Posts made by Tim Hunt

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Moodle has had a question bank, separate from quizzes, since Moodle 1.N, in 200X. On that scale, what has changed in Moodle 5.0 is relatively small, and possibly makes things less confusing.

Also, with the changes in Moodle 5.0, it is now easier to ignore the question bank, and just build a stand-alone quiz without even being aware of where Moodle is storing the question.
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Asking to "stop question bank" misses the point.

Tracking question versions was not done on an idle whim. It was the solution to a whole lot of problems that used to exist in the past. We are not going to remove versioning and go back to those bugs. Also, it is not a plugin that could be just turned on or off. It is now build into the core of the Moodle question system. It is like asking to remove Moodle's roles and permissions system (which people asked for when that was new.)

It certainly is the case that adding question versions to Moodle was a big change. Therefore, we did not get everything perfect the first time. There were rough-edges. Some of those have been improved. Others remain, but we have not stopped working on it.

To continue to move forwards, what we need to know is specifically what is still not working right now, so we know what needs to be better. When talking about that, please focus on what the problem or need is, not what one possible solution might be. When thinking about these things, some people recommend that you ask yourself 'Why?' at leat 5 times, to make sure you really understand what you want to achieve. 

From all the discussions I have read and heard, I think the main problems people still have are these:

  1. If you edit a question in the middle of a live quiz, those changes does not immediately show up to students.

    Note: you don't always want that, but sometimes you do, and it is too tricky to do. Currently you have to know that you should: go to Quiz -> Results -> Grades, and regrade the question. But, there should be an easier way to do that if that is what you want. And, I am not sure if we have a tracker for this.

  2. If you keep editing a question then you get a lot of versions in the database.

    Note the discussion here: it is not uniformly agreed that this is a problem. However, there is a tracker MDL-73701 that is worth doing when someone has time.

Those are the main ones that I remember right now. What else?

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I would suggest you don't change too many things at once. Going from your current setup to:

  • Multiple web/application servers behind a load balancer
  • Shared storage for moodledata
  • A single separate server for the batabase - especially if that server has a lot of RAM and you configure the DB to use it well.

That will be a huge step forwards in scalability, and perhaps enogh to get working in one change.

After you do that, probably the next biggest thing I would do is

  • Set up Valkey (or another Redis equivalent) for most of the Moodle caches.

If Moodledata in on shared storage, then that is pretty essential. Also, make sure you set up 'localcachedir' https://github.com/moodle/moodle/blob/main/config-dist.php#L543.

After that, it migh make sense to get database replication working. If you have a live database for write, that are replicated to some read-only copies (that you can fail-over to in emergency) then, you can get Moodle to use the replicas for read operations. See https://github.com/moodle/moodle/blob/main/config-dist.php#L126.

You are right to be asking about best options for Moodledata. Performance of that matters, but I don't know what is best.

You can have a very, very big Moodle site before you need a clustered database, and clustered databases are complex from everything I have seen.

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Moodle in English -> Accessibility -> Moodle forms, hideIf and accessibility

by Tim Hunt -
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On Moodle forms, it is common for there to be some form fields that depend on other field. For example in the Forurms setting form (link to Moodle demo site), in the  'Common module settings' section, if you change the value of 'Group mode' then the 'Grouping' setting underneath appears and disappears.

For screen readers, we seem not to do anything special for that. For example one could imagine that being marked with aria-live="polite", but that example probably illustrates why we don't do that: the other thing that changes is the next thing in tab-order, so what happens should make sense to users of assistive technology.

But, what about in other cases, is there a case for making it clear to screen-reader users that changing one setting is having some impact on the rest of the form? I would be interested to know what people think.

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