Itamar Tzadok

As shown in the docs, the grade settings are in the Ratings section. hth

I'm not sure what's political correctness about that. Obviously there are relevant use cases where we would like users to rate their own entries. That is why it is possible to rate own entries in the Dataform.

The main advantage of the Dataform is that you can set up any assignment in any layout you wish. The trade-off is that complex assignment will require complex setup. But then again, fixed modules such as the assignment can typically only do the standard stuff. So, if what you need is standard you definitely want to use a standard module. If what you need is less to non standard, the Dataform may be able to allow you to do it.

There are quite a few settings, not all are documented. How-tos, tips, tricks and presets can be found in the Dataform forum.

How many instances for a particular activity depends on what you are trying to achieve.

Indeed adjusting times is an issue. It works in the Dataform the same way as in Moodle. But I've been planning to enhance that in certain areas, by allowing to enter time as a string.

Setting up a complex activity is a complex and time consuming task. It's inevitable. If you will limit the activities in your environment to such that can be set up by any instructor, you are likely to have only standard oversimplified activities. It's not that instructors are not capable. They just don't have the time to do something that should be done by specialists anyway.

You can try the Dataform module. Students can submit an entry with online text for each lecture. The simplest way would probably be to use a designated instance for each lecture and you can set a due time for that instance after which the students can no longer submit. For annotation you can edit the student's submissions and add your comments inline or use a comment field to add external comments. We employ both approaches in courses, depending on the instructor's preference. For grading you can use a rating field (ajaxed) or select field (entry editing mode). If you have the pdf view add-on you can export a view to pdf. Otherwise you could probably save the view page and import into Word or pdf (worth experimenting). See below an illustration of one of the annotating approaches that is used in one of the courses this term. hth

I like the clean theme. It's clean. The more theme is still clean (after removing the background image) and allows configuring colors and as such also quite nice. But there are still three things that I find annoying: the navigation block, the administration block, and the "Add a block" block on side-pre even if I move all other blocks to side-post. So I've drafted a simple theme, derived from more. I call this theme "cleaner". It "fixes" those three things with a few simple modifications.

First, I made side-post the default region in the theme's config. IMO it creates a cleaner and more intuitive look. I had to override columns2 layout because it was hardcodedly laid out with side-pre.

Second, I set the theme to omit the administration and navigation blocks in browse mode, and show them only when editing. This required overriding the block_manager. It also required adding to the theme's core_renderer (which extends the clean's one) the header method in order to add the editing button to the front page.

One of the nicest effects of the latter is that in pages where I don't add any blocks the main region stretches all over the page. It's just cleaner that way.