Peter Ruthven-Stuart

Martin,

"My experience is that images (gif, jpg) are not published in other courses.
What is your workaround??"

If I want to make 'questions' available to other courses, my workaround is:

1. put any media (images or sound files etc.) in the 'Files' folder of the top page. This requires that you have admin access.
2. I then publish certain question categories so that they can be used in many courses. Any media in these questions are placed in the 'Files' folder of the top page.

This is not the same as making whole quizzes available in various courses, but does solve the problem of media not being published in other courses. Furthermore, publishing question categories is only really possible if your moodle has a limited number of teachers. The more teachers there are, the more likely it is that someone will accidentally change the published questions.

So, I would welcome any change to moodle that makes it possible to copy entire quizzes and any other activity from one course to another, without having to use the 'Restore course' feature.

I think you need to install the English (JA) language pack, which you'll find here:

http://download.moodle.org/lang/

The README.txt in this package reads as follows:

This is a special "language" that basically provides
English under the Japanese encoding scheme EUC-JP.

When this is used instead of the normal "en" language pack
it prevents "mojibake" on bi-lingual Japan/English servers.

Note the original "en" language must still be present on
the Moodle server, even if it isn't made available from the language menu.

In other words, simply changing the character encoding in a browser does not fix the 'mojibake' problem.

David,

The most useful GIFT help page is

http://your.moodle.site/help.php?module=quiz&file=formatgift.html

so, the GIFT help file on the moodle.org site is:

http://moodle.org/help.php?module=quiz&file=formatgift.html

Once you have formatted your questions as described in the above help file, you then,

1. click on 'Quiz' in the [Add an activity...] pull-down menu.
2. Set up the parameters of your quiz, then click on the [Save changes] button.
3. You will then see a link to the right of the screen that says "Import questions from file". (this may be slightly different if you are using a pre 1.5 version).
4. You will then be faced with a simple screen in which you can select the category into which the questions are to be imported,
5. next select the File format (GIFT format is the default),
6. and then browse your hard disk for the GIFT formatted text file containing your questions.
7. Finally, click on the [Upload this file] button. You'll then see a screen that tells you how many questions were uploaded, and you'll be able to see the questions.

That's it!

There should be no need to download anything form the Moodle website, since the information that Moodle needs to interpret GIFT formatted questions is already part of the standard moodle package. Also, you don't upload the questions into a 'file upload area'. You import them via the quiz module as described above.

Winn,

"Is there a way to do this?"

Yes, there is.

As the administrator or teacher of the course in which you want to add 'lurker teachers', click on 'Teachers' in the Admin section of the course. Search for the people you want to add to the course as teachers, then click on the 'Add teacher' link to the right of their names and email addresses. This will move them up to the 'Existing Teachers' section, Next, select the order they should appear in. Since you want them to be hidden, select 'Hide'. You can also indicate whether or  not they have editing rights.

Hope this helps.

Joseph

Thank you very much.

I made the changes as you suggested and it worked! And even managed to make other changes.

Changing the stylesheets seemed to be very complicated and enormously time consuming looked at from the point of view of someone whose only experience with styelsheets is Adobe GoLive. However, your reply made me realise that little changes are very easy to make, and thus 'customising' ones own moodle - at least in a limited way - is really quite straightforward.

For any one else new to this, note that because of stylesheets being cached on servers, the changes you make may not be immediately apparent. Also, the Firefox extension (Web Developer Toolbar) makes experimentation with stylesheets much less opaque.

Thanks again.