As some of you may have read in yesterday’s blog post on the Moodle workshop I ran yesterday at the Australian Moot, there was some fairly robust discussion on how the file management functionality in Moodle 2.0 differs from that in 1.9. For my money, it is the single biggest change that many users will need to deal with when they move to 2.0, and I thought I’d write up a little piece here about the problems, reasons, solutions and a work around that will make things easier for those who are coming to terms with the changes as they play with 2.0 preview releases.
Ok, duty of disclosure stuff first. A few weeks back I was asked by the folks at Packt Publishing to review the recently released Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios Beginner’s Guide, and in return they’d give me a copy of the book. Well, they kept their part of the bargain and so now I’ll keep mine.
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One of the least understood things in Mahara is the potential for using groups as an assessment mechanism. I think this is because of two reasons:
- The documentation about this feature on mahara.org is not great, something I’ll rectify shortly after making this post (if I can stay awake), and
- Those who sign up for a free demo Mahara account anywhere won’t get to see the feature, as you need an Admin user to set up the special group types that can be used for assessment.
For a while its struck me as a shame that this is the case as I think it is one of Mahara’s better kept secrets, so I have finally gotten around to putting together a presentation on how it all works, why you should care and what would make it better in future.
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Moodle is a demanding mistress, and the amount of Moodle work going for my Higher Education clients in the last month or so has kept me busy enough to genuinely struggle to find time to do any blogging. At last, a fortuitous day off has helped me to get enough time to put together the third video in the Plugins Review series – this one thanks to a query from a friend and colleague who likes to ask questions that I often can’t answer, which in this case related to the Dialogue Module.
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Perhaps its just the clients that I tend to deal with, but the vast majority of focus when deploying a Moodle site tends to follow the following elements:
Typical Moodle Process
This is a very ‘course centric’ way of looking at Moodle, and to be fair this is the way that most people I’ve met want to use Moodle, for better or worse. This does however ignore a number of neat things that Moodle can do that are less course-centric and more student or topic centric, which leads us to this episode of Moodle Obscurities.
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As if the Moodle Plugins Review wasn’t enough, I’ve decided to do some more short videos of what I’m calling ‘Moodle Obscurities’, which could also have been called ‘little things in Moodle that I stumbled across by accident and that cold have made my life easier if I’d known about them earlier’. The first of these shows how to cut down the length of a Moodle navigation bar (sometimes called the ‘breadcrumb trail’) to remove what some can see as a superfluous link, removing a potential source of confusion for students. Read more…
One of the things lacking in Moodle according to some people I’ve heard from is the lack of the predictable, sitting on the left of the screen, menu of all items in a Moodle course. Sure, there are plenty of other things that can tell you where you are in a Moodle course, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was a neat little menu in that top left hand corner like in every other website since 1995… Read more…
For a while now I’ve been meaning to put together a series of videos on Moodle which aren’t anywhere else. Sure, there are already quite a few doing the rounds on YouTube and MoodleTutorials, but I still felt like I wanted to do something more, so I’ve decided to put together a series of videos on some of the common plugins that can be used in conjunction with core Moodle.
There are several hundred plugins available for Moodle that extend its functionality in all sorts of ways. Some integrate with other systems, some add new functionality, some improve on the functionality that is already there. I’ll focus on some of the more common ones to start with, and then move on to some of the more experimental ones. These aren’t going to be high-quality videos, mainly because I don’t have the time to put together Moodleman-quality presentations, instead I’ll try and focus on getting them out regularly and hopefully let them improve as time goes by.
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