Moodle Add-ons Book released

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May 17, 2013

Moodle Add-ons BookOne of the strongest reasons for using an Open Source GPL application is the freedom to bend it to your own requirements, to configure and customise it to your organisation’s business or process needs. With Moodle that often means using add-ons from the community. There is a wide variety of plugin types; some are simple and some are complex in both their installation and use.

To keep up-to-date with new add-ons, a few years back I started to active review them on this blog. Based on the reviews and on the experience of working with organisations using Moodle, I put together a list of “Essential plugins for Moodle”, which I have regularly updated and  presented at conferences, including the recent Ireland & UK Moodlemoots and the iMoot in 2012.

Michael de Raadt is the Development Manager at Moodle HQ and has been actively developing Moodle plugins over the past few years including Progress Bar and Unanswered Discussions. In 2010 Michael wrote the book “Moodle 1.9 Top Extensions Cookbook” which showed examples of how the plugins could be used in teaching.

For the past year I have collaborated with Michael to write a book on Moodle add-ons and today we are delighted to announce that our book “Moodle Add-ons: Using add-ons to enhance your Moodle site” is now available to buy.

The book is available to buy on Createspace and on Amazon and other online retailers. For now it is just the paperback version but we will have the Kindle version formatted soon.

Our new book goes beyond the work we have done before, extending the presentations and reviews into a new context, providing more reasoned background about add-ons, their format and function, and on the process of evaluation.

Book Summary

The first three chapters explain Moodle add-ons in general, including the different types of add-on plugins available, how they are contributed and why people write an add-on. The book continues with a guide on how to install a Moodle environment to safely test add-ons, away from your production site, and explains how to install a sample add-on. Perhaps most valuable is the third chapter, which describes the many aspects an institution should consider before installing an add-on.

The rest of the chapters include comprehensive reviews on Add-ons broken down into the following areas:

  • Resources and Activities
  • Navigation
  • Course Tracking
  • Interface
  • Course Administration
  • Site Administration
  • Course Formats
  • Virtual Conferencing

Hope you have as much fun reading the book as we had writing it.

Order now on Createspace

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Moodle 2.5 is here!

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May 14, 2013

As promised Moodle HQ has now released the much anticipated Moodle 2.5.  It is already available to download from the Moodle.org site and from GIT. The Moodle Docs for 2.5 are also available.

There are a lot of cool new things and improved old things in this release which are sure to make many users admins and teachers alike very happy. These include:

Starting with this release Moodle Docs will now have a page outlining the new release key feature improvements. Check out http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/New_features

For details on how to upgrade to Moodle 2.5 see here -> http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Upgrading_to_Moodle_2.5

For the full release notes check out -> http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.5_release_notes

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Moodle 2 Tool Guide -> DCU version

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May 14, 2013

As you may remember I released a Moodle 2 version of Moodle Tool Guide which was created by Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz).

Now Mark Glynn of the Learning Innovation Unit at DCU has adapted it for Dublin City University.

pdf Download Moodle 2 Tool Guide - DCU Version (pdf) - 763.85 kB pptx Download Moodle 2 Tool Guide - DCU Version - PPT (pptx) - 306.47 kB

The other available versions of the Moodle 2 Tool Guide are:

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Moodlemoot Edinburgh 2014 – confirmed

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May 12, 2013

As on the Moodlemoot.ie site:

It has been only a few months since Moodlemoot Dublin, but things have been progressing quickly.

We are delighted to announce that we will be running a Moodlemoot Edinburgh 2014 in partnership with Edinburgh Napier University. We aim to have a similar format to the two Dublin Moots, with training workshops, two days of presentations and then a developer hackfest.

We are currently working to finalise the dates and the venue and have narrowed down the decision after visiting a number of venues in the last few days.

However, we can confirm that the Moot will be held in Spring 2014 -  more information as soon as this is confirmed.

