LSU gradebook

I’ve been looking at the LSU gradebook, as MDL-17807 has lots of votes. The simple grader report is really nice, with the option to scroll grades while students stay fixed, and quick editing for fast paced editing of grades for either grade items or students.

I’ve also been learning more about the flexibility of the Moodle 1.9 gradebook. Alternative reports can easily be added as plugins, with visibility controlled by a capability.

Please see the work-in-progress Development:Gradebook improvements for proposed gradebook improvements based on the list of popular gradebook issues. (Remember to vote for the issues you most want to see fixed!)

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AJAX forum rating

Tuesday is weekly code review day, and I’ve been looking at a usability improvement – MDL-17364 – AJAX forum rating. Thanks to Eloy for this improvement, which you can see in action in the moodle.org forums and which will be included in Moodle 1.9.4 onwards. See the Forum ratings documentation for more details.

Hopefully in future, AJAX can be used to improve database and glossary entry rating too!

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Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day – 24 March 2009 – is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

I really admire Moodlers A. T. Wyatt and Mary Cooch, as they’re always helping others in the forums, plus they provide a much-needed teacher perspective in discussions.

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Embedding resources in a page without using a frame

Tuesday is weekly code review day, and I’ve been looking at MDL-10021.

Thanks to the work of Daniele Cordella, Jerome Mouneyrac, Joseph Rézeau and a few others, for improving the implementation of embedding resources in a page, keeping the page navigation visible, using an object tag, rather than a frame. The File or website link documentation has further details.

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Gradebook improvements

I’m investigating how the Moodle gradebook can be improved, particularly for teachers, and have started looking through the list of popular gradebook issues.

It’s a real challenge to figure out how to simplify the gradebook, whilst at the same time adding the extra features that people are requesting.

As Mark Pearson says in the discussion Moodle Gradebook “Level-Setting”:

“Problem is that the way things work in the Tracker you get a heap of bugs, improvements and feature requests that can add rather than reduce complexity of the gradebook with no easy way to sort them out.”

I’d like all our planned improvements to be listed in Development:Gradebook interface improvements for Moodle 2.0 for discussion at our next developer meeting.

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