CLAMP Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2019 will be held Tuesday, June 25 through Thursday, June 27 2019 at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. A pre-Hack/Doc documentation and coding sprint as well as a workshop on LTI applications will be held on Monday, June 24.
The lodging deadline is Wednesday, May 29, 2019. The event registration and travel grant application deadline is Friday, June 7, 2019.
Nominations are now open for new members of the Steering Committee and this year’s Recognition Awards.
Steering Committee
CLAMP is accepting nominations of member colleges to serve on the Steering Committee; terms are for three years. You need not specify who will represent the college on the committee now, and you can nominate schools other than your own.
The nomination criteria are:
The institution must be a four-year liberal arts college or institution.
The institution must be a member of CLAMP
Our current steering committee members are: Beloit College, Carleton College, Centre College, Hampshire College, Kenyon College, Smith College, and Wesleyan University.
Beloit College, Centre College, and Kenyon College rotate off the committee this year. The current committee members will choose the three new members based on nominations submitted by the community, with an eye towards maintaining geographical diversity.
The CLAMP Recognition Awards are awarded annually to one programmer (e.g.; hacker) and one instructional technologist (e.g.; doc’er) to acknowledge outstanding achievement as members of the organization. These achievements include work on Moodle development, Moodle documentation, CLAMP organization and/or recruitment to CLAMP.
In 2018-19, the value of this award is $500. To receive the award, individuals:
must be a member of a current CLAMP school
can not be currently serving on the steering committee
This year, the the Steering Committee will accept nominations from member schools. Nominations must be submitted by May 31, 2019.
There are four new Moodle: Liberal Arts Edition releases. There are no new LAE features; these are maintenance releases only. You can download the updates from the CLAMP code release archive.
The next stable releases are scheduled for mid-May. We expect Moodle HQ to release Moodle 3.7 around that time; CLAMP will evaluate it and prepare a beta at the forthcoming Hack/Doc Fest at Smith College. CLAMP evaluated Moodle 3.6 at the Brandeis University Hack/Doc Fest in January 2019; please see CLAMP’s daily reports for details: Sprint Day, Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.
These releases were developed, packaged, and tested by Kevin Wiliarty (Hampshire College) and Andrew Zito (Lafayette College).
Chad Bergeron demonstrates the Moodle Inline Trainer plugin. Photo credit: Charles Fulton
The last day of Hack/Doc, as usual, was a bit shorter due to attendee travel plans. We wrapped up around lunch time after some discussions about Moodle 3.6, student projects, and user training.
Moodle Inline Trainer
Chad Bergeron demonstrated the Moodle Inline Trainer, a plugin in use at Brandeis University. This plugin was developed by Zak Kolar, then a student, in partial fulfillment of his senior thesis on how teachers use technology. This is independent of Moodle’s “user tours” functionality. Teachers may select from a list of available trainings which provide step-by-step instructions. For some steps instructional videos are available. An overlay feature will highlight the next place to click if the teacher gets stuck. Usage data is collected for review by site administrators. The plugin is open source, but no formal release is planned.
Moodle 3.6 features
Download participants table
The new merged participants list now allows the downloading of enrolled users. Previously the only place to get that information was via the grader report. There’s a set of controls on the bottom of the participants page similar to the bulk user actions list. All the standard data formats are supported. You can select some or all the participants.
Forum emails will display images from authenticated courses
This change addresses a long-standing problem for many CLAMP schools: when a forum email notification is viewed in a desktop client, the images are not visible, because they’re behind authentication. We couldn’t get this working in CLAMP test instances, but that could be down to peculiarities with CLAMP’s environment.
Joe Bacal warms up the crowd at Brandeis before diving in to H5P. Photo credit: Charles Fulton
Work on the task list continued during Day 2 of the Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Brandeis University, punctuated by three lunchtime presentations from members of the community.
Lunchtime presentations
Joe Bacal from Smith College presented on H5P and how they’re using it at Smith. H5P is an interactive, web-based content authoring tool. We kicked the tires on it at Hampshire College in 2017, and again at Lafayette College in 2018. Students at Smith used H5P in WordPress to create a spatial representation of a story’s plot. The use case for Moodle is different, because authoring is restricted to teachers. One useful way for teachers to leverage H5P content is to create quizzes. These integrate seamlessly with the Moodle grade book. In response to concerns from some of the attendees, Joe noted that H5P has published a guide on the accessibility of its various components.
Kevin Wiliarty from Hampshire College provided an update on the state of the Filtered Course List block. Filtered Course List provides a curated list of courses for faculty and students which is less cluttered than the traditional course list block. New features include listing courses based on enrollment method, support for starred courses, and persisting tree expansion between page reloads.
Finally, Andrew Reuther from Swarthmore College demonstrated the latest improvements in Swarthmore’s PDF accessibility tool. The tool scans uploaded PDFs and checks for various accessibility features, including title, outline, language, and the presence of OCR text. A block exposes the information on a per-course basis to instructors. New functionality will allow instructors to “repair” inaccessible PDFs within Moodle, without uploading a new file. Using Ghostscript, which is installed on most Moodle servers by default, an instructor can set the title and language, after which the PDF will be recreated and updated. In addition, Swarthmore is using its subscription to SensusAccess to scan and generate OCR text for PDFs which don’t have them. In addition, Swarthmore is adding site-wide administrator reporting tools.
Copy and paste of images from one WYSIWYG window to another
This is another new feature in Moodle 3.6, and one with a strong CLAMP pedigree. If you copy/cut text and images from one editor window (either Atto or TinyMCE) to another, it appears to work for a short period of time but then subsequently returns a broken image. This was a complicated bug which had to do with how Moodle handles drafts. Charles Fulton (Lafayette College) and Willy Lee (then at Carleton College) first reported the bug in April 2014, during CLAMP’s Development Workshop at Smith College. CLAMP’s proposed fix, after many revisions, was included in the Moodle 3.6 release and works as expected. Copying and pasting images from one editor window to another will no longer result in a broken image.
Live quiz report
This is a quiz report plugin developed by Bill Junkin at Eckerd College. A teacher may view a live spreadsheet showing student’s answers to a quiz, while the quiz is in progress. Possible use cases include teachers monitoring students’ progress during labs or teachers identifying students who need assistance in flipped classroom scenarios. The plugin worked out of the box; we used it to provide a live readout on where attendees wished to have dinner.
