently a total of 86 Moodle language packs for Moodle 1.x (source: Moodle download – Language packs). Many translators are currently working hard on Moodle 2.0 language packs. The Moodle 2.0 language packs download page shows the percentage of translated strings for each language. A big thank you to all our Moodle translators as listed in the Translation credits.

I got asked some questions about oublog (I mean, from somebody who is considering using it on their Moodle system), and I thought the answers might be useful to other people, so I'm reposting here.

What is the Personal blogs link on the front page?

The link on the home page takes you to the personal blog for the current user. I don't think there is a way to remove it, so please just hide it if you don't want the personal blog facility (if you are only using course blogs).

How can I set a course blog up for use as a journal where only the student involved, and a teacher on the course, can see that student's personal blog?

a - Set 'Individual blogs' option on blog settings to 'Separate individual blogs' (means students can't see each others' blogs)

b - Make sure your teacher role(s) has the 'View individual blogs' capability (I think they should have this by default but just to check)

c - Decide whether or not to use group mode:

i. If you only have one teacher there is no point.

ii. If you have lots of different teachers, each of which has their own group of students, then use group mode. Use visible groups if the teachers are allowed to see each others' students, or separate groups (and of course make sure the teachers belong to the groups) if they are only allowed to see their own students.

Who can edit comments?

You can delete comments (your own; or whoever posted the blog post can delete all comments; so can admins obviously), but not edit them. We didn't provide an edit facility for comments because they're supposed to be kind of trivial. [Also because, since we have to make sure everything's auditable, making them editable adds a lot of complexity.]

Could you add a grading option when upgrading the module to Moodle 2?

I will see what we can do but can't promise anything unless we manage to get some internal users to request it.

If we added grading, how should it work? Would you want the teacher to grade the student's participation (i.e. a single grade) or to rate each post like on forum (i.e. ratings per post with some kind of aggregation feature, like taking the average, to come up with an overall grade)?

My guess is that the former is more useful - but it's also something you can achieve already by manually adding a grade for the activity in the gradebook and having teachers use the gradebook interface to set the grade, so we'd only be making the interface a bit nicer.

There's now a 'stable version' of ForumNG. This is intended for anyone else who wants to use it on a production Moodle 1.9 site. From September, this should be exactly the same as the live, fully-tested version used with students on the OU system.

Since I made a long forum post about it, I'll just suggest you should please read that for full information if you're interested! Or for the lazy, the download link can be found on the standard information/download page for ForumNG.

Also: I apologise to anyone whose comments I didn't reply to, or replied crazy late. I do now have a feed reader set up to monitor the Atom feed of blog comments, so I should be able to respond quickly to any comments you leave on this bug in future (assuming I have anything to add, that is). That is, if it (said feed reader) works. I am not at all sure it does...

It is a book that the community has needed for a long time, a book that tells you how to write Moodle code. Now it is finally here. Does it live up to expectations?

Yes, I think it does. The authors, Mike Churchward and Jonathan Moore, are two experienced Moodle developers (they both work for Canadian Moodle Partner Remote Learner) so they can write authoritatively on the subject.

One issue with a book like this is that the examples given are, necessarily, fairly basic. To illustrate key techniques and ideas, a book must explain using the simplest example that makes the point. The question is, when you come to solving real problems, will the techniques you have learned expand to cope? Well, this is where the experience of the authors counts. They are telling you the right way to do things that works for real applications, even if they are only using simple examples to illustrate them.

The book does a thorough job of covering just about every type of Moodle plugin there is. Of course, some plugin types get more space than others, with the two most important, blocks and activity modules getting the most space. Therefore, some other plugin types, like question types, and gradebook plugins, are covered rather briefly. Between the chapters on the different types of plugins are chapters on more general topics like security, accessing the database, and so on.

Anyone who has had code reviewed by me will know that I get really pedantic when I review something. As I was reading the book I made a list of minor errors, or points where I disagreed with the authors. From the 300 pages of the book, I only found 22 things to put on my list, and none of them are interesting enough to mention here. (I did send the list to Jonathan.) So, I think this book has a very high standard of accuracy.

This book does assume you already know how to program in PHP, and write HTML and CSS. I think that was the right decision. There are plenty of excellent books out there that will teach you to write general web application in PHP, and it would be silly to duplicate those in a book that is uniquely about writing code for Moodle.

It is unfortunate timing that this book was released only a few months before Moodle 2.0. Moodle 2.0 does change quite a lot of the rules for how to do Moodle development, and so a lot of the details in the book will soon be out of date. However, don't let that stop you from getting this book. We have just talked about how this book helps you make the jump from being a general PHP developer to being specifically a Moodle (1.9) developer. Well, from there to being a Moodle 2.0 developer is just another small step. You won't be wasting much time if you learn about Moodle 1.9 first, and anyway, some people will still be running Moodle 1.9 for some time to come, and it will be a while before there is a book about Moodle 2.0 development on sale.

This should go without saying, but programming is an activity that you actually need to do to understand. You won't become an expert Moodle programmer just be reading a book. You will become a Moodle programmer by actually trying to write Moodle code, and learning from your own mistakes, and from the code other people have written in the past. What a book like this will do for you is that it will help you avoid a lot of the really basic mistakes, and it will set you off on the right path. So it will make your own learning-by-doing much more efficient, but I cannot replace the doing. Also, I would like to point out that while this is the only book about Moodle development, it is certainly not the only resource to help you learn Moodle development. If you are interested in this book, you should also look at the Developer documentation on Moodle Docs and the Introduction to Moodle Programming course on http://dev.moodle.org/.

Overall, if you want to learn Moodle development, this is a good book to help you attain your goal. Sure, you can get a lot of the information for free online, but in this book the authors set it out clearly and in a logical order. The information in this book has been written by expert Moodle developers and then carefully reviewed, so you can read the book without being on your guard for misinformation. You would have to be more careful just using the information Google finds for you online. So, as I say, this book lives up to expectations. If you want a book on Moodle development, get this one, and don't worry too much about Moodle 2.0 making it out-of-date.