First of all, I don't know if this should be here or inside the General Developer Forum, but well.. it concerns more to the assignment module...
Anyway, here I'll show you a little modification we have done to the Assignment module.
1) What it does:
The user can select parts of the text of the assignment and write comments associated to them. Then the text is formatted and is marked with colors depending on how many comments does it have.
The teacher (and other students) will know if there are any comments because the text assignment is marked in different colors depending on how many comments there are, so feedback is totally visual!
Color range goes from yellow to red, where yellow tones mean few comments, orange tones mean some comments, and red tones mean lots of comments.
2) Screenshots:
3) Usefulness?: We think that it can be very useful because users can have direct feedback between them in the same page of the assignment (without needing to write posts in the forums or similar). Students can write comments associated to parts of the assignment (eg. ‘I don’t understand this sentence, what does it mean?’), and then, the teacher can correct it if he/she wants.
4) How to install: Download the attached zip file and extract it into your moodle's folder. I must advice that this is like a beta version, it should be used only for testing purposes and bug tracking. Be sure to visit your Notifications link in your moodle site, by doing this the DataBase which will contain all the comments sent by the users will be created automatically.5) Steps to Reproduce: Go to any assignment you want. Select any part of the text and copy-paste it to the “Text to be highlighted” box, then write any comment you want and click send. Now you can go back to the assignment page and reload it to see the changes (the text will change in colors and you will see the comments there are).
6) Actual Results: This is a “beta” version and it has some bugs. For example, if you select a word (not a sentence) and this word is appears more than one time in the assignment description, it will be marked every single time it appears. That means, that the actual implementation of Colorize Assignment does not have into account which is the exact position in the text of the word or sentence you want to mark.
7) Expected Results: The desired results would be to mark only the sentences or words that the user wants to mark, not any more or less…
Also, everything related with selecting text, inserting comments, and viewing comments could (or should) be done with AJAX which would definitely give it much more attractiveness and ease of use. In fact, we would like it to be as good as STET implementation, which is the comment-system used in the GPL-DRAFT (see here for an example: http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gplv3-draft-4.html ).
8) Thanks for reading!: I'll appreciate any feedback you want to give me. Thanks!