It looks like Petr Skoda may have fixed this as part of MDL-29684 but this is only fixed in master, not the stable branches. (and I haven’t tested it)

And unfortunately as the sync process has already screwed up the enrolments on the courses, simply applying the patch to the clients 2.2 site wouldn’t work – the only way it seems it might work would be to revert back to the 1.9 site and re-run the upgrade with the patch in place – or manually go through each course and fix the enrolments. Unfortunately we didn’t notice this early enough and the site was already being used so the client is now going through each course and manually fixing the enrolments for their teachers (time-consuming and frustrating!)

IMO this sort of issue should be back-ported but hopefully this post might help prevent others from experiencing the same pain!

The initial work involved a large amount of restructuring and very limited (if any) differences in the UI to users…. but Ankit has just finished a new “interactions” report that displays SCORM interactions in a more readable manner – This report is currently available in MDL-28277 and will probably become part of Moodle 2.2 core very soon. This interactions report is something that has been requested a lot in the forums and will hopefully allow teachers to make a lot more sense out of the data that SCORM presents.

Kudos to Ankit for his hard work on this project – it will be interesting to see any new SCORM report plugins that are developed and hopefully the new interactions report provides a useful addition to the SCORM reporting in Moodle! Thanks heaps to Google for funding Ankit’s time to work on the project!

As part of Mayank’s work a small number of SCORM 2004 issues have been resolved in Moodle 2.2 and hopefully with the automated test harness in place it will help to progress with other SCORM 2004 bugs.

If you would like to keep track of Moodles SCORM 2004 progress, add yourself as a watcher to MDL-7068 where each SCORM 2004 test has been added as a task.

If you would like to install the test harness and check it out in action – see the instructions here:
http://docs.moodle.org/dev/SCORM_Test_Harness#Running_ADL_SCORM_Test

One of the challenges we faced was loading 189 SCORM packages into a Moodle Course – I knocked up a quick script to import bulk SCORM packages that is available on MDL-17822 if anyone is interested!

Mayank’s work has been a valuable contribution and I’m personally appreciative of the effort he put into the test harness – it’s going to save me a LOT of time – and hopefully help to prevent any SCORM regressions from appearing in new versions of Moodle! – and thanks heaps to Google for helping to fund Mayank’s time to do the work!

Posting here in case someone else runs into this weird bug in the hope that it might save someone some time!
Pseudo code:
httpReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
httpReq.open(“POST”, url,false);
httpReq.setRequestHeader(‘Content-Type’, ‘application/x-www-form-urlencoded’);
httpReq.send(param);

When “param” contains something like this it works fine!
id=&a=11

but when “param” contains something like this – it crashes IE 7:
id=&a=11&cmi_corelesson_status=incomplete&cmicoreexit=suspend&cmi_suspend_data=|&attempt=1&scoid=28

Initially I thought the encoding might be the issue and encoding the params using encodeURI() seemed to work – but further testing found it was still an issue.

The fix was to re-structure the code so that it didn’t call the code from a child window but from within the “parent” window…. crazy….

Mayank Gupta will be working on a SCORM Test Harness to allow us to automatically run the SCORM ADL tests on the latest code – this has previously been a time consuming process and can only be performed in IE – this will greatly improve our existing code review process and help to identify the issues with SCORM 2004 support and allow ongoing development without breaking compatibility with previous tests, for more information on this see MDL-26912 – a secondary task for Mayank is to add tracker issues for the failing SCORM 2004 tests and if he has time suggest fixes for a few of them as well.

Ankit Kumar Agarwal will be working on improving the quiz reporting in SCORM – presenting the responses to quiz questions (if the SCORM package reports them back to Moodle) in a more readable manner – for more information on this see MDL-27256 , a secondary task for Ankit(if he has time) is to look at some of the SCORM 2004 tests that are failing and suggest fixes for them.

