David Scotson

I was somewhat confused by the second of the Jack Kenny pieces.

It states that:

• Cleo (Cumbria and Lancashire Education Online) have selected Moodle for their area
• that teaching staff have not been consulted, and are upset

but also

• that staff are to be forced to use a system "yet to be developed by Cleo"
• that Cleo selected Moodle based on feedback from local schools, some of whom are already happily using Moodle

Something doesn't add up since these statements clearly contradict each other.

From what I can gather (from brief Google research), headteachers from schools who are not currently using Moodle, and further don't seem to understand what Moodle is, are unhappy to be forced to move to it. Understandable I suppose, but it seems the Cleo/Moodle team have some PR work to do.

edit: I'm guessing Jack's an open source sceptic, quotes from the article focusing on your own experiences:

Moodle, an open-source product, is the learning platform that Miles uses.

Devotees are keen to point out that it is free but they rarely cost in the time it takes to tailor the software to their requirements. Moodle tends to be favoured by enthusiasts and Miles is certainly one of those, but the work that he has done is not dependent on its use.

Considering it is in the context of an article about what great teaching work you are doing with a 'learning platform', that's a fairly thorough going over he gives to your tool of choice.

Some tiny issues to think about:

• I personally wouldn't use the colon at the end of each input name, it seems fussy and unnecessary to me, though I'm personally a bit minimalist
• Boolean choices (Yes/No etc.) could also be expressed as a checkbox e.g. show grades? [tick]
• the gap between the control and it's label is large enough that the blank space becomes visible itself. Reducing it might return focus to the foreground and better 'connect' the two visually.
• you might want to think about internationalisation, as not all languages are as compact as English (right to left text might be an issue too, though I don't have much experience with that) so erring on the side of simplicity with ordering might be necessary

Yes, exactly that, a PHP library for creating forms that (because it is shared between projects) has had enough time and effort expended to iron out all the kinks.

You can see an example here: Pear's HTML_Quickform (just an example, not a firm recommendation)

You can also search the Using Moodle forums for 'quickform' to see some previous discussion on this topic.

I think your suggestion to truncate the search results is the better for lots of reasons e.g. scanning 20 snippets for relevance is probably easier than 20 full posts.

Forcing people to attach a file is a half-solution, particularly as I'd quite like Moodle to return a post in its search results even if the phrase I'm looking for occurs in the forum attachment.

Also, regarding Google Search of just the forums, the RSS feeds from the forums are picked up by the Google Blog Search so for example you can go to:

• search.blogger.com

and enter

• inblogtitle:"open social forum" giving you all entries from that particular forum

or

• blogurl:moodle.org giving all RSS feeds from that url

Unfortunately sites can be as much as two weeks out of date, possibly more so and from a brief survey it doesn't appear to catch every post (maybe it does, I didn't do a precise count). I don't know if Moodle needs to do something to be better serviced, I believe the Google sitemaps service lets you specify how often content changes and have the Google spiders visit as appropriate.

Hi, I'd seen these test scripts added to the wiki and been intrigued. I think having community created test scripts is a great idea, but one that could be taken further with automated testing tools.

The tool I have most interest in is Watir. I'm so excited about the possibilities of this tool that after months of waiting for the promised cross-platform, cross-browser version 2.0, I've finally caved and overcame my revulsion to install and use Windows XP on my main work machine to explore its potential.

I've not yet had the chance to dig into it fully but believe that the tool is simple enough for ordinary Moodle users to contribute and run automated test scripts, while allowing more advanced users and developers to do very interesting things.

In fact I was often reminded of Moodle when reading the testimonials of testing professionals who use this tool. It seems to open up this world to a whole new audience by massively lowering the technical expertise required and working in a way that fits their existing mental models.

If anyone else has been looking into this or other similar/complimentary tools (e.g. Selenium) I'd love to hear about it.