Howard Miller

I have had a request from a course leader to investigate the possibility of performing Critacl Peer Reviews within Moodle.

In case it isn't clear what this means (and it wasn't to me!) the idea is that essays or similar produced by participants (probably in Word) are somehow made visible to all other participants for comment/discussion.

I can't see an easy or elagant way to do this. Any thoughts?

I confess I haven't dug into the code yet....

How hard would it be to add an additional resource type? It would be based on plain text, but when the text is displayed it would be run through a custom formatter.

Its just to get an idea how deep in the code these sort of features are before I take on something that a might regret!

Thanks!

Re. The email that gets sent when one particpates in or starts a discussion:

Tutors here have noticed and are concerned that anyone directly replying to the email will send mail directly to the poster. It would be useful to be able to disable this feature, ie, just to bin any replies or send them to a "junk" mailbox.

I guess what I am asking is that a provision is needed for a default reply address to these mails rather than the poster's email address.

Another feature-suggestion I guess....

I have to start by pointing out two things (1) I have only worked with the IMS QTI specification, and (b) I don't have a great deal of background in the IMS world so I maybe missing the point somewhere.

However, the DTD for the QTI has a bit of a design-by-commitee feel. Its designed to do everything and is complex and decidedly tricky. I think that a DTD should be a intuitive as possible, but this has all manner of options many of which have a less than obvious purpose. I think you would be doing well to design a system that exported material out of Moodle and it looked how you expected in WebCT (for argument's sake).

I don't want to be too negative as its almost certainly a step in the right direction.

This can be done (elegantly) using CSS. You can have different style sheets for different Media Types. This would require that Moodle be fully CSS'd (as it where), but this would I think be a better use of effort than just adding a print view.