ulcc moodle user group - march 2015

@ulcc www.ulcc.ac.uk

Welcome

Chairs


Feedback

Dave Kenworthy


el.blogs.ulcc.ac.uk


Reporting Workshop Feedback

Richard Havinga


Why a Workshop?

• Small group of customers to have real value input.

• Prioritise requirements on what should be done.

• Let us know whether we are going in the right

direction.

• Facilitate sharing between Customers.


Key Findings (1)

• Moodle reporting is too basic.

• Availability under menus.

• Customised grouping.

• Graphs and Interface paramount.

• Flexible and range of filters (Google Analytics).

• Creation of own Departments.


Key Findings (2)

• Report Categories and Descriptors.

• Role based permissions system.

• Empowered to create Reports.

• Standard Service.

• Retrospective Data.

• Event Flags by Email.

• Make it easier to download Logs


Reports for Students

• Grade & feedback overview across courses & modules.

• Student resource and activity access:

– Benchmarked to course average (overall and per resource and activity).

– When, where and interaction frequency.

– Suggest activities and resources to view or complete.

– Visual progress (completion tracking, activity engagement, benchmarked

timeline).


Reports for Lecturers

• All reports for students they teach but at different levels.

• Submission dates for activities (category, courses)

• Total submitted, late and not submitted by activity.

• Completions & Badges by student and total per course.

• Predictions for intervention e.g. access / interaction / submissions /

Logins.

• Individual Learning Plan Entries by Course (Sussex Downs User Group).


Reports for Middle Managers

• Option to access Lecturer & Student Reports.

• Department Course Access Totals & Averages (views, interactions).

• Department Course Totals for students needing intervention (over time).

• Department Course Visibility & Enrolments.

• Department Course Activity & Resource Totals vs. total interaction by type.

• Department Lecturer Access (interactions, views).


Reports for Senior Managers

• Option to access Middle Manager Reports.

• Comparison of Departments for Middle Manager Reports.

– Student & Lecturer Average Interaction Totals.

– Resource and Activity type by Total and average interaction.

– Students needing interventions trend over time.

– Visible Courses & Enrolments by Department.


Next Steps

• ULCC to review outcomes further and feed the priorities into

backlog.

• Communicate back to customers on progress

– Steering group

– User group

– Blog


Coursework Activity

Richard Havinga


What is Coursework?

• Activity Type in Moodle

• Facilitates Double and Blind Marking

• Integrates with Turnitin


Why Coursework?

• ULCC been working on the idea for a while.

• Funding and demand from the Higher Education Sector.

• Adding missing features to Moodle.

• Now on version 1.0 (rewritten to be a more holistic tool set).


New Features & Interest

• Closed Steering Group Discussions.

• Plugin available to customers on request.

• If interested contact the Service Desk on

[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]


OCM Development

Alistair Spark

Online Coursework

Management (OCM)

by Alistair Spark

Timeline• March 2013 - strong push from Academic Lead to go paperless on RP2

• April 2013 - Initial discovery of the project

• June 2013 - ULCC User Group discussions with Mike Dearing

• July 2013 - Initial meeting with Registry & Exam Office

• September 2013 - Cancelled meeting w/ other interested parties by ULCC

• November 2013 - Initial meeting w/ ULCC => Write Use Case document => signed off by end of the month

• Feb - March 2014 - Follow up meetings w/ ULCC.

• Apr 2014 - ULCC agrees to resourcing the project & starts refactoring

• May 2014 - RVC gets access to latest code to follow status & bug test

• Oct 2014 - v1.0 released by ULCC - stable & ready to go live. - met to review required additions - checked w/ Exam

Office specifics - Quote raised

• Jan 2015 - RVC requirements met & delivered

• 9th March 2015 - Pilot Submission Deadline

• 11th May 2015 - Pilot Marking deadline

Background

• All summative coursework submitted online since

2012 for plagiarism detection by Turnitin(TII) via

Learn

• Students have to submit twice both online & paper

copies

• Considerable amount of paper to dispatch to

examiners - time consuming

• If submitting online can we go paperless?

