Moodle is lucky to have 4 successful GSOC projects this year – hopefully this will be a rewarding experience for the successful students and will produce some useful code for Moodle! – Thanks to Google for providing the funding to allow this to happen!

• Isuru Madushanka Weerarathna will work with Michael de Raadt on a project to add email_reminders_for_calendar_events
• Ankit Gupta will work with Rajesh Taneja to work on a new video/audio capture repository plugin 
• Mayank Gupta will work with me on improving SCORM 2004 support
• Kanika Goyal will work with me to improve the Plagiarism api

The quality of applicants varied a lot this year – we had one applicant who copied the full Wikipedia Moodle page and submitted that as their proposal. There were several students who put a great effort into their applications and missed out this year – hopefully some of these may still engage further in the community – we appreciate the effort you put into your applications and the patches you provided as part of your application process!

Ankit Agarwal has been working on restructuring the SCORM reporting code as part of a GSOC project this year. This now allows the standard Moodle plugin functionality to the reporting interface in SCORM – developers can write their own SCORM report plugins and drop them in place in the same way installation of a block/module/standard plugin is done in Moodle.

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!

Mayank Gupta has been working on a new test harness that allows us to automatically run the SCORM ADL 1.2 and 2004 tests as part of a GSOC project this year. This also means we can start to run the 1.2 and 2004 tests during Moodle’s weekly integration review to make sure that any new code hasn’t broken SCORM compliance. Previously, running the tests has been a very time consuming task – even for SCORM 1.2 with just 2 SCORM packages to test… SCORM 2004 has 189 different SCORM packages that need testing!

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!