Martin Dougiamas

Some questions ...

1. What do you guys think about the basic interface of Ray's moodle-tinymce_matheditor?

It's not dragmath but I think most people agree that Java is a dead end and we do need a truly cross-platform solution built into Moodle.  Of the few I've looked at it seems the most promising, but unfortunately they all seem pretty buggy.

2. Is there really no strong opensource JS equation editor out there?

I'm surprised - these are not new technologies and there are so many maths techheads.

3. Feature wise, if Wiris was open source and included in Moodle would it satisfy everyone's needs?

So we have this site (moodle.org) that I set up for information, community support and discussions about Moodle, and we have a team of people responsible for maintaining it and all the other .org, .net and .com sites, the SITES team at Moodle HQ, numbering 8 people.  This team has only officially existed since June 2013, before that these sites were maintained by whoever could spare a bit of time from Moodle coding.

It's very clear to me (and I hope to you) that our sites need a big update, both visually/functionally to bring it into the current decade and informationally to be able to answer everyone's questions better and to help the world understand what Moodle is.   I personally cringe every time I need to look at the current moodle.org front page on any device.

The team has been working through the issues for a long time, over a year. MDLSITE-1862 and related issues.  Many of them come from tracker issues and forum comments over the years.  We can't asking for community votes on every little step along the way, the process would just take too long (and it's been incredibly long already).  But please understand that we do argue and discuss every little thing with the community in mind, and we have planned all along to show a prototype to key people (facilitators etc) here before going live with it.

One of these little things is the problem of all our Moodle courses on this site being called, currently, a confusing mix of "courses" and "forums", when they are in fact neither.   In one discussion we decided that standardising on calling them communities would be the best way to clean up the mess and make things easier for novices.   Perhaps that makes it easier to see why this course (which I named originally as Using Moodle) will be better off named as Moodle in English.  Our world is multilingual and we should be inclusive.   I agree it may seem a little random as it has happened in advance of the new redesign but I feel very strongly that multilingual communities are the right direction for Moodle.

Hi,

The FRONTEND team at Moodle HQ are working on a number of new things to do with usability and features for Moodle 2.7 and beyond.

To improve our development process and decision-making, we are focussing on producing quick usable prototypes of ideas early in the 6-month development cycle, before getting deep into proper coding.

To facilitate this we have a new site called prototype.moodle.net where we'll be publishing experiments and examples for you to try out and to give us feedback on.  The site will be evolving over time with new projects and mockups.  Also note that it's not comprehensive and doesn't include everything we are working on.

If you have some time, please explore the Moodle sites there and try out the new features, then give us feedback using the surveys or other methods provided.

Thanks for helping to improve Moodle!

Cheers,
Martin

This sounds like a really interesting suggestion, Bob.  Do we have a tracker issue or another discussion yet where that is being fleshed out?

I just moved this to the Gradebook forum too.

I'd like to point out that there is no guarantee that any of the Netspot-developed enhancements will actually get into 2.7, but that they do all seem like pretty good small enhancements that should not be difficult to integrate.

Likewise there is some great enhancements in the LSU work, thanks Robert for working on documentation so everyone can "see" it better.

Moodle HQ is currently tackling a number of gradebook bugs too in a sprint focussed on gradebook and assignment bugs highlighted by Moodlerooms.  (listed here)

The problem with our gradebook is much bigger than these fringe issues however.

1. We have a fundamental conflict produced by two major ways of grading around the world: points and percentages.  A lot of the issues we have are produced by trying to support both at the same time.   Most people interested in gradebook only work in one of the other.  Petr Skoda has suggested separating them completely and I'm coming around to that idea.
   
   
2. The interaction of gradebook with activities really needs an overhaul.  For consistency and simplicity it would be good if the central grading code provided and controlled all the interfaces for grading.
   
   
3. The whole concept of assessment in Moodle (and in education in general) needs to be clarified so that we have a very clear model that pervades the entire system.  For example how should outcomes and grades be connected?   I think a lot of research needs to be done in this area.

All this adds up to a lot of work and I'd really like us to tackle this as a mega-project next year.   Robert's phase 3 above is a start in the right direction but there's a lot of work to do yet.