Assignment

Thanks Howard!  are you using a windows box? - I get those ssl errors on my windows box as well - I think it's a bug in PHP that I need to work around...

the error:"Primary account ID for Turnitin not activated to use the API tiicode"

seems to suggest you haven't "activated" the TII moodle Plugin. - has TII activated your ability to use the API?

also the "'mystuff.mdl_assignment_files' doesn't exist" error is because the tables needed havn't been created - I probably forgot to include a version change so that the updated script in assignment\db\install.xml  runs properly.

Thanks for testing!

btw - the ssl error seems to be a php bug - see:
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=41770

not clear if it is fixed post PHP 5.2.1 - what version of PHP are you running?

Dan

No trouble...

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-13680

Thanks Wen!

I'm not sure at this stage whether the XML-RPC stuff will even be necessary, but it would be interesting to see some design specs if they were available - I have some docs on the current API, but I'm not sure if I can publish them publicly? - David - do you mind posting the doc on the current API? - especially any new XML-RPC stuff (even in draft stages) - we would be happy to provide feedback on it to help with your design!

I know I'd like some way of giving a better report to the student rather than just a similarity score. - a cut down version of the full report (with no way of allowing students to see other students submissions) would be great!



Dan

Hi Wen,

Currently, we do not have a rough timeline as to when our own code will be available for testing. There are some internal dependencies as well as a resource constraint at the moment that is causing the release to be longer than expected.

The project is not currently outsourced to Northumbria Learning, although Neil and I did start working on it together last year. Neil has become unavailable to spend more time on this, which is what halted this development among other factors.

We would be happy to have Dan and Howard help on an integrated solution for Moodle 1.9 and 2.0. I think that would help a lot, but it's taking a little time to get things ready and organized on our side. I think it would especially help with Moodle 1.9 and 2.0 compatibility, as currently, we are building against Moodle 1.8, and I know there are significant changes to Moodle 1.9 and I'm guessing there will be in 2.0 as well.

As a general thought, essentially, our code for our current integration, at least on the Moodle end, is open source, in the sense that we are not selling it and once you download it, none of the code is hidden, so you can actually see everything that we are doing (I'm a little new to the open source concept, so don't quote me on that, as I'm also not sure what legal complications there are to making something open source - we have a project in place right now to investigate and do so officially). We are open to people modifying our the code we have written for their own customization or their own purposes or improvements, but once that is done, it makes it harder for us to troubleshoot the integration if there are errors since we won't know if those changes/customizations/improvements might be the source of the error.
That being said, if the open source community wants to work in collaboration with Turnitin to improve the plugin, and the improvements are testing, then we can fold in those changes to the version of the plugin that we release. But currently, there is nothing stopping anyone from taking the current plugin and doing whatever they want with it. We already have our Turnitin Moodle integration code up on Sourceforge, and this was put there because I was unaware that there was a CONTRIB area in Moodle for projects just like this - at least that's what I'm told. We would definitely like to see what the community can add to the plugin and we think that this can make the plugin more robust and beneficial to users, and changes and improvements can happen more quickly than if just Turnitin were to release updates to the plugin, but as for the updates to the plugin that we do fold into the plugin that we officially release and support, we need to be able to control that for support reasons. We are working on getting things organized on our end to do so for our current plugin as well as this other version that will utilize our XML-RPC API that we are also concurrently developing. Also, as another aside, I'm sure that some of the ways we are doing things to get things working in our plugin might not be the best way to do them in Moodle as we are not experts in Moodle, and having tips/feedback/suggestions/improvements on the code from the community could help quickly and vastly improve it. We are hoping to do this soon with our XML-RPC version of the integration, but people can start this right away with our current version of the integration and correspond with me in terms of suggestions and improvements that we would consider folding in.

Thanks,
Dave