Mask

Activities ::: mod_masks
Maintained by Daniel Miller, Céline Hernandez, Adrien Jamot, Mounir Ganem
Transform PDF documents into interactive activities in a snap
Latest release:
74 sites
7 downloads
12 fans
Current versions available: 1

MASK provides a SIMPLE solution for creating an interactive activity from a pdf file.

The teacher can upload their pdf file to Moodle, lay down masks that obscure parts of the underlying document and add questions for the students to answer in order to make the masks disappear.

The student is encouraged to try to answer questions correctly on their first attempt and receives a corresponding grade in the Moodle gradebook when they have found the correct answers to all of the questions in the document.

The teacher can add hint texts to be displayed after a student answers questions incorrectly in order to help them to identify the correct answer.

The teacher can additionally hide pages such as title pages and blank pages in the original pdf that are not of interest for their use within Moodle.

NOTE: For anyone considering using this module in assessments it is important to know that a student who uses the web developper functionality built into all modern browsers is able to view the document pages without the overlayed masks. As a result, in an assessment context the answers to questions should not be present in the pdf document

DEPENDENCIES: This plugin requires installation of the pdf2svg application which is available as a standard debian and ubuntu Linux package and is also freely available for Microsoft Woindows and Mac OSX

Screenshots

Screenshot #0
Screenshot #1
Screenshot #2
Screenshot #3

Contributors

Daniel Miller (Lead maintainer)
Céline Hernandez: Developer
Please login to view contributors details and/or to contact them

Comments RSS

Show comments
  • Plugins bot
    Wed, 2 Nov 2016, 5:15 PM
  • David Mudrák
    Thu, 15 Dec 2016, 5:18 AM

    Thanks for sharing the block with the Moodle community. Unfortunately I have to mark it as needing more work for now for some serious issues spotted during the functionality testing and code review. Details are reported to your tracker. Most importantly:

    • MySQL specific code
    • The db/install.xml issue (described in your rant comment there, such an approach is not acceptable for a plugin hosted here)
    • Serious security (CSRF and XSS) issues.

    One the code is fixed and follows the Moodle coding guidelines, please feel encouraged to request another review of the plugin. Thanks for your understanding and patience with the review and approval process.

  • Daniel Miller
    Fri, 16 Dec 2016, 8:24 AM
    MYSQL-specific code fixed and verified on a postgresql install
    The db/install.xml file has been reinstated as requested
    The security issue has been addressed
    The issues reported on the tracker have all been resolved.
  • Plugins bot
    Fri, 20 Jan 2017, 10:10 PM
    Approval issue created: CONTRIB-6667
  • Daniel Miller
    Thu, 11 May 2017, 9:17 AM
    This re-submission has been a little while in coming.
    The reported issues have been corrected, as have one or two other issues that turned up during retesting.
    I have just finished a pretty thorough test round on MySQL and Postgre on Moodle 3.1 and 3.2.
    I have tried pretty hard to break it and have not succeeded so I hope that this time it'll get a green light.
  • pascal b
    Wed, 22 Nov 2017, 11:35 PM
    Is it compatible with Moodle 3.3 or 3.4 ?
  • Ezzeddin Hamed
    Sun, 26 Dec 2021, 8:58 PM
    The idea of this plugin in nice, but it has not been updated in 5 years, when writing this comment. Is it going to be updated sometime?
Please login to post comments