Background

• Currently Turnitin only supports single marking - no double blind marking,

etc

• Deadlines in Turnitin cannot be granted to individual students for special

circumstances, extensions apply to all students

• various file size & reliability issues with TII also

• So an alternative solution was needed

What OCM does

• Students submit their coursework online.

• Extensions can be granted individually if needed

• Markers can then be allocated for each paper - either automatically at

random or manually

• both markers can mark papers at a convenient time

What it does

• Once both markers have marked they can agree a final grade

• final grades can then be exported by the exam office once all papers

marked

• Individual feedback / General feedback can be released (optional)

Student submission complete

Markers are allocated manually or at random

automatically depending on the coursework

Benefits vs Turnitin

• Student submissions still go through Turnitin for

plagiarism detection

• If TII is offline, the submission is stored in Learn and can

be submitted to TII once service is restored

• No file-size limits for students, Learn limit is used which is

very high, if TII cannot cope, this can be submitted as

plain text separately thus removing stress from students

• Plagiarism score not displayed to students (optional) also

relieving potential stress.

Latest additions

• Individual Deadline extensions w/ info

• Submit on Behalf of student

• ability to download all grades in csv backup & restore (for archiving)

• sample marking

• group submission marking

Future plans

• Improve data flow -> save time

• Feedback from markers about the experience required

• Copy Agreed grade & comments from initial marking

• Auto-agree grades for small differences

Timeline

• 9th March 2015 deadline- Trial w/ RP2 markers (45 students / 68 markers

- mix of techno-phobe & techno-savvy)

• May 2015 - Review survey data from trial -can we go paperless in 2016?

Any additional requirements?


Break

Back at 11:35


2.8 Q1 Release / Upgrades / Plugins

Emily Walker


Overview

• Schedule for Q1 Release

• Upgrade Process

• Major changes

• Plugin Status Report

• Q&A


Schedule for Q1 Release

• Q1 Release available from 30.3.2015

• Tailored customers can request to pull this release from our GitHub

Repo from 30.3.2015 (to test)

• All emails / request via [email protected]

• Upgrades will be scheduled Mon-Thurs between 09.30 -17.30 each

day




• Emails confirming booking plus visible slots in our public upgrade

calendar

• ULCC upgrade team will notify you if there are any third party plugins

that are currently installed that are either unsupported in 2.8 or are

currently not available.

http://www.google.com/calendar/[email protected]&ctz=Europe/London



• Access to Moodle 2.8 demo site 13.3.2015

• Release Notes (today)

• Plugin Matrix 30.3.2015


Upgrade Process

• ULCC will contact you 2 weeks before your upgrade date with a new IP for any new servers that will host your upgraded Moodle site.

• Please make sure you change your firewall rules to accept this IP for any external connections used by your Moodle service for example LDAP, SITs and any ILP materialised views


Upgrade Process

• It is very important to make sure that you have the right

staff available on the day of the upgrade (networks, MIS)

• On the day of the upgrade at 9.30am ULCC will place

your current Moodle Site into a 'Read Only' state

• If you have a Mahara service as well this will be in

maintenance mode during 09.30 to 5.30


Upgrade Process

A description of read only is provided below

• ** Turnitin capabilities are not set correctly in Moodle so that if the view

capability is set to allow but edit or submit is turned off a user can still

access submit.ac.uk which can result in database updates.


Upgrade Process

• Logs (now called Legacy logs)

• Feedback from last year – truncating to 3 months impacted on end users

– As end users still need access to this academic year logs for review

• This year we will offer max 1 year. *impact on downtime for minor

updates for large sites

• Ideal is three months


Upgrade Process

• You will need to update your firewall and

any scripts / automation that references

the IP address directly. Where the DNS

name is used no update is required as this

will move with the server at the time of the

upgrade.


