Moodle in English: Permanently hide columns from assignment view

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Assignment

Good day Moodle Gurus!

(Moodle version 2.3)

I have spent the last hour researching ways to site-wide permanently hide columns when quickgrading submitted assignments.

At the moment, the following columns appear: Select, Edit, User Picture, First Name / Surname, Status, Grade, last modified (submission), file submissions, last modified (grade), feedback comments and final grade.

I know I can hide them, but I would like to remove the columns from the view or at least minimize them by default.

Is there a non-php way of achieving this?

Many thanks for your thoughts

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Hi Marc,

Not sure if this helps but we changed the custom css for our theme:

/* this hides the header of the user picture column */

.gradingtable tr th.header.c1 {
display: none;
}
/* this hides the user picture column */
.gradingtable tr td.cell.c1 {
display: none;
}
/* this hides the header of the email column */
.gradingtable tr th.header.c3 {
display: none;
}
/* this hides the email column */
.gradingtable tr td.cell.c3 {
display: none;
}

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Thanks Louise. That does help.

I will wrestle one of the IT support guys to the ground and make them change the CSS. It does really bug me

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Isn't there any option that you can do the same thing from the user interface of moodle??

I am using moodle 2.5.1.

Regards,

Andreas

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I don't understand your question, what do you mean by assignment view?

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Hi Louise

This worked perfectly - thank you!

Alex

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Using this code to css

.gradingtable tr th.header.c8 {
display: none;
}
.gradingtable tr td.cell.c8 {
display: none;
}

will hide the uploaded files column from grading table.

What about if we would like to show this column but without link so files not be downloadable? Is there such a css rule?

Is there any way to do so (show files but not be able for someone to downlaod)..?

Thank you in advance!

Regards,

Andreas

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Louise, your code was VERY helpful. Thank you for that.

I used what I learned from you to hide the city/town and country columns from the Participants list, because they aren't really useful for us and we need the horizontal space. Unfortunately the particpants list uses 'generaltable' (see code) which is used elsewhere in Moodle. Not a shock, considering the use of the word 'general.' I discovered the next day that my CSS change removed the "restore" column when trying to restore a course. Argh!

Regardless, I learned something really useful from you, and maybe someone will read this and come up with a brilliant solution to my problem.

WARNING: This code is for explanation only. Don't use it, or you'll have unexpected results!

/* test to hide the city-town column from the participants list */

.generaltable tr th.header.c4 {

display: none;

/* this hides the city-town column */

.generaltable tr td.cell.c4 {

display: none;

/*test to hide the country column from the participants list */

.generaltable tr th.header.c5 {

display: none;

/* this hides the country column */

.generaltable tr td.cell.c5 {

display: none;

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I agree that User Picture, last modified (submission), last modified (grade), are always in the way.

Ideally I would like a way to move these columns to the right since the most important columns when marking work are:

Name
Grade
File Submission (to download the work)
Feedback Comments/Submission Comments (I currently prefer submission comments for my comments because I can conduct a dialogue with the student about what they can do to improve)

If these columns were on the left I would be able to get on with my marking much quicker. As it is I either have to scroll back and forth or hide the unnecessary columns.

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To make this page more user friendly for our teaching staff and make a better use of the screen space, we did a bit of customisation of our Moodle install. This, of course, required changes to Moodle code.

I've included a screenshot of Assignment Grading page from a test course to illustrate the changes we made.
(*All user details are fictional)

Here is a list of changes we did:

Reordered the columns
User name, picture and ID number are combined into a single column
Grade column (Mark in our case) displays a combined set of grading options. So grading options, grade input and quick feedback textarea are all displayed together in a single column.
User submissions column displays all the submissions from the students. So File submissions, online text and comments are all displayed together in a single column.
Grader feedback (marker feedback) column displays the feedback files and feedback comments in a single column as well.
Preview option for online text and feedback comments opens in a popup instead of moving to a new page.
Grade input box does client-side validation to check that marks are numeric, and alerts user when invalid marks are entered.

These changes have greatly improved the grading experience for our teachers and helps reduce input errors. The biggest plus point is that there is usually no need for them to do a horizontal scroll now. All the necessary details required while marking is always displayed on-screen.

