Auto-save for assignments & forum posts (lo how many posts I've lost to IE/Firefox and even Chrome crashes - o snap!).
After losing a particularly long one the other day I realized how incredibly frustrating this is for non-technical users as one side of me told me to always write a post in wordpad and the other side of me told me what unwelcome advice that was to give to someone who just lost an hour's worth of work to IE.
We've done this for our Assessment module - I'd be happy to mentor for other areas - basically the Assessment code Mark wrote works quite well - need to port it nicely to core, provide for failure recovery, don't overload the server, etc.
Forum and assignment auto-save (was Wanted: New feature ideas for GSOC projects)
by Michael Penney -
Number of replies: 2
Auto-save for assignments & forum posts (lo how many posts I've lost to IE/Firefox and even Chrome crashes - o snap!).
After losing a particularly long one the other day I realized how incredibly frustrating this is for non-technical users as one side of me told me to always write a post in wordpad and the other side of me told me what unwelcome advice that was to give to someone who just lost an hour's worth of work to IE.
I completely agree with this point. I'm in the habit of writing texts in an editor and then copying and pasting them into the relevant Moodle form field. Most non-technical users don't know, let alone follow best practices, and find this aspect of the web in general very frustrating.
There are already existing solutions. I quite like Wordpress' auto-save feature and the ability to resize the text input area window by dragging-and-dropping. I think resolving core issues like this would make Moodle (and the web and e-learning in general) much less off-putting to teachers and students.
Just my $0.02!
After losing a particularly long one the other day I realized how incredibly frustrating this is for non-technical users as one side of me told me to always write a post in wordpad and the other side of me told me what unwelcome advice that was to give to someone who just lost an hour's worth of work to IE.
I completely agree with this point. I'm in the habit of writing texts in an editor and then copying and pasting them into the relevant Moodle form field. Most non-technical users don't know, let alone follow best practices, and find this aspect of the web in general very frustrating.
There are already existing solutions. I quite like Wordpress' auto-save feature and the ability to resize the text input area window by dragging-and-dropping. I think resolving core issues like this would make Moodle (and the web and e-learning in general) much less off-putting to teachers and students.
Just my $0.02!
As for forum auto-save, please see (and vote for) this if you likey:
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-16732
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-16732