The following have generously agreed to be the Moodlemoot Edinburgh chairs:

Dr Keith Smyth
Senior Teaching Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Higher Education
Programme Leader MSc Blended and Online Education
Office of the Vice Principal (Academic)
Edinburgh Napier University

Dr Mark Glynn
Head of Learning Innovation Unit
Dublin City University

We will be announcing the programme committee in the coming weeks too – we already have a number of people accepted as members and are in discussions with others.

As with the last two moots, the programme committee will be doing three tasks:

  1. Setting the themes/formats for the Moot
  2. Assessing and rating the submissions
  3. Chairing sessions at the Moot

So if you want to put yourself forward for the programme committee on behalf of your institution – please get in contact with me in the next two weeks on info@moodlemoot.ie

See you in Edinburgh.

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Moodle 2.5 and the Bootstrap based theme – Clean

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May 8, 2013

Moodle 2.5 brings the a new theme into core. It is called Clean and it is based on the modified Moodle bootstrap theme which is maintained by Bas Brands which inherits styles and renderers from its parent theme.

The Original Bootstrap Moodle theme which is in the plugins database has over 8700 downloads since release. It was based on the Bootstrap CSS framework. It has minimal styling and can be used to create User Experience optimised themes. The framework was released by Twitter and has a huge following.

When you are looking at a course with the normal Clean theme enabled it would look like this:

clean-full

When you shrink your browser (as it would be smaller on an iPad or mobile device) it looks like this (the blocks have jumped below the course sections):

clean-small

 

Options

There are a few theme options which can change how it looks.

Navbar

The first option is to invert the navigation bar or not. This swaps the text and background colours for the navbar at the top of the page between black and white.

The two variations are shown below. This is certainly a neat feature.

Standard

clean-white-nav

Inverted

clean-black-nav

Logo

The second option within the theme is that you can upload a logo. This will appear below the breadcrumb and above the course content/block area as in the example below. To me the positioning is a bit odd, and would maybe be better being above the breadcrumbs, but I imagine that is not a big change to make when you clone it.

Logo positioning on Clean Theme

Logo positioning on Clean Theme

You can also specify some CSS here which is useful if you need to have a logo different to the standard 75 pixels in the theme.

Footnote

You can also add some content that will be displayed in the footer throughout your Moodle site. This is a neat touch for those who have to add privacy/copyright and other links or logos to the foot of every page.

Footer Text positioning on Clean Theme

Footer Text positioning on Clean Theme

 

So all in all a nice new addition to the Moodle theme family!

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Demonstrating the improvement in forms in Moodle 2.5

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May 8, 2013

Moodle 2.5 has improved the usability of Moodle forms with a great step forward in providing the forms in a collapsed format and also providing the html editor in collapsed state by default too.

When you have a platform that has been built to cater for many different needs, one thing which happens is that there are usually a lot of options available to tweak the set up.

Moodle is no different in this matter. The settings pages when creating a course, or some activities (like quiz) have a lot of options available to enable each type of usage you can probably think of and also enabling you to configure it to how you want it to behave. For example  a 1 hr exam no retakes and no feedback, or a 10 minute test with unlimited retakes and lots of question by question feedback.

Taking Quiz as an example it has settings to address so many aspects they are broken down into the following headings:

  • General (3)
  • Timing (5)
  • Grade (3)
  • Layout (3)
  • Question behaviour (3)
  • Review options (28)
  • Display options (4)
  • Restrictions on attempts (5)
  • Overall feedback (5+)
  • Common module Settings (4)
  • Restriction of Access (5+)
  • Activity Completion (4)

The number is the amount of settings under that heading.

As you can imagine, this makes for a long page which can be a bit intimidating.

The new collapsed form shows the required information and then has the balance collapsed into sections that if you want to change the default settings you can expand it to do so. The image below shows the new look and the video demonstrates the change.

Adding a quiz in Moodle 2.5

Adding a quiz in Moodle 2.5

This is a great move and I know many will like this.

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