I work for a computer science department, and we're hoping to replace a homegrown course management application with moodle in the Spring. Between now and then, my job is to make moodle do some stuff that probably isn't really a necessity for most other courses (but what do I know? Maybe someone would find this useful/has already done this). If I'm in the wrong forum, please let me know the appropriate place to post development queries.
Moodle creates a directory hierarchy for managing files uploaded for all courses that moodle knows about. This hierarchy names directories after (apparently) the course ID in the database. Unfortunately, these numbers mean nothing to humans, and our profs will need to be able to navigate to these directories to, for example, run a compiler against uploaded programming assignments. If someone has worked on this, let me know so I don't duplicate any efforts (though I imagine this is a simple change).
In addition, I'm also going to need to allow users to upload more than one file. The reason that a zip file doesn't work is because I want the professor to be able to tell the students (in the assignment description), for example "upload 3 files, one named x, one named y, and one named z. File x should be this, file y should be that, and file z should be the other thing". Once the files are uploaded, the professor can run a very simple shell script to go through and run a program against only file x for each user. Also, the assignment will not be marked as "submitted" until all three files are uploaded.
The next change might be a bit intrusive, and it's the ability to break down a very large class into smaller groups, each of which is handled by a teaching assistant. The main prof should still be able to assign final grades or grades for some small assignments, but he should be able to assign a TA who also has the ability to assign grades to students who are assigned (by the main prof) to his subgroup.
Those are the changes I think will be most intrusive, so if there's a simple add-on that handles this type of situation, or comes close, let me know!
There are a couple of other changes that can hopefully be handled mostly in the background or as separate code:
One is in the "View x Submitted Assignments" page. This is clearly geared toward a class of 20 or 30 students, rather than a lecture of 120 students. We'd like to, at the very, very least, get rid of the drop down box for entering grades and replace it with a text field so that you can just tab around and enter grades without having to click on 120 drop downs. Ideally, there would be some way to do this in some form of "batch mode", where the professor uploads a file in text format, with three columns: userID, assignmentID, and numeric grade. Feedback could be an optional fourth field. Currently, moodle allows for downloading in text or excel format, but not uploading data that will be used to populate the database as I've described here. This type of batch functionality would also be useful for adding 120 users to a course
The last change is really an addition. We'd like to be able to view more detailed statistics online, but that's low on the priority list.
If anyone can point a newbie toward people who are doing development work that I can latch onto or collaborate with, please post links!
Thanks.
brian.