The CLAMP Steering Committee is pleased to announce that it has selected Carleton College and Wesleyan University as its new members. They replace Connecticut College and Union College, whose terms ran 2014-17. The new schools’ terms run 2017-2020.
About the Steering Committee
The CLAMP Steering Committee is composed of representatives from four-year liberal arts colleges or institutions. The current members are Beloit College, Carleton College, Centre College, Kenyon College, Lafayette College, Occidental College, and Wesleyan University.
CLAMP is pleased to announce the first release on the 3.3 branch. This release is based on extensive testing at the Hampshire Hack/Doc. This is a beta release; several of the contributed plugins do not have official 3.3 releases as yet, although based on our testing they work.
The next stable releases, including Moodle 3.3.1, are scheduled for mid-July. This release was developed, packaged, and tested Charles Fulton (Lafayette College) and Kevin Wiliarty (Hampshire College).
Accessibility discussion with Rob Eveleigh, Five Colleges, Inc. Accessibility Coordinator. Photo credit: Sarah Ryder
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.
Moodle 3.3, Boost, and Upgrade Plans
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:
The ability to choose a different document converter is nice.
The course overview bug is a concern, though it’s likely to be remedied in 3.3.1.
The expansion of user group and overrides is nice for students needing accommodation.
Review of the poster plugin functions as advertised, which helps some of the Boost concerns about a lack of a home for blocks.
One consideration of going to 3.3 is that it requires PHP 5.6.
Who is using or planning to use Boost?
One school is using Boost already and the feedback from faculty so far has been positive, but they just made the switch in May.
Another school is planning to roll it out in July.
Some other schools are considering it, but no solid plans to make the move at this point.
Accessibility
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:
Using semantic markup effectively
Providing alt text for images
Using descriptive and unique link text
Choosing colors with sufficient contrast
Captions, transcripts, and audio description
Clarity of language and layout
Ensuring accessibility of non-HTML content, such as PDFs and
Form labels
Skip navigation
Data table headers
ARIA
Javascript
Moving, blinking, or scrolling content and ensuring that the user can control the functions
Andrew presenting about a file scanner. Photo credit: Sarah Ryder
File Scanner Demo
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.
A Little Bit of Git
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!
Dan Wheeler talking about his experience with eThink at Hampshire Hack/Doc. Photo credit: Sarah Ryder
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.
The R.W. Kern Center at Hampshire College. Photo credit: Hampshire College Communications Staff
After taking a quick tour of the building we headed outside for a group photo!
Hack/Doc group photo at Hampshire College. Photo credit: Jocelyn Edens
Lunchtime Presentations
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.
CLAMP Steering Committee Update and Recognition Awards
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.
Merged Course Tool
This plugin was updated to include the option to move children courses to a category.
Automated Tests for LAE 3.3
Done, and the LAE beta with plugins should be ready by this Sunday.
Moodle Mobile 3.3
Some testing was done, but a comprehensive review was not completed.
And more fun…
There may have been a mid-afternoon field trip over to Flayvors at Cook’s Farm for some ice cream…
Joe Bacal and Dan Wheeler, CLAMP Recognition Award Winners for 2016-17. Photo credit: Sarah Ryder
The CLAMP Steering Committee is proud to announce the 2016-17 winners of the CLAMP Recognition Awards.
Joe Bacal, Applications Administrator at Smith College, has participated in CLAMP since the Winter 2016 Hack/Doc at Reed College. As a relative newcomer, Joe was open and helpful, assisting with the testing of Moodle. He also provided a SQL ad-hoc report for admins to help determine the extent of use for the PDF annotate function, which was invaluable as schools decided whether to enable it for Moodle 3.1 and higher.
Dan Wheeler, Senior Research and High Performance Computing Specialist at Colgate University, has distinguished himself as a member of the CLAMP community by being a long-time attendee at Hack/Doc events on both the hacker and doc’er side. He is always friendly, approachable, and willing to help out others and share his experience. Dan was a member of the CLAMP Steering Committee from 2013-2016, and he organized and hosted the CLAMP Summer Hack/Doc Fest at Colgate University in 2013.
About the Awards
The CLAMP Recognition Awards are awarded annually to one developer (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.
