We have been having quite a bit of fun in my Advanced Technology in Schools course. A big part of the course is exploring the magnificent array of on-line tools for teachers.

Our usual modus operandi is to introduce a class of tools or services–wikis, blogs, video hosting, social bookmarking, mindmapping, etc.–and each person in the class takes a tool and works with it for a while. Then they prepare a short demonstration of the tool or service for the class (we used jing for some, and in-class presentations for some). A blog post is also prepared and posted in our community blog.

Because I have a small number of people in the class, I made it a rule that there could be no duplicates when selecting tools or services for review. So every time we start a new topic, I create a forum for students to “claim” their tool or service. A proper claim requires the name of the tools to be specified in the subject line and a link to the tool to be placed in the text.

It is amusing to watch the race to stake a claim. We all laugh about it, but the competition is fierce! And woe unto the absent student . .

I am pleased to be teaching the Advanced Technology in Schools course again.  This one doesn’t come around very often, and it is one of my favorite courses to teach.  That is probably because I learn as much as anyone!

We are working in an intense, 3 week format.  About half the work will be done on-line and half in a computer lab on campus.  We focus on web 2.0 technologies and consider how those things can be used to engage students in communication, collaboration, and reflection.

This class uses two parallel moodle courses.  One with assignments and grades, where students have the student role and the instructor has editingteacher rights.  The other is a true, shared course and everyone in the class has editingteacher rights.  We keep the resources in the shared course and part of the fun is for everyone in the class to post resources and links so they will become part of the course the next time.

We will be experiencing the usual topics–blogs, wikis, social networking applications–as well as a variety of collaborative and multimedia tools to enhance learning.  I hope that each student will, at the least, contribute new artifacts to a digital portfolio and, at most, embark upon the creation of a personal learning environment woven together with a variety of tools.

We use a shared blog on eduspaces.net, mostly because there are some social networking tools there and I have been a member of that community for some time.  Hopefully, some other eduspaces members will drop in and comment on the student’s posts from time to time.

So if you are interested in technology and education and have a mind to do so,  please join the csc3315 community at eduspaces and participate with us!  We will be active for the remainder of the month of May (2008).

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Most favorite hacks (moodle 1.8)

My most favorite hacks:

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Increase the number of course summaries displayed before going to collapsed mode in category view:

the following change was made in course/lib.php
line 13 should read
define(’COURSE_MAX_SUMMARIES_PER_PAGE?‘, 25); // courses

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Allow admins to edit posts after closing:

In moodle/config.php file, add the following two lines:

// Setting this to true will enable admins to edit any post at any time

//  $CFG->admineditalways = true;

except uncomment the second line (remove the two slashes):

// Setting this to true will enable admins to edit any post at any time

  $CFG->admineditalways = true;

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Change the default course settings to create topic courses instead of weekly courses.

changes made in course/edit.php

98 change
$mform->setDefault(’format’, ‘weeks’);

to

$mform->setDefault(’format’, ‘topics’);

If you wanted to, you could change the default number of topics/weeks in a course. See
104 $mform->setDefault(’numsections’, 10);

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Increase shortname field length in the course request form and the course creation form.

In moodle/course/edit_form.php

line 72
$mform->addElement(’text’,’shortname’, get_string(’shortname’),’maxlength=”25″ size=”25″‘);

moodle/course/request_form.php

line 13
$mform->addElement(’text’, ’shortname’, get_string(’shortname’), ‘maxlength=”25″ size=”25″‘);

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Assignment grading interface: turn quickgrade on as default, increase default number of assignments shown to 20, and remove instructor from the list.

in moodle/mod/assignment/lib.php

line 682
$perpage = get_user_preferences(’assignment_perpage’, 20);

line 684
$quickgrade = get_user_preferences(’assignment_quickgrade’, 1);

line 982
$teacherattempts = false; /// Temporary measure

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Set default course blocks rather than using sticky blocks.

in moodle/config.php, lines 20-25

Find the defaultblocks_topics line and replace with this. Also change
the string for defalutblocks_weeks. Don’t change social though.

$CFG->defaultblocks_topics =
‘course_menu,myCourses:activity_modules,calendar_upcoming,quickmail’;

$CFG->defaultblocks_weeks =
‘course_menu,myCourses:activity_modules,calendar_upcoming,quickmail’;

Here are my notes for creating and using a local language pack. This is a great option in moodle, because it lets you create customized language files for your institution that are not overwritten when you install updated moodle code.

Following these excellent directions from Tim Allen:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=49150#p225224

In particular:

“The local pack en_utf8_local will not appear in the language menus for selection and your users do not need to change their settings.” So the reason you are not seeing the customized language pack in the menu is because you are not supposed to! wink The local pack en_utf8_local and the main pack en_utf8 are checked together (local one first, then the main one) and the language menu only shows one entry for both of them.

