Itamar Tzadok

Does that include enrollment of the learners in the courses in order?

I've been asked to provide a crossword activity for practicing concepts in a second year Law course. Personally I don't find the crossword particularly effective for such a purpose. The crossing of words and the typical conversion of phrases to one lower/upper case word are more a distraction than useful cues. Flashcard activities are probably much more suitable for concept drilling than crosswords. But for various mostly irrelevant reasons it was decided to go with crosswords.

The easy route was to use the game plugin. But the game plugin doesn't seem to have a solid ongoing support. It also contains much more than may be needed, without a clean way to remove unwanted components. And so I decided to construct a minimal crossword plugin as a dataformfield sub-plugin of the Dataform activity.

The Dataform crossword uses open code by Àngel Fenoy from Arenys de Mar, Barcelona for generating the crossword structure (the same code that is used by the game plugin). It uses open js code and jquery for the crossword ui.

A typical implementation would consist of a Dataform activity with a crossword field, a view which displays the list of attempts and a view which displays a single attempt in editing mode. The concepts and definitions are entered in the field configuration as concept-definition pairs, separated by a space (as the concept is rendered as one word), each pair in a new line. Other settings in the field allow for controlling the crossword dimensions (max row size) and min and max number of words.

In a typical usage users add an entry for a crossword attempt. The crossword is generated on entry creation. It is displayed and can be solved when editing the entry. Current solution is stored when saving the entry. Depending on the number of available concepts, subsequent entries will generate different crosswords. In the attempts list it is possible to display the number of words in the attempt, number of letters, number of words solved, and completion % (number of letters solved / number of letters).

The plugin is available from git at https://github.com/itamart/moodle-dataformfield_crossword. It requires Dataform 2.8.6.

Illustration below.

Yes, that's how it seems to work. But then the whole feature seems to be conceptually broken. Since I can force a user dashboard template by preventing users from customizing their dashboard, I should be able to reset their dashboards when I change the template. There doesn't seem to be a way to do that.

To prevent all users from editing their dashboard, unset the moodle/my:manageblocks capability in the Authenticated Role in the system level.

The users' dashbaord is controlled separately from the admin's. To customize the users' dashboard go to Site administration - Appearance - Default Dashboard page. What you put in that page is what the users will see in their dashboard. That template does not apply to the admin's dashboard.

hth

It's likely broken html. Next time it happens, use the browser 'Go back' button to go back to the editing window, delete the content of editor, save, and consider what in that content could have broken the html.

The 35 pages are not code. That's the image content in base64 which is what you get when you drag an image into the editor in a recent enough browser. While this should work, it is better to upload images via the image button of the editor so that the images are properly stored in the file system. This also reduces the risk of broken html.

hth