Moodle messaging is a fantastic tool but it is often abused by our students here at college. Students have been reported to spend too much time sending messages in class. Often the male students spend time looking for female students to whom they can send a message to.
When a student receives an unwanted message they can report it by clicking a link.
Although it is possible to remove forum posting rights using roles in Moodle I needed a quick way to ban posting rights for a particular user and forum.
We use Moodle as a student intranet as well as a VLE. On the student intranet we have a student forum where students can discuss almost anything. Occasionally, some students abuse this and post inappropriate messages. We required a way to ban re-offenders from posting to the student intranet forum but retain their posting rights for their course forums.
The Moodle bar provides a quick glance as to how many users are using Moodle at any point in time. In order to extend this functionality we created an Online Users page which does exactly what it says on the tin.
It grabs a list of active users that have been using Moodle in the last 5 minutes. It displays their name and a link to their profile.
When an administrator views this page they see a link to Moodle Detective, a loginas button, an edit profile button, a message history button and an option to send the user a message.
It was brought to my attention that when Moodle filters out a word found in the "bad words" list it in fact leaves the word in the alt text. So moving your mouse over the word "Scunthorpe" produces some quite interesting results!!
The resolve this I edited the file filter/censor/filter.php
And around line 36 replace this code
$words[ ] = new filterobject($badword, ‘<span class="censoredtext" title=".$badword.">’, ‘</span>’,
with this:
As an active XBOX gamer I really like the XBOX Gamercard that allows you to view your score and game progress and compare this with other users.
In fact, I liked the idea so much that I built a Moodle version.
Every Moodle administrator/developer has daily tasks that they perform.
Although many jobs can be automated during the cron there are often small jobs to do that can accumitively take up a lot of time.
I needed a to-do list system that would collate all my daily Moodle tasks and display them on one page.
To upgrade or not to upgrade? That is the question.
Well my answer is…upgrade!
I am currently in the process of writing a short paper on a possible upgrade to Moodle 2.0 for Leeds City College. I am proposing an upgrade during the summer.
Unfortunately, due to the size of the organisation, our custom tweaks, third party plug-ins and staff training needs, an upgrade isn’t going to be easy.
This blog post will be part of several posts during the run up to D-Day! Or M2-Day as I’ll call it.
Today I created a Moodle Task List (MTL) which further enhances the custom MyMoodle page.
The Moodle Task List works by checking a series of database queries to see whether or not a student (or staff member) has completed a certain activity or visited a certain page.
The queries are modular and extra queries can easily be “bolted” on to the list.
This task list will work great for our inductions at the start of the new term. The list will prompt the student to do the following:
Today I finished working on the quick course edit bar. The bar appears once the “Turn editing On” button is selected. The bar drops down beneath the breadcrumb trail to reveal 3 of the most common settings that our tutors have problems finding under the course settings.
Using Jplayer 4.5.230 it is possible to include subtitles on Moodle videos. The subtitles are encoded in an XML file which includes the timings and content.
In order to achieve this in Moodle there are a few core code tweaks to perform including a Jplayer upgrade.
To see Moodle Subtitles (close captions) in action visit the link below: