We have the keynote with Martin Dougiamas tomorrow, first thing.  I expect him to talk about Moodle 2.0 and some idea about the future roadmap.

I had a great time listening to Patrick talk about theming moodle this morning.  Tomorrow I will attend Helen’s workshop on Moodle 2.0.  It will be nice to get a tour from an expert rather than trying to figure it out on my own!

I believe there are around 130 people attending, which is a slightly larger group than last year.

Our problem is this (we must have set something wrong):

When a person logs in to mahara directly, it creates an account with the default avatar icon and the institutional email address.

When a person logs in from the moodle block, Mahara creates ANOTHER account.  It adds a 1 after the username and appears to pull in the avatar and email from the moodle instance.

We certainly do not want two accounts for every user depending on how they logged in!!

The is additionally complicated by the fact that if this is really a portfolio, students will need access to it for some agreed-upon time after graduation (I am thinking 12-24 months).  Once they matriculate, they will not be able to log in through moodle because those courses are open to enrolled students only.

Things I need to figure out:

1. If a person has two different accounts in Mahara, won’t the content they add be unavailable from the alternate account?  Surely so, but worth testing.
2. Can students be migrated from one authentication method to another without losing their content?  If not, maybe we don’t want the portfolio so tightly integrated with moodle (even if SSO is a giant convenience).
3. Can you mix authentication methods?  We might need some manual accounts as well as LDAP accounts.
4. How do you lock mahara so that students can ONLY enter through the moodle block?

If it is one or the other, we have some policy thinking to do.  I hate to think that the whole system will be completely tied to course enrollment.  That wasn’t what I had in mind, so we will need to discover the work around.  I see pleas for assistance to Tony in my future. . .

FIrst, there is a nice drop down box where you can select the essay question you want to grade.  Part of the description is how many attempts require grading, and this is updated each session.

Once you have selected your question, at the top of the screen you will see a summary including the name of the question and the number of attempts that have been graded.  The highlighting also appears on the summary list, so you can easily see which individual students’ attempts have been graded.  This is new!

You can use these links to grade the whole set of questions, a partial set of questions, or just the questions that you haven’t graded yet!  This is wonderful.  I remember spending a lot of time going through questions I had already marked in order to find those submitted later (in 1.8.x)

All in all, I find these to be changes that will definitely help MY productivity.  And now I will be more likely to grade a quiz prior to the closure date since I can easily focus on ungraded attempts instead of digging through the entire set of responses to locate those that have not been evaluated.  Quicker feedback for students without significantly more time required from the instructor!  A win-win situation.

Then we got started with the planned sessions for the rest of the day.  The intro sessions were all held in computer labs, so participants there were actively working with Moodle and practicing skills.  These sessions were very popular as a large percentage of the conference participants are just starting with Moodle.

I was pleased to go to a Mahara workshop, because I have been experimenting with Mahara for some time but was interested in seeing how other people were using it.  Two other people from my institution also attended this session, and we are going to try to set up a pilot instance for one of my classes in the fall.

I also went to a presentation on outcomes, which is another thing I really want to work on this fall.  Right now, the outcomes can be set up site wide so that teachers in multiple courses can use the same outcome.  However, I don’t think there are really any good reporting tools to pull out information and aggregate it across courses.  So maybe we will work on that.  I think that all the information should be stored in the gradebook tables, so if we can figure out how to write the queries, we should be able to aggregate the information.  For general education assessment, this could be a great tool.

At the end of the day, we had a debrief and then dismissal.  We hit the road home about 4:30.  I enjoyed the conference very much, and I met some really nice people.  I appreciate Metrotech for sponsoring this even.  Maybe we will do it again next year!

I opened the conference with a presentation on Moodle: What Students Want (or, reading between the lines). I had examined survey data from 4 institutions to determine some commonalities in student comments and further, how to use those comments to improve the student experience.

Afterwards we had a wonderful lunch, catered by Metrotech students, and broke into 4 separate tracks for interest sessions: moodle basic users, moodle intermediate users, moodle administration, and moodle technical.

I attended a session that was videoconferenced from France. Nicholas Connault gave us a review of the new gradebook in Moodle 1.9. We used Elluminate, but had a lot of trouble with the connection. We dropped at least 5 times, and that was frustrating for the audience. Other video sessions were technically more successful.  We used Elluminate for all of them.

