New icons in Moodle 2.4
Moodle have included some very good-looking icons in the upcoming release.
There are a number of changes, some of which I think will be very nice.
- Activity icons are now colour and 24×24 in size
- Action icons are now 12×12 and are monochrome.
- The icon format is now SVG preferred and PNG version for fallback – which is great for different devices
Both the size and colour differential will really help on the look of the page. There are good design guidelines that are available for developing new ones to match the standard ones. There are now standard colours and sizes.
Here are the new icons:
New Icons for resources in Moodle 2.4
New Activity Icons in Moodle 2.4
New icons for blocks – for Moodle 2.4
So there they are. Great work!
Offline grading worksheet in Moodle 2.4 Assignment
One of the very useful new features in Moodle 2.4 Assignment is the Grading worksheet uploading. I had mentioned in the post about Blind Marking but this post will explain the process more fully.
So what is the Grading Worksheet option?
For this example, I am setting up an assignment on a course that has 10 students. This assignment is just going to be a placeholder assignment (Like the old style offline assignment) where the grades / comments from a practical can be added. So I have set it up with the following settings:
So once you create the assignment, you can then go then go into the view/grade all submissions page to access quick grading or the other options available from the drop down such as Download grading worksheet.
Selecting the Download grading worksheet will prompt for the spreadsheet (CSV) to be downloaded. Once opened in Excel it looked like the following:
This enables you to add a grade and a comment for each participant. Once you have added them in as below, you can then go through the upload process.
By selecting the Upload Grading worksheet option, you are brough to a standard upload page with one exception.
Once you upload the file and submit, you are prompted to confirm the changes as shown below.
After you confirm, the assignment and gradebook are updated. The grading page with the new data is shown below:
If you want to late change the grades using a worksheet you can download the existing values, change it and upload the new one. It works the same way. Below it shows the confirm page for when I went back in and set the grades all to 100.
Summary
This is going to be a heavily used feature for Moodle Assignment and will save a lot of time for graders. Of course it is not only good for “offline” assignments like a practical, as if you are updating it locally from manually graded papers, this will also be very useful.
Blind Marking in Moodle 2.4 Assignment
As part of my testing of the upcoming Moodle 2.4 I got to try out the new Blind Marking feature. This post gives a quick overview of how it works.
So what is blind marking?
In short, normally when you use blind marking in assessment the teacher/grader cannot see who the assignment is from while they are grading. They may or may not see after the grading happens.
So in Moodle 2.4 there is a new option in the assignment settings page:
As the help text explains:
Blind marking
Blind marking hides the identity of students to markers. Blind marking settings will be locked once a submission or grade has been made in relation to this assignment.
So what happens when you set this on?
For the student, they do not see anything different in the submission status window. So it may be important to explain the use of Blind Marking in the Description field as you would other assignment aspects.
Once the students have submitted what can the teacher see in the assignment?
The new assignment also provides an option to download the list of submissions so that you can edit the grades in a spreadsheet and then upload it. This option also maintains the blind marking with no names shown and instead just a Participant number “Participant 52″ for example.
When grading is complete there is an option to “Reveal student identities”. Once this is done the grades are then sent to the gradebook.
An interesting new feature, and as this is one of a few new options in the assignment – I will blog about the others in coming week or so.
Moodle 2.3.3 is now available
Moodle HQ have now released the latest release versions of Moodle 2.3, 2.2 and 2.1. If you are running one of these versions you should plan to update to the new release version to take advantage of the fixes.
As these are minor releases there is no major feature change, so these include minor changes, bug fixes and some security fixes. For example Moodle 2.2.3 tackled 212 tracker issues.
Some highlights from Moodle 2.3.3 are:
- Upgrading books from earlier versions now works correctly
- A capability has been introduced to consistently exempt specific users from forum auto-subscriptions and forced subscriptions
- Folder resources now show files in sorted order
For the full details of all the releases use the below links:
- Moodle 2.3.3 release notes
- Moodle 2.2.6 release notes
- Moodle 2.1.9 release notes
Some interesting blog posts that I have read recently.
I like trying to keep up to date with posts from bloggers on learning and Moodle and related information. Here are some of the posts that I have read recently and that you may find interesting:
“How to load test your Moodle server using Loadstorm”
This is a step by step how-to to help test how well your Moodle can cope with a certain number of users. Now personally, I use Amazon cloud servers and jmeter for testing Moodle performance with my clients but this blog post is certainly a good read although it is for Moodle 1.9.
Source : www.iteachwithmoodle.com/
“Why Your Moodle Site is Slow: Five Simple Settings”
As with all platforms, different options can often be tweaked and disabled even if not needed. This great post takes the user through five such areas in Moodle which many people may not need and that the Moodle administrator can change to reduce them impacting the site performance.
Source: opensourceelearning.blogspot.com/
“Moodle custom fields”
Jenny Gray covers the topic of custom fields / metadata which arose the recent Moodle developer meeting. This is an interesting area and one to watch.
Source: ltsdevmusings.wordpress.com/
“Open technical debt?”
Although this is from 2 months ago, I think it is a good one to highlight as it tackles some really big aspects of ongoing code development which relates to Moodle development as well.
Source: salvetore.wordpress.com/
“Understanding Tin Can API”
Is this the son of SCORM, or SCORM NextGen? Either way this is one future of Learning Object interaction with Learning Platforms and this blog post is a great summary of what it is all about. I do wonder how this will fit in Moodle and will fit with LTI./
Source www.open-thoughts.com
“MOOC, Motivation, and the Mass Movement toward Open Education”
Hans de Zwart blogged a session he attended about MOOCs at Learning 2012. As I recently took part in a MOOC, this post drew me in and really added some perspective on the whole area. Know what a MOOC is or not, worth a look.
Source blog.hansdezwart.info/
“Adding Moodle 1.9 Block Restore to Moodle 2.3″
Mike Churchward is at it again with another multi-part series on Moodle development this time covering the development needed to have Blocks from Moodle 1.9 backups restore correctly in Moodle 2.
So far there are five parts: Part 1- Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5
Some recently added plugins
I have a few near completed reviews of some other plugins that people from the community have developed , but for those who don’t keep an eye on the Moodle.org Plugins directory, here is a list of some of the recently published /updated plugins (I won’t be reviewing them all, and have already done some in the upcoming book).
Lightbox Gallery Set
This resource allows you to create ‘Lightbox’ enabled image galleries within your Moodle course. As a course teacher, you are able to create, edit and delete galleries. Small thumbnails will then be generated, which are used for