Making HTML Editor More Teacher-friendly

Making HTML Editor More Teacher-friendly

by Fernando Oliveira -
Number of replies: 1
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When Teachers use the HTML editor to grade or provide feedback for online assignments, they must change their font so that their comments are set apart from the students’ work (example: student’s submission = black text, teacher’s comments = green text). Having to repeatedly adjust the font for each submission makes the grading process more tedious and time consuming.

Possible solutions:

  1.  Add a setting in Admin > Appearance > HTML Editor that would allow the admin to assign default font settings to particular roles (background colour, font size, etc.). 
  2.  Add a setting in Admin > Appearance > HTML Editor that would allow admin to create a “Custom button”, which would allow for a predefined font settings. Teachers would click this button before adding comments, rather than have to do multiple clicks to select background colour, font, etc.

Wondering…

  • Anyone know if either of the above solutions is possible, given the limitations of the HTML editor?
  • Anyone know of any other work-arounds to this problem?

Thanks,

Fernando

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In reply to Fernando Oliveira

Re: Making HTML Editor More Teacher-friendly

by Itamar Tzadok -
Anyone know if either of the above solutions is possible, given the limitations of the HTML editor?

It should be possible to add a button to the editor toolbar that inserts a "comment block" such as ![ ] such that anything the instructor adds withing the brackets is already colored: ![ This is my comment ]. However, given that the HTML Editor is replaced with tinyMCE in Moodle 2, the effort may not be worthwhile unless there's already contributed code for editor toolbar extensions.

Another possible solution also requires hacking the code but may be easier. Instead of messing with the editor you can add to the assignment grading form a button for inserting a comment block (as in the above solution). All you need to do is add to /mod/assignment/submissions.php html for the button and a javascript function which takes the editor's reference and uses its insertHTML method to insert the comment block.

hth
smile
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