Next, I went to a session on adding closed captioning to video. We learned two different techniques for accomplishing this goal. One was using free software, called MAGpie. The other was using Camtasia. I think Camtasia was easier, but for individuals with real budget constraints, the magpie method works well enough. The major problem, of course, is getting the transcription to begin with. Metrotech was fortunate in that they could hire students in the medical transcriptionist program to provide the initial text files. Once these were created, you could copy and paste to the appropriate program and then cue the text to appear at the appropriate point on the video timeline. When the video plays, the CC button appears and the user can selectively show or hide the captions. I have been interested in closed captioning for some time, and was delighted to find out about these new tools.

My session on E-Portfolios: Getting Started with Moodle was the very last one of the day. I was delighted to find that the room was full and there were many people interested in a simple way to get started with portfolios. I started with an overview of the types of portfolios one could use, and the benefits and costs of each type. I also pointed out that some types of portfolios (showcase/employer) were not very compatible with others (growth/developmental). The last portion of the presentation demonstrated a number of portfolios pre-service teachers from McMurry had created using a standard instance of Moodle.

The conference ended around 4 p.m., and I am looking forward to the sessions schedule for tomorrow. There are a number that I am very interested in, and I will give one presentation on using uploadcourse.php to create course shells as a batch process and end the day serving on a Moodle Panel taking questions from the audience. The highlight of the day, of course, begins at 8:00 a.m. when we are addressed by Martin Dougiamas from Australia.

I help manage the moodle.org databases–modules and plugins, themes, and Moodle Buzz. On rare occasions, we have spam entries or empty entries (people just trying things out!) Mostly, these databases are used by people who contribute code, themes, or articles about Moodle. The databases (at this time) range in size from 334 in modules and plugins, 53 themes, and 200 Moodle Buzz entries.

On April 19, I noticed that the icon for entries needing approval had been changed from a red checkmark to a black checked box. This was a problem! The majority of the entries needing approval were entries that had been updated by the authors, not entries that had been added. I had no way to sort those, so I usually resorted to scanning all the entries for the red checkmark–several pages worth at 50-100 entries per page. The black checkbox graphic was extremely hard to distinguish from the other icons clustered at the end of each record.

Helen was good enough to file a tracker request on my behalf. Within a couple of days, a fix had been added to the code in cvs

2008-04-22 Tuesday 21:34  skodak

	* mod/data/: lib.php, styles.php:
	MDL-14424 approve icon now bigger + css class added

2008-04-21 Monday 22:15  skodak

	* mod/data/: field.php, view.php, lib.php, styles.php: 

	MDL-14458 - optgroups Fields and Other in search menu; removed
	unused search code, html labels, added option to sort by time
	modified

2008-04-20 Sunday 04:46  skodak

	* mod/data/lib.php, mod/data/view.php, lang/en_utf8/data.php: 

	MDL-14424 - approval icon is bigger again, it is possible to sort
	by Approved status now

So I am very pleased that I not only got a more eye-catching graphic (which is now customizable through css), and also the capability for sorting on the ‘approved’ or ‘time modified’ fields. Thank you Petr!

After a prolonged scuffle with flexpage (which for some unknown reason wasn’t working properly and also prevented upload users from working properly), I was happy to find success with upload users.

First, you have to create the csv file. I usually do this in excel, but check in wordpad before uploading to ensure that no empty lines of commas or other types of space have crept in.

Then, you can proceed to the upload users form in moodle. Now there are many ways to fine tune the process.  You can add new users only or update existing accounts.  See screen capture.

Additionally, there are some more advanced settings, such as email settings, html editor settings, and institution name. (see screen capture)

You are supposed to create all the courses before you enroll the users. If you forget, you will see a report that lets you know exactly which courses did not exist.  The users will be created, but they will not be enrolled in any courses. (see screen capture)

At our institution, we run upload users every night for about 2 weeks. While we have never *unenrolled* students, as they change schedules through the add-drop period, we can get them enrolled in new classes. If you need to run upload users multiple times, the settings may change a bit.  (See screen capture)Moodle helpfully gives you a report after a successful run.  Naturally if you have several thousand lines in the csv file, this is less helpful. But for initial runs to test your input file, you can see very quickly if you have a problem.

Now that I have this working properly, I will turn my attention to uploadcourse.php. Stay tuned!