Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2019 will be held Tuesday, January 8 through Thursday, January 10, 2019 at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. A pre-Hack/Doc documentation and coding sprint will be held the afternoon of Monday, January 7, 2019.
The lodging and registration deadlines are Friday, December 21, 2018. An additional lodging option is forthcoming.
Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2018 will be held Tuesday, January 9 through Thursday, January 11, 2018 at Centre College in Danville, KY. A pre-Hack/Doc documentation and coding sprint will be held Monday, January 8, 2018.
The lodging deadline is Friday, December 22, 2017. The registration deadline is Friday, December 15, 2017.
Please join CLAMP for a webinar presentation which will be held Friday, September 22, from 10:30-11:30 am (CST) in Zoom (https://zoom.us/j/630284326).
Sonya Johnson PhD, professor of Religious Studies at Beloit College, will share about her experience coming to Moodle, anxieties and expectations she had, challenges she faced and how Moodle helped her meet those challenges. She will also share about the ways in which Moodle, the quiz module in particular, supported her pedagogy. Sonya will finally share lessons learned/take-away’s and her future plans for her courses in Moodle.
Future sessions will consist of a faculty member presenting a 20-ish minute session about a particular method or tool they utilize within Moodle for their teaching. Faculty from each of the 30+ CLAMP schools are invited to lead these sessions as we continue with the series.
Each of session will be broadcast live via Zoom for participants at other schools to watch synchronously and hopefully gather faculty for discussion after the presentation. Sessions will also be recorded for those who cannot make the live session, and posted on the CLAMP YouTube channel. Our hope is that members of the CLAMP community are able to schedule a shared viewing of these presentations, whether live or recorded, with members of their own faculty to use as a springboard for discussion of how the presented material could be used at each of your respective institutions.
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 3.3, Boost, upgrade plans, and accessibility.
The Hack/Doc group didn’t have major concerns with Moodle 3.3; some CLAMP schools are planning to upgrade to 3.3 for the fall semester and others are sticking with 3.1 or 3.2 for now. A few notes from the discussion:
Rob Eveleigh, the Five Colleges, Inc. Accessibility Coordinator working with Hampshire, Amherst, Smith, and Mount Holyoke Colleges, joined us for a lively discussion around accessibility. Some of the items mentioned were:
Some websites that provide information on a variety of web accessibility goals and strategies:
Some free tools to help evaluate web accessibility:
Andrew Ruether from Swarthmore College worked on a tool that scans PDF files in Moodle. The local plugin runs whenever cron is set to run and evaluates the newest files first. Working on a small amount of files each time, it shows if the PDF is an image or text. Andrew created a block for Moodle to show a summary of the PDFs in the course for teachers. The database table keeps the content hash of the PDF, whether it was checked, page count, and OCR status. It might include scan quality down the road. It could potentially include the ability to spell check the OCR document. Ideally, it’d be nice if the non-OCR file could be converted on the fly.
Kevin Wiliarty from Hampshire College spent some time going over git techniques with other folks. One of the best aspects of Hack/Doc, in my opinion, is the ability to collaborate with and learn from others while feeling like you’re part of a supportive community. Thanks to everyone who attended and participated this week!
Posts from Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2017 at Hampshire College: Homepage | Sprint | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3
Yet another productive day thanks to a well-attended Hack/Doc Fest.
Kevin Wiliarty from Hampshire College spent a little time in the morning encouraging some of the new-to-Moodle attendees to check out the free Moodle Mooc.
We took a break mid-morning to walk over to the R.W. Kern Center, which was built at Hampshire College last year with the goal of certification under the world’s most advanced green building standard, the Living Building Challenge: generating its own electricity, collecting its own water, and built avoiding toxic “red list” chemicals using materials mainly from local and regional sources.
After taking a quick tour of the building we headed outside for a group photo!
Bonnie Solivan from Wesleyan University provided an overview of using Badges with Moodle 3.2. She encourages the use of badges, noting that it’s a great way for students to be able to visualize what they’ve learned and achieved. At Wesleyan they’ve connected Badges with Lynda.com so that students can pull their skills with badges into their LinkedIn profiles.
Megan Grady-Rutledge from Butler University shared her experience and results from a Moodle 3.1 Mobile pilot. Megan participated in a free Moodle Mobile Mooc and she used the tips acquired there to help guide course content design. Overall she thinks turning on and supporting the app is worthwhile based on feedback from students, but there is definitely a learning curve for faculty to think about designing their courses for mobile.
Dan Wheeler from Colgate University and Holly White from Luther College talked about the advantages and disadvantages to hosting their Moodle installations with eThink. Overall they’ve been satisfied with their experiences, though they shared some of the pain points that came along with giving up a certain level of control.
We had a brief update from the CLAMP Steering Committee to ask for more nominations for CLAMP member schools to join the committee, and to announce the CLAMP Recognition Award winners. Congratulations to Joe Bacal and Dan Wheeler!
A doc’er ran the Wave tool on all four themes installed on a test instance (Boost, Clean, Essential, and More) and found that Boost was the most accessible. Some of the accessibility issues will need to be updated by core since it has to do with the way PHP is rendering the code, so these findings regarding Boost will be submitted as UI bugs in the Moodle Tracker.
This plugin was updated to include the option to move children courses to a category.
Done, and the LAE beta with plugins should be ready by this Sunday.
Some testing was done, but a comprehensive review was not completed.
There may have been a mid-afternoon field trip over to Flayvors at Cook’s Farm for some ice cream…
Posts from Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2017 at Hampshire College: Homepage | Sprint | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3
