Peter Ruthven-Stuart

Hello Felicia,

I had the same question, so experimented with this new repository. It seems that by activating the "URL downloader", users can paste in an URL of an external image via the file picker. This image is then downloaded and saved to the moodle system and can be displayed as any other image. So, no need to link to an external image and risk that image being deleted. I suppose this might work with other file formats, e.g. PDFs? Of course, there could be some copyright issues with this .

Hello Yulia,

Yes, what you suggest is possible, but it creates extra work for Admins, work that they didn't need to do with 1.9 because teachers could upload the files themselves to a course files directory. It also means that teachers become even more dependent on Admins; something they could do on their own now requires admin support.

Yulia, thanks for that advice.

As I mentioned above: "At the moment I am thinking of creating a directory on the Moodle server, separate from Moodle but open to the web", so I realise that it's possible to create a folder for uploads, however, this workaround is no good for teachers who don't have access to a server or are unable to create such a directory (e.g. don't have the right permissions). Furthermore, the advantage of the new file system is that when questions are made within Moodle, multimedia files become permanently attached to the questions, which is good for backups and importing etc. I think Tim Hunt's proposed solution would probably make this permanent linkage possible even with GIFT formatted questions that are imported.

Thanks for that update.

It does seem that the feature request you mention (MDL-13905) is after a similar goal, but I'm not quite sure why the requester needs this feature in 1.9. He wrote: "However, it (GIFT) doesn't support an image to show with the question."

It is possible in both 1.9 and version 2 to add URLs (i.e. add HTML img tags or links to sound files). I have attached a text file containing two MC questions in the GIFT format. The first question is the same as above, which contains a link to an MP3 in a course directory. This works in 1.9, but is no longer possible in version 2.

The second question in the attached file is more complex. It contains links to both images and sound files (OGGs). Even the feedback contains links to sound files. Because all these images and sounds are in an external site (Wikimedia) this question will work in both versions 1.9 and 2.

The issue is that most moodle users will want to upload multimedia to their own Moodle system (i.e. not rely on an external repository), and then link to these media files in their GIFT formatted questions. This is no longer possible in version 2 because the 'course files directory' has been discontinued.

Hello Mark,

Here in Japan, first names (i.e. Given names) are rarely used. I have never known of a student calling or referring to a teacher by his or her given name. They are very unlikely to even know it, unless of course their teacher uses Moodle. The only exception to this is that some non-Japanese teachers ask their students to use their given name.

So, yes, I think the ability to hide teacher's first names would be a welcome feature here in Japan.