My university in Japan just implemented Moodle on a school-wide basis. There are some 12000 users and about 1500 courses currently registered. Unfortunately, it turns out that for the most part, only Japanese can use the system because the names of all of the users are (naturally ) in Japanese. If the school really wanted to bend over backwards to please the foreigners, most of whom can't read Japanese, they could, of course, use the Romanization of everyone's name instead, but that would be highly unusual in the Japanese cultural context, and very un-Moodlelike to boot.
This isn't just a problem with Japanese, but with any country that uses a non-Roman alphabet and where some of the instructors (probably mostly those who teach foreign languages) aren't able to read the local script.
What I would like to suggest is that the mdl_user table contain two more fields, lastname2 and firstname2 and that the course settings have a toggle so that the instructor can select one or the other.
Naturally, this would also entail placing in IF statement in all screen generation code that involves displaying the user's name, although the $fullname variable, once set to the selected name, might be all that is required in some cases.
Does seem like something which would be easy to implement and would be useful for reasonable large segment of current and future Moodle users? What do you think?
General developer forum
Two sets of name fields in mdl_user?
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