Martin Dougiamas

OK, I had no idea changing this default would upset anyone. Let's talk about this and then perhaps take a poll.

Let me explain some of the background that led to this particular question, which is:

"Should teachers have the ability to safely override roles in their own courses BY DEFAULT in new installations of Moodle (or should they wait until the administrator allows them to do this)?"

I think they should be able to, because:

1. I generally want to empower teachers with all the features of Moodle
   
2. There was much criticism previously about the way some settings "disappeared" in Moodle 1.7 when we added roles (In forums, database activities, course settings etc) because they were moved to the overrides page.
   
3. That move was made for security to protect teachers from some risks, but the new safeoverride option now only allows teachers to override capabilities that are without risks so that reason is gone.
   
4. We only do it on new sites. Sites with roles who are upgrading from 1.6 or any other version prior to 1.9.3 will not have any defaults changed.
   
5. Administrators can still decide what they want - we are just talking about a default for an existing checkbox.
   
6. Teachers who don't understand it don't have to use it, but having it available does at least give them a chance to learn about overrides and permissions
   
7. Overrides at module level are not anywhere near as complex as the situations Administrators have to deal with.

So that was my reasoning. If there is some obvious consensus that this was a bad decision then I'm happy to leave this default to off!

Yes the great thing about the new gradebook in 1.9 is that pretty much every feature request we had about Gradebooks before 1.9 is now satisfied and it is now possible to set it up to suit 99% of teaching situations (and the use cases are extremely varied!).

The problem with this is of course increased complexity in the user interface. The standard grader report has to allow access to everything.

If you ever see a better way to improve Gradebook usability please make sure you discuss it in this forum and get it into the Moodle Tracker. That way developers can have some guidance on how to improve it in future releases (or plugins, since the new gradebook supports drop-in interfaces now, such as the one Steve linked to above. Hope we see more of them developed!)

Outsourcing decisions are frequently wierd ... my local state government here recently gave a large overseas company A$30 million to develop an LMS from scratch!

Aw, thanks. I'm painfully embarrassed now. Right back at ya all, because it's all you terrific educators and developers that actually make it so compelling to work on making this software better. (hug)

Getting back to work now ...

I'm pleased to announce that Moodle.com has contracted Piers Harding (ably assisted by Dan Marsden) to work full time for the next few months on making the Moodle SCORM module something to be proud of. Piers and Dan work at Catalyst, one of our Moodle Partners in NZ.

The plan is basically:

STAGE 1: Achieving official compliance with SCORM 1.2 standard and fixing all known bugs in the tracker.

STAGE 2: Achieving SCORM 2004 compliance

Please assist Piers and Dan any way you can by voting on known bugs, filing new bugs where necessary and providing same data and testing where you can.