The new term is nearly upon us and lots of tutors are running about doing last minute Moodle changes to their course areas.  One question that keeps coming up is "How do I reset my course and clear last years students?"

The answer is simple, use the course reset feature in the course admin block.

This little gem is often missed and tutors are rarely informed of its use during Moodle training. Read more »

Apologies for the confusing blog title, I did this so that other users with the same problem could find it easily in Google. Read more »

For some strange reason, when a user clicks on a PowerPoint from within Moodle that is set to "New Window" they are prompted with the Open, Save, Cancel Box.  But when they click open, PowerPoint is launched and the presentation displays an empty white screen.

I think it has something to do with the TEMP folder and the way IE references this folder.  This bug only seems to happen on campus and works fine with Firefox, Chrome etc...

As a quick fix I edited file.php in the Moodle root directory.

And changed the line: Read more »

I often receive questions from Moodlers about how to tackle a Moodle overhaul so I thought I'd share my thoughts on this with the Moodle community.

Moodle to me is a constantly evolving project, I often change things as I'm going along.  Many people set out to create a finished product and as a result set their expectations too high and put too much pressure on themselves to finish the project in the allotted time. Read more »

Most jobs require tools.  Plumbers need wrenches, joiners need saws, accountants need calculators, hairdressers need scissors.  But what does a Moodle Developer carry in their toolbox? 

This will differ depending on your Operating System but in terms of functionality, how many applications does a Moodle developer really need? Read more »

For a few years now we have seen the rise of social media.  The popularity of Facebook and Twitter has given birth to the rise of new social media startups such as Foursquare and Miso.  It is starting to feel like there is a social media website for every element of our lives.  

Not only can we tell the world what we are doing, we can tell them where we are, where we have been, what TV shows we are watching, what websites we like, where the best deals are and which vouchers to redeem to get them.   Read more »

This hack is awesome! At last, the WYSIWYG editor works for Mac Users and Google Chrome.

I can't take any credit for this as it's something I found on moodle.org.

Pall Thayer released the code so a big thank you to him.

The origial post can be found here but I have documented the process here and simplified the instructions below as they were a bit tricky to follow:

First we need to edit the file lib/moodlelib.lib Read more »

One of the most frustrating things about Moodle is the popup window that opens when a tutor uploads a file.  Not only does it open in a small window but it often crops of the side of the screen with the "choose" option.

Many tutors then miss out this vital step of clicking choose and often place a checkbox next to the filename instead.

So we set about trying to find the code in Moodle which changes the size of the popup window (by default this is set to 750px x 500px). Read more »

After lots of comments and feedback by readers of my blog and by the forceful persuasion of @moodleman and @donnathompson via Twitter I have agreed to put some extra work into my course report block and release it to the public.

I'll be documenting its progress on this site and maybe write a tutorial on how to build it as I go along.

Proposed features: Read more »

The new Leeds City College Moodle has now gone live.  The new Moodle will include all the courses from 2 previous Moodle installations and 1 Blackboard installation.

The new Moodle is load balanced using 3 web servers and 2 database servers and is expected to serve in excess of 30,000 students. Read more »