I've been using Moodle in my large calculus class for almost a
month now and I am generally very happy with the experience.
There are however a few imperfections which I've encountered,
which might also be easy to resolve.
First of all there seems to be no category built into Moodle 1.08
for displaying student exam scores (where the exams are taken offline
in the classroom). I currently file them under the category offline
assignment (and use the language editor to display it as "assessment").
However it's not a perfect fit, since the fields "Due Date" and
"Submitted" really don't make sense in this context.
Another peeve is that Moodle doesn't seem to distinguish between
a blank score (i.e. no score was recorded) and a score of 0.
Still another is that under Windows ME, trying to assign grades
manually via submissions.php crashes both IE 6.0 (always) and Mozilla
1.2.1 (frequently) in my class of 187 students. It's much more stable
under WinXP and Linux.
Yet another problem is with the "Download in Excel" function in
grades.php. Numerical scores are marked as text instead of numbers.
We've extended grades.php to batch upload grades into an "assignment".
It works well enough for our purposes, but there are some shortcomings.
First of all the batch upload fails with a php timeout error if I attempt
to upload grades for all 187 students at once. The workaround is to
split the upload into two batches of ~90 students each. Also the
submission date for the upload is screwed up. I'm attaching the
modified grades.php in case someone else finds it useful. In the teacher's
view of grades, there are now two extra buttons at the bottom of the
page: "Browse" (for the local input file with the grade data), and "Import",
which triggers the upload.
The input for the batch upload is a comma separated file with
two fields. The first line should be
user,nn
where nn is the assignment id number. The data lines consist of
pairs
x,y
where x is the student's Moodle id number (i.e. the database index)
and y is the student's score on the exam.
The reason we use the Moodle id numbers instead of the students'
names is that we find that some students edit their names, e.g. replace
their legal first names by nicknames or middle names, at unpredictable
intervals, causing problems with correlating them with our official
records.
Zig Fiedorowicz