Some minor frustrations

Some minor frustrations

by Zbigniew Fiedorowicz -
Number of replies: 1

I've just finished setting up my calculus course for the coming spring quarter, using my interface scripts with WeBWorK, the symbolic math. homework generator and grader.  A couple of the problems further link to WIMS, another such system (c.f. Problem 8 in Practice Hmwk 0). You can log into my course at   https://webwork.math.ohio-state.edu/moodle/ as a guest without an enrollment key.

Martin, feel free to link to my site from your list of Moodle sites.

A couple of general comments about things I'd like to see improved in Moodle, from my limited experience in using it.  First of all I am using a course format which is intermediate between the topics and weekly format. It's basically a weekly format, except that the units are not necessarily covered over a one week period - sometimes a week and a half or two weeks.

I will probably hack Moodle to implement the following minor changes. I prefer "Course Outline" to "Topics Outline" as the header for the main course page. Also in my use, Assignments are really Assessments.  Unfortunately Resources are too large of a grab-bag category, and the subset of "Program Resources" are really "Assignments" in my usage.

Also my course is divided into 6 problem sections. I want to have a field in Moodle to indicate which section each student belongs to. The only way I could find to do this was to create a bogus Assignment to contain this data as a "grade".  Also I would like to be able to sort on this field.

Finally I noticed today that on Martin's site, Moodle refused to display the list of participants since the list contained more than 500 members. I am worried about what other such limitations might be built into Moodle.

Zig Fiedorowicz

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In reply to Zbigniew Fiedorowicz

Re: Some minor frustrations

by Martin Dougiamas -
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Hi, Zig.

What several people I know do is make a copy of the "en" folder to a new language (eg "en2") and then use the online language editor to adjust strings to their liking. In future upgrades, just keep the en2 folder - if new strings are missing from it then Moodle will get them from the "en" language anyway.

Your use of the external 'Program Resource" to connect to Webwork was your choice, remember? wink For the interface you want on the course page it would be better to make a complete new WebWork module. One way of doing this would be to make a copy of the resource module, changing "resource" to "webwork" throughout, and stripping the other resource types from it (it might be best to follow up in the developer forum about this).

Yes! "Using Moodle" today hit 500 participants within the last 30 days! Quite a milestone. There have to be some limits to make pages usable (I know a Moodle course with over 3000 users) - however there is a feature request to make the user list fully pageable/searchable which will avoid this need for cutoffs in future versions. I've just lowered the cutoff date to 21 days for the courses on moodle.org.

And I've linked your site - thanks!

Cheers,
Martin