Hopefully this will get us a little bit closer to having full SCORM 2004 support directly in Moodle.

here’s the full press release:
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The 2.0 version has the following features:

• Single folder for really easy installation – just drop it into a new folder called “turnitin” in the new /plagiarism folder in 2.0
• Uses Teachers own credentials instead of a “global teacher” account – makes for better integration with Turnitins other products like Grademark
• I mentioned it above – new “experimental” integration with Grademark. (needs a few victims to test/give me feedback)
• Better Date handling – uses the start/close dates in Moodle as the start/close dates in the Turnitin assignments it creates (although Turnitin doesn’t like start/close dates before the assignment is created so it uses the earliest possible date instead)
• More advanced setting of Turnitin features when creating/updating an assignment. You can now set:
  • Whether to compare a submission against other students files
  • Whether to compare a submission against Internet sources
  • Whether to compare a submission against Journals, periodicals, publications
  • When to generate the Originality Reports
  • Whether to use an institutional repository (if set up)
  • Exclude Bibliograpy references from the report
  • Exclude quoted text from the report
  • Exclude small matches from the report
• Improved performance and handling of errors (still more improvements to come over the next week on the error reporting page)
• Now creates assignment in Turnitin as soon as Moodle assignment is created instead of waiting for the first file to be submitted (it creates the assignment in Turnitin when the next cron cycle runs after the Moodle assignment is created)
• Easier integration with other Moodle modules (soon to come) – keep an eye out for integration with essay quiz questions and the Workshop module.

The new Moodle 1.9 version has the following new features:

• Better Date handling – uses the start/close dates in Moodle as the start/close dates in the Turnitin assignments it creates (although Turnitin doesn’t like start/close dates before the assignment is created so it uses the earliest possible date instead)
• More advanced setting of Turnitin features when creating/updating an assignment. You can now set:
  • Whether to compare a submission against other students files
  • Whether to compare a submission against Internet sources
  • Whether to compare a submission against Journals, periodicals, publications
  • When to generate the Originality Reports
  • Whether to use an institutional repository (if set up)
• Improved performance and handling of errors

Sites using an older 1.9 version of the integration that wish to upgrade to Moodle 2.0 must upgrade their 1.9 Turnitin integration first – otherwise they will lose content/data during upgrade.

The new 1.9 version of the code is available as a git branch here:
http://github.com/danmarsden/moodle19-patch_turnitin
(this is based off the old mdl19-turnitin branch on git.catalyst.net.nz so if you’ve been using that it should be an easy switch)
Installation of this on an existing 1.9 site should only be attempted if you can easily manage significant customisations to your Moodle site (and know how to use git) – if this is new/difficult for you, best that you wait untill you upgrade to Moodle 2.0 – you can also get this code in patch or diff format here:
http://github.com/danmarsden/moodle19-patch_turnitin/compare/MOODLE_19_STABLE…mdl19-turnitin.diff
http://github.com/danmarsden/moodle19-patch_turnitin/compare/MOODLE_19_STABLE…mdl19-turnitin.patch

The 2.0 version of the code is available as a git branch here:
http://github.com/danmarsden/moodle-plagiarism_turnitin
or you can get it as a zip here:
http://github.com/danmarsden/moodle-plagiarism_turnitin/zipball/master

To install the 2.0 version – just grab the files above and put them in a new folder called “turnitin” under the /plagiarism folder in 2.0
then..

1. Go to: Admin > Advanced features and select the checkbox “Enable plagiarism plugins” and save the settings
2. Go to: Admin > Plugins > Plagiarism Prevention > Turnitin configure this page as usual
3. Select the “Turnitin Defaults” tab and set the default settings you would like when a new module that allows plagiarism is created.
4. Make sure Scheduled Tasks/Cron is running on your site
5. Create a new Assignment and make sure Turnitin is enabled
6. Submit a file
7. Done!

I’m also working with Sergey Butakov to generate a Moodle 2.0 Crot plagiarism plugin – Crot is an open source based plagiarism tool that uses the MS Live (Bing) Search engine as a backend for comparing results – it’s not quite ready/working yet, but you can check out the progress so far here:
http://github.com/danmarsden/moodle-plagiarism_crot

For those wanting to create their own Plagiarism plugin with another tool, I’ve created a “new” template that can be used as a basis for creating your own plugin here:

http://github.com/danmarsden/moodle-plagiarism_new

and developer docs on the api are available here:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Plagiarism_API

It’s important to note that Moodle 2.0 doesn’t include any Plagiarism plugins by default – you must install them separately – but as it is all self-contained in a folder it is very easy to install. Inclusion of Plagiarism Plugins in Moodle Core may be investigated/debated/discussed in future (definitely not before 2.0 final release!)

Always keen to hear feedback – let me know how you go!

The NZ Open Source Awards are a bit more flexible and a wider range of projects will be eligible but nominations are closing very soon!