Upgrade Process

When the upgrade is complete we initiate the

switchover to the new site. Below is a list of

steps / actions

• ULCC will contact you to inform you that the upgraded site is ready to be

switched over

• ULCC will switch the internal DNS to point to the 2.8 version of your site– This process will mean that for about 30 mins the current live site will be inaccessible to your

users.

– Once the switchover is complete you should direct your users to clear their browser cache

– ULCC enable crons

– ULCC remove the 'read only' mode

– The site is now released!


Major Changes

(1) Themes

Since 2.7 Moodle only supports two core themes; Clean & More

• More will replace current theme for services currently on Bloom /

Bonsai

• Tailored / Private theme will be moved across

• ULCC will configure logo and colour scheme on upgraded site.

• Bloom includes new configurable themes BCU & Essential

• ULCC will contact services affected by this individually


Major Changes

(2) Filters

• 2.8 includes mathjax plugin - requires newly written

mathjax filter but is 100% compatible with existing

equations

• Removal of Wiris


Major Changes

(3) Atto Editor

• No option to re-size text with Atto

• Cannot change the font colour


Major Changes

(4) Logging system

• Since 2.7 Logging system changed

• Plugins are moving to using the new log

• Mnet_logs removed

• For 2.8 The two systems will run side by side with the old log referred to

as the ‘legacy log’

• If you maintain your own plugins and developments you will need to re

write them to work with this new system.

• Log Retention


Major Changes

(5) Events Monitoring

• A new feature introduced within Moodle 2.8, events monitoring allows admins and teachers to receive notification when certain events happen in Moodle.

• An administrator can view a list of all events from Administration>Site administration>Reports>Events List.

• The list can be filtered to show specific components (core, Assignment, Book etc.) levels (Teaching, Participating, Other) and database query types (create, delete, read, update).


Plugin Status Report

• Not all Plugins have a 2.8 version ready

yet

• Mod subpage no longer supported

• Equella, oublog, ouwiki

• Full list updated weekly on demo site


Quarterly Update Schedule

• June 2015 (Core update)

• Sept 2015

• Dec 2015

Currently exploring options for OOH


Moodle Integrations

Toby Yeung


Integrations

Courses

Categories Groups Enrolments

Users

Submissions Grades Authentication


Common Integrations

• Moodle External Database (Enrolments, Courses)

• ULCC External Database Extended (Enrolments,

Categories, Courses & Groups)

• Web Services (All Integrations)

• Grade Binding (Bind activity and send grades)

• DB Sync Other (User creation and updating)


Moodle External Database

CUSTOMERDATABASE

MOODLEDATABASEENROLMENTS

TABLE / VIEW

STAGING DATABASE

COURSESTABLE / VIEW


Moodle External Database Extended

CUSTOMERDATABASE

MOODLEDATABASEENROLMENTS

TABLE / VIEW

STAGING DATABASE

COURSESTABLE / VIEW

COURSEGROUPS

TABLE / VIEW

GROUP MEMBERSTABLE / VIEW

CATEGORIESTABLE / VIEW


Moodle Web Services

CLIENT MOODLE SERVER

Web Service LoginUsername, password

Token for successful LoginToken

Call Web Service Function

Web Service Function, Parameters &

Token

ResultReturn Result of Function

Check Login

Check user can call functionCall Function

Check user has_capability of function

Run function and return result


Moodle Grade Binding

CREATEMOODLEACTIVITY

STUDENTCOMPLETES

ACTIVITY

LECTURERGRADESACTIVITY

BINDING

GRADEDASSESSMENTS

GRADESDATA

GRADES EXPORTED

WEB SERVICE CALLED


DB Sync Other (User Accounts)

CUSTOMERDATABASE

MOODLEDATABASEUSERS

TABLE / VIEW

STAGING DATABASE


Questions

Interested in integrations further?

Please contact the Service Desk via

[email protected]



Close

Chairs