Peter Ruthven-Stuart

Tim,

Thanks for your reply.

"...and I am not sure there is a good answer at the moment."

I was afraid that might be the answer.

"On the other hand, what you are doing is clearly a highly practical way to create questions, and something like that should be made to work."

Yes, the GIFT format has saved me many hours of work. The ability to add URLs to questions in GIFT files means that in 1.9 I can create and upload 100's of listening questions without having to manually link each question to its respective sound file. The same goes for any 'media' file, and of course includes URLs in feedback too.

So while I fully understand that the new file system is better, it seems a pity that this extremely useful and time saving feature of GIFT (the ability to add URLs to multimedia) appears to have been rendered almost impossible in version 2.

Your suggested solution makes a lot of sense. Would it be worthwhile me 'creating an issue' (an 'improvement') in the tracker?

What do people suggest is the 'Best Practice' for linking multimedia (sounds, images etc.) to questions written in the GIFT format to be uploaded to a moodle version 2 system?

For moodle version 1.9, I create a GIFT format Multiple Choice question containing an MP3 as follows:

::MC question with linked MP3::
Listen to this<a href\="http://vle.c.fun.ac.jp/moodle/file.php/282/sounds/piano.mp3">:</a><br>
What is it?
{=a piano
~a harpsichord
~an organ
~a clavichord}

the '282' in the URL refers to the Files directory of a course with id 282. So I would upload all relevant mp3 files to the 'sounds' directory in that course's files directory. Alternatively, as an admin, I could have uploaded all multimedia to the Front page site files directory, and added the relevant links to the GIFT file.

However, with moodle version 2 the management of files has completely changed. There are no course or system level directories to upload multimedia files to, unless I activate the 'legacy course files', which I want to avoid because of its associated problems.

So, what would be the best solution (or possible solutions) for linking to multimedia in GIFT files destined for a Moodle version 2 system?

At the moment I am thinking of creating a directory on the Moodle server, separate from Moodle but open to the web, and uploading all multimedia to that, and then adding absolute links to the relevant media files in that directory in the GIFT file. The problem with this solution is that it's only possible for someone who has access to the web directory on the server. I would rather not have to set up ftp accounts for every teacher.

Any suggestions will be most welcome.

Hello Orhan,

Back in 2007 at a Moodle Workshop, Gordon Bateson told me about the following:

"a modification to add a language menu to every page which has a Moodle header"

How to 'install' it: open “theme/standard/header.html” in a text editor

change this (around line 35)

<?php if ($navigation) { // This is the navigation table with breadcrumbs ?>
to this
<?php if ($navigation) { // This is the navigation bar with breadcrumbs
$uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
if (strpos($uri, '/login/')===false) {
$uri = preg_replace('/&?lang=\w+/', '', $uri);
if (strpos($uri, '?')===false) {
$uri .= '?lang='; // new query string
} else {
$uri .= '&lang='; // append to existing query string
}
$button .= popup_form(
$uri, get_list_of_languages(),
'chooselang', current_language(),
'', '', '', true
);
} ?>

This works in 1.9. I have not tried this with version 2. Of course, please try this first in a test site.

Hello Michael,

Thanks for posting.

"Team Assignment assignment type" looks good. It looks great for allowing teachers to grade group / team work, but judging from their Wiki page, it seems that it is not designed to allow students to grade team members' levels of contribution to a team task.

Hello Peter and Marcus,

There is a demo site for trying out the Question Creation module:

http://www.ruthven-stuart.org/qca/

This module has not yet been updated for version 2.