I hope that our customisations of the Assignment Grading page can give others some ideas on how to improve the Assignment grading page for their users as well. I'm happy to share our code with others who also like to get their hand dirty writing code

Thanks,
RT

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You screenshots look good.

I guess the tradeoff is that because your submissions/feedback are all collapsed in one column each, the height of the row is greater - so in all other columns you will have > 50% whitespace which greatly increases the vertical scroll.

It would be good to hear of your typical class sizes and if you have had issues with this with any big class sizes (> 500 students).

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ID# is indicated twice, is this significant?

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Actually the only reason for having the another column for the ID number is for sorting. I currently haven't looked at how I can add the ID number sort function together with the User name column. After I work out how to do this, ID number column will be removed as well.

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Interesting, it that it too complicated, simply move it to the far right.

I would like to see that blocks column to be restricted to a fixed/minimal width or moved to the right side. This would free up editable space for grading and minimize or eliminate horizontal scrolling. I know this is a more complicated move though as it is theme based.

Nice work though....

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Hi,

In my report I can't see the username firstname and lastname and the picture,

That mean the teacher don't know which student he is checking.

How can I add those columns?

I tried adding all the capabilities to the teacher/admin but nothing helped

moodle/grade:viewall

moodle/site:viewfullnames

mod/assign:grade:

mod/assign:revealidentities:

moodle/site:viewuseridentity

moodle/user:viewdetails

moodle/user:viewhiddendetails

What else could it be?

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It is, of course, not a perfect solution but one that works well for our staff.

In the screenshot above, I'm testing by enabling the 3 main submission types and 2 main feedback options.
Typically at our Uni, File submission is the preferred choice. Online text submission is hardly used at all (because it currently lacks TurnItIn checks). And only one of the feedback types is used, depends mainly on how marking is done for the course.

Courses at our Uni range from 50 students upto 2000 students. Our largest class size this semester was 2000+ students but most of the courses would have 100-200 students.
The screen width for most of our users is between 1024px to 1440px. Almost every teaching staff were frustrated of the constant horizontal scrolling when we moved to v2.3. As you do a horizontal scroll, the student details moves out of display. So even though you can see a lot more rows, you cannot really identify the student. So you have to do a horizontal scroll to see the student details and another horizontal scroll to go to the grading or feedback input areas. It was a nightmare! Ever since we did these changes I don't think we received any complaints regarding the scrolling. For us, the little extra whitespace was greatly overshadowed by the huge time savings and lesser mouse clicks. (Most users use the mouse as much as possible.) It made grading much faster.

Ideally it would be great if I can implement static columns similar to the Gradebook, and fixed table headers for this. Thats the plan for next year

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Rajneel,

Static columns are implemented in Bob Puffer's laegrader report . You may like to download this & install it into grade/report. Here's a list of layout differences from the readme file:

Layout Differences From Grader Report

LAE Grader report in non-editing mode.

Grade item and category headers are all on one line, not nested. LAEgrader does not collapse or expand categories.
LAEgrader allows wrapping of grade item and grade category names (at approximately 30 characters) to avoid excessively wide reports
Category items always follow the items contained in the category
All items (including the category column) included in a category are color-coded the same to group them together, alternately orange/blue
The last column is always the Course Total.
Items not contained in a category have a background of white as does the Course Total. - Hidden items and categories are gray.
If your gradebook exceeds 95% of the width of the document page, a horizontal scrollbar will be applied at the bottom. If the height of the number of student rows to display exceeds the user-configurable height a vertical scrollbar will be displayed. Whenever the grades are scrolled, either horizontally or vertically, the grade item titles (and optionally, range and average rows) will remain fixed as will the student columns (including "id", if displayed). This is the biggest difference between the LAE and core gradebooks. It negates the need for mouseover descriptions of which student and which item on which you're currently working.
Rows added such as 'range' or 'average' are placed at the top (instead of the bottom) and are frozen along with the grade item titles row so the user never loses sight of them.

Laegrader report has been operational for quite a while and is quite robust on different browsers (especially compatible with Mac browsers). Try it and see!

Mark

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Thanks Mark. Yes, I did try out the Laegrader report. It's a great improvement of the standard grader report.

That's when I thought that something similar for the Assignment Grading view is also possible.

It would be great if static columns and headers feature can be implemented as part of Moodle's flexible tables API so that it can be used in other places in Moodle as well.

Thanks,
...RT

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