Archive for January, 2009

Student Feedback

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

It’s really important for teachers to get feedback from their students – it can be very humbling, but it is always good to try and improve where we can. Teachers and Developers engage in the moodle.org forums to constantly refine Moodle, but we can sometimes miss the voice of the students! Alex Miller has a post on the LTT blog about a session at Moodlemoot AU last year presented by some Year 12 students. One of the comments is directed at teachers – “Our teachers don’t know enough about the capability of these systems, which frustrates us, let us help!”

This really points out our need to train the teachers!- Moodle has a great Teacher certification program facilitated by Moodle Partners all over the world, I’d highly reccomend this program, the more teachers understand Moodle, the happier the students will be!

I also find the end of that statement interesting “let us help!” – students are a great resource, make sure that you provide tools in your courses to allow your students to share information – encourage it! – I’m looking forward to see the new Wiki tools get integrated into Moodle – engaging your students to generate wiki pages based on the course content will help them learn, and provide a great resource to share with other students!

The comments by the students in the LTT blog regarding social networking is interesting too! – Teachers have a range of opinions on this as shared in the moodle.org forums, it’s good to hear what the students feel about this too! – maybe something for a future blog post!

Moodle 2.0 patches

Monday, January 12th, 2009

I’ve been working on getting a few patches ready for 2.0 this week that have been sitting in my list for a while! 2.0 is shaping up to be a really good Moodle release!

MDL-7206 – a patch to allow all assignments to be downloaded in a single zip
This is something I wrote a while back that has been hacked at by various people and a patch in that issues is available for 1.9 – I’ve wanted to get this into core for a while, but haven’t ever got round to it!

Some issues around error handling in backups – silient backups/restores dont’ do any error reporting, so I’m planning on modifying the backup_logs table to allow other errors to be saved other than just data related to scheduled backups.  details on this are in MDL-14736 and MDL-12037

I’d also like to prepare a patch for a new backup/restore type that would allow a restore to update a course, rather than duplicating or needing to delete the content of the course first – it would be nice to see this feature integrated into an improved backup/restore UI to allow a teacher to select each individual activity/resource and decide whether to update/delete/roll dates forward etc.

And then theres the Turnitn stuff I’d like to get into core, although it will require some funding so I can convert the code to work with the new stuff in 2.0