Future major features

I am sorry you feel that our suggested improvements are a denial of service attack. It is not our intention, our intention is to be a good open source community member and improve Moodle for all.

The activity grader has been fully baked, we have had clients using it for 1.5 years and have modified it and updated it in several ways based on their input. It is our opinion that it is to the point where the only positive progression forward is the inclusion of more activities within it. When it comes to inclusion of more activities we have 2 options:

1. Continue how we have and hack parts of core Moodle to add activity support and maintain these hacks as the core activities are modified.

2. Ask that Moodle and the community to consider the inclusion of an activity grading interface and work with the community towards consolidating activity grading.

We could release this interface to the community via the plugins but then that would require community members to maintain core hacks. We want to be good citizens and so we try to stay away from releasing features that require core modifications.

On your point about commenting on other's specifications, I believe we have participated in many ways. I have commented on several of the tickets in the tracker on requested features, we have provided accessibility feedback on several tickets and our developers have reviewed several specifications for suggested features. If there is something specific you would like comments on I would be happy to review it and give feedback.

There is nothing about this specification that requires it be in Moodle 2.6, we would definitely think the community would benefit most if it was in 2.6. The interface already works, as I said it has been used for 1.5 years. We can demo it now, in fact anyone can test it out on our public demo site at http://demo2k12.moodlerooms.com/. We plan to complete the lions share of the work that needs to be done to complete the inclusion into core.

We are more than happy maintaining it as a proprietary feature of our product or considering its release as a plugin that requires core modifications and updates with each Moodle release. The reactions to the interface we have received at Moots, from prospects, and our clients though pushed us to request that the feature be added to Moodle and not released as a plugin.

Agreed that they are working on a lot right now, but not sure that whinge is warranted here.

It's a good thing that Moodlerooms are releasing all this stuff that they've been working on for some time and they are going about it exactly the right way, so I thank them 100%.   I've been more aware of all that stuff for quite some time so it's less surprise to me.

The decision on whether and when anything gets into core or not ultimately lies with Moodle HQ, if we have a backlog then we have a backlog (and we have a backlog already).

Joule grader will be released as part of whatever version of Core Moodle HQ accepts it in. Right now the earliest version Joule grader would be considered for inclusion would be Moodle 2.7. Moodle does not back port new features to older versions of Moodle. Joule grader would be considered a new feature. Joule Grader is a complex system and could have significant impacts to grading in at least one core activity, with additions from advanced forums to core forums probably 2 activities. We do not want to rush inclusion, instead we want to get it in right.

Moodlerooms doesn't plan to release Joule grader outside of a core release. Because it has such a significant impact on activity grading we do not want to have community members installing it incase Moodle HQ determines that apis need to change in order to provide the best functionality for the entire community. Moodlerooms is staffed to handle api changes internally, but we aren't staffed to fully support community members converting from Joule grader to the Moodle activity grader.

We really do need a different name for Joule grader when it is included into core.

1. At the moment it obscures the submission pane. We definitely want to improve this usability. Originally we were unable to allow users to adjust the size of the columns, since our last release this has changed and we are considering improving this. 

2. We are adding that to our December 2013 release of Joule so that change would be included.

3. Currently only Forums is supported and we could probably add rating capability to the interface, but the original idea was that you would review the forum and rate the posts then use grading interface to grade the overall performance. The idea was that ratings would be used as a metric for grading but not as the grade. Database and glossary don't support grading. Long term I would love to convince Moodle HQ to add grading to many more activities.

4. At the moment no, but that is something we will be looking into as part of the Assignment grading work flow that was added in Moodle 2.6. Long term imo this interface needs to support all grading options a teacher would want for a course.

5. Turnitin would depend on what plugin you are using. Joule grader will have an API that activity plugins can take advantage of. Turnitin Direct would need to add Joule grader support to their plugin. If you are using the plagiarism plugin not the activity then that like PDF annotation should be supported in this interface. But needs to be added. This is something we would need to look into further.