You are browsing the archive for Moodle2.

Assignment Grading hack for Moodle 2

February 8, 2012 in Moodle2

One of the biggest frustrations with Moodle 2 is the changes to the theme that create an iframe scroll effect for content that exceeds the width of the theme.

For example, if your theme is 1000 pixels wide, the gradebook doesn’t get pushed off the edge, as in Moodle 1.9, but instead is wrapped inside the container with an additional horizontal scroll bar.  Whilst this does look neater, it makes grading assignments with many users a cumbersome task.  And here at Leeds, this receives the most complaints from tutors.

Tutors have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the horizontal scroll bar and then back up again to find the student.  Even pressing the right arrow key on the keyboard doesn’t stop them from finding their place in the table, and sticky user profile pics doesn’t cut it either.

I know this year I said I would refrain from hacking the course code but this is a necessity.

After much deliberation I decided the cleanest and tidiest way to improve the grading of assignments was to replace the user pics column with an additional status column.

Now when a tutor views an assignment they see the link to either “Grade” or “update” right next to the student name.
No more sideways scrolling and it’s quick and easy to see what hasn’t been marked.

To do this I edited mod/assignment/lib and around line 1478

Change
$row = array($picture, $userlink, $grade, $comment, $studentmodified, $teachermodified, $status, $finalgrade);
to
$row = array($status, $userlink, $grade, $comment, $studentmodified, $teachermodified, $status, $finalgrade);

All we have done here is replaced $picture with $status.
I then made some CSS changes to make the link appear more like a button by adding some padding and a background colour and border.

Now everyone is happy I can get back to my other tasks….for now anyhow!

Comments Off

Moodle Subpage Module

January 17, 2012 in Featured, Moodle2, Reviews

This has to be one of the best modules I’ve seen for Moodle. It’s created by Sam Marshall from the Open University and still in beta but I simply had to install it.

It allows tutors to split a course up into sub-courses and add resources and activities within these sub-courses.

A bit like how I use meta courses already. But doing it this way reduces the overhead on the meta enrolments and easily allows resources to be moved around the course.

The tutor simply adds the sub-page through the “Add a Resource” activity.

The mod installed perfectly and I applied the patches that fix the redirect as suggested by Sam.
I wasn’t keen with the way it orphans the activies in the sub-page so I removed orphaned activities using CSS (I don’t like the orphaned activities in Moodle 2 period, I prefer to increase/reduce the number of topics instead).

Lastly, I added some CSS to my theme so that the links to the sub-pages use the same graphics we use for all of our unit links.

This mod has several advantages:

1)Long courses can be split up into units
2)No coding necessary
3)It auto creates the link to the new section
4) It auto creates the standard graphic we use for creating units
5) If you put assignments in a sub-course, or sub-courses, it will show from your main course gradebook, so everything is in one place.
6) You can have sub-courses, within sub-courses within sub-courses…great for complex courses or modules
7) You can use groups and groupings on the sub-course link so that only certain students on your course can see the sub-course

Thanks Sam, this mod is amazing. I’ll be keeping my eye on its development and maybe tweaking it some more myself.

Comments Off