So, I did as suggested. First, copy the en_utf8 language pack, rename it, and go through with text editor and change all the desired strings. Things like “instructor” not teacher; “enroll” not “enrol”, “expiration” not “expiry”, and “course prefix and number” not “shortname”. Also, include all the extra language files from the blocks I have installed (quickmail, course menu plus, mycourses, gradebook enhancements). (Well, I have never been quite straight on where those need to go, so I put them in local anyway. I wanted to keep all my changes together).

Important things to note:

• The file must be named en_utf8_local. The first time around, I named it something else and of course it didn’t work properly!
• The file must be placed in the moodle/lang folder.
• Default site language is en_utf8.
• Do not include more than the necessary files. If strings are changed in main moodle language files, having the same file here will pre-empt loading of altered strings and help files

image by LadyHawke365

I was delighted when I found that there really was a script that allows you to use a csv file to create a set of courses on Moodle. This is something that I think should be part of the moodle core. Fortunately, a solution exists–contributed and tweaked by several kind souls in the forums at moodle.org. While additional batch tools maybe available in later moodle versions, 1.8.x does not include them. The solution I present here is good for moodle 1.8.x (I have done it on 1.8.1 and 1.8.4 WIMP and LAMP).

When setting up our pilot portfolio instance, I needed to be able to create some 36 student portfolios. Getting the process down now will ensure that additional portfolios can be created quickly each semester.

First you have to have the users all in the system. I created a “sandbox” course and ran uploadusers with a csv file to create the accounts and enroll all the students students into the sandbox course. This course can be deleted or hidden, as desired. In fact, you don’t have to enroll them into a course at all–that field is optional. I was going to use it as a means of sending a bulk email to portfolio users.

Where did the information come from? I actually exported gradebook information from the appropriate courses on the main Moodle LMS for the university and dropped it into the proper columns in an excel spreadsheet. After that, I filled in the remaining fields and saved the file in csv format. (If you use excel, always check the end of the file in wordpad. It is very easy to get extra rows of empty fields if you are not careful.)

Second, you need to install uploadcourse.php (this version of the file contributed by M. Pearson at Earlham–rename it to take off the txt extension if you use it) to your moodle/admin directory.

Create a csv file with the required information to create the courses. My file looks something like this. The file is a bit tricky to make. Almost all of the fields are required to create courses, even some things you might rather skip over! Fortunately, the script is friendly and will stop immediately when it encounters a required field with no data. Do double check the maxbytes settings in the moodle system policies or calculate the correct values. This value is in bytes, not mb.

If successful, the courses will be created and each student will be assigned as the instructor for that course. For more information about the various settings and fields, please see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=30126#p339447

You can create categories with this script, but the categories are only created if at least one course exists in them. If you need to create an “empty” category, then you will want to create a placeholder course with a placeholder instructor account. I created a user called “tba” and placeholder courses which were deleted later.

The categories are created in the order of the csv file, which can be a plus if you would like to manipulate those. But if you make a mistake the category order is tedious to change afterwards.

You trigger this script manually. I haven’t figured out how to add it to the admin menu.

This process worked very well to create portfolio courses for our portfolio instance. Although it takes a couple of steps, that is much faster than creating 20 or 30 courses individually and then having to set up the course setting information and assign the instructor role.

I am STILL on my soapbox about wishing to get off the WIMP platform. We are running php5.1.2, because we had a lot of trouble with IIS and violation errors last year when we upgraded php. We rolled back and were doing fine under moodle 1.6.3, but now it is a different story.

We stopped extra backups for old instances; that helped, but we still have a peak load problem. I am seriously thinking about moving my courses to another server. I will feel guilty, but I will be having class!!

Maybe one of these will help; we are checking them out.
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=78290

This one looks helpful:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=61334

This one I started, but lots of other interesting info got posted.
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=55451

This one has more on php; they think the slowdown is related to cron.
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=57715

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Followup:

Performance Tuning

1. Set the variable allow_call_time_pass_reference = Off
2. Changed Recycle work processes to 360 minutes instead of 1740, this should keep the memory usage from growing too great.

Error logs in Windows
The log entries should be in the event viewer application log. If they’re not there, try uncommenting the settings in your php.ini file which control where the log entries are stored, e.g. log_errors = On and error_log = syslog. Save php.ini and restart IIS.

Turn on debugging in php
To turn on debugging, try setting the Server -> Debugging options on. Also, in your config.php, try adding:

define('MDL_PERFDB' , true); http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=74795#p333327

Final update: Upgrading to the newest version of 1.8 fixes this problem. It was mostly related to database queries. Refactoring has us back to normal for the spring 08 semester. What a relief!

Well, we are having a big problem with IE7 and ppt files in Moodle. If you click on the link, you get a presentation with a single blank slide. Reminds me very much of the old Windows 98 problem that was fixed with the first service pack. . . Integration with IE was problematic at times.

The only way I have been able to fix it so far is to append ?forcedownload=1 to the link in Moodle. The problem even occurs when I use a PowerPoint show. And I dislike those because you have to view full screen and endure the transitions.

I tend to think this is an IE problem. It happens with IE7 no matter which moodle version I test; it does not happen with IE6. I can’t replicate it with Firefox either. It happens whether in a new window, or loaded into the same window. But it is going to be great trouble to fix. Instructors will have to manually change every link since the students will likely not have Firefox installed.

Sigh. I am definitely too tired for this. More discussion here:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=76969

Update: Service pack is FINALLY out for Office 2007. Some people also reported relief for the blank white slide problem after tinkering with the security settings in IE. I think we have this sorted now. But I still have the patch on the server. I guess we will see how things go with a new build of Moodle 1.9.x for summer terms.

Problem:

when I go to the grade exceptions screen, I
select a student who is third in the list
select the third assignment in the list
click “exclude from grading” and the third student is excluded from the first assignment in the list.

I have concluded that this a MOODLE bug, not a GBv2 bug, since it also happens on another 1.8.2 instance I run that has had no code enhancements/hacks.

So therefore, I am filing it in the Moodle Tracker as
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-10904

Clearly, the javascript fix provided by John helped with the refresh problem when assigning an exclusion.� But the exclusions are applied to the first assignment no matter which assignment you select!� Well, let me correct that.� When *I* applied the fix, it didn’t correct the exclusion problem.� It did appear to work for him.� So I probably messed it up!

So I conclude this is a real bug and I hope it gets fixed soon. I have asked John to send the actual file so that we don’t have to rely on my slim to non-existent coding ability.

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http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-71

Cannot exclude grades from any but first assignment; cannot exclude from multiple assignments

Problem with grade exceptions, Moodle 1.8.2 GBv2

I am using the patch uploaded around July 23, 2007 on this system (1.8.1 system)

I have a class with 5 students and 44 assignments.

First problem:

when I go to the grade exceptions screen, I
select a student who is third in the list
select the third assignment in the list
click “exclude from grading” and the third student is excluded from the first assignment in the list.

Second problem:
when I exclude a student from a single assignment (which works only when it is the FIRST assignment!), I can’t get the screen to refresh so that I can exclude students from a different assignment. Even if I click on a different tab and come back, I cannot start excluding for a second assignment.

This is big trouble!

Related discussion:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=71428

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So I am thinking about course shells and how instructors can get content loaded into the shells.� Basically, you have course restore add, course restore delete, and import.� Anthony Borrow reports (sorry, haven’t found the link yet) that his school expects teachers to keep and use their own archives.� Other people indicate (no link for this either!) that they make shells and people import content from previous courses that are still on the server.� So I decided to login as an instructor, try the course restore delete and see what happened!

*Runs smack into roles problem*

The restore worked except for, at the bottom, you have a choice of teacher roles that are, more or less, below the editingteacher.� 1) create a new role, 2) assign as non-editing teacher, 3) assign as student, 4) assign as guest.�

See: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-6831 and

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-9066�

So I chose new role. This left me with instructor rights, but it created a copy of the editingteacher role in the admin area of define roles AND I no longer showed up as instructor in the roles assigned display list.� But I still had editing rights as an instructor.� I logged out and logged back in.� I still had editing rights as an instructor, but did not show up as “editing teacher” in the lists.

So I log in as admin to go see what happened to the roles.� I saw that a copy of editing teacher had been created.� When, as admin, I deleted the new copy of the editing teacher role, it was reported that 0 users were assigned to this role. Then, my instructor account was automatically returned to the editingteacher role in the restored course and became visible again in the roles/participants lists.

Strangeness, strangeness.� So I did some further tweaking of roles.� I set up an override on the teacher definition, allowing teachers to assign teachers.� I had this on my 1.6.3 system, so it seemed that this setting might solve the problem.� And, I renamed the role so my “teachers” would be “instructors”.� Evidently, in 1.9 we will return to setting the string for what to call students and teachers as part of the course settings.� Right now, it is picked up from the role name.

Now, when I (as instructor) restore with delete, the editingteacher role shows up as expected and I can keep myself in the course as instructor.

Personally, I think it is a bug that any instructor can create a new role through restore.� What would happen if you had 1000 instructors trying to do this?� Scary thought!� However, adding the role override corrects the practical problem of allowing yourself to stay the instructor!� But “new role” is still an option, and I think that is not quite right.

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