Moodle plugins directory: Fair Allocation | Moodle.org
Fair Allocation
Activities ::: mod_ratingallocate
Maintained by 
Learnweb – University of Münster, 
Tobias Reischmann
This Module lets you add an activity to courses, in which users can rate choices. You may then distribute the users fairly to the choices by maximizing overall 'happiness' in terms of ratings.
This may be an alternative to the choice activity or first-come-first-served.
Latest release:
538 sites
346 downloads
49 fans
Current versions available: 9
In the area of schools or universities, there are often allocation problems, where a group of pupils or students needs to be assigned to a bunch of resources. These resources may be study groups, thesis topics, or seminar slots.
Therefore often techniques as first come first serve are used, which is not seldom perceived as unfair by the students.
To reach a high acceptance for the distribution technique is module offers the students the possibility to rate the possible choices according to their preferences. For this purpose the module supports multiple different rating strategies (e.g. Yes-No, Order, Points, Likert-scale).
After a predefined time period for the users to hand in their preferences, the distribution can be started. Here, an algorithm solves the distribution problem by maximizing the overall satisfaction.
Additional features:
- Choices have maximum sizes
- After the automated distribution, the allocations can be changed manually (including students with no rating)
- The students can be notified about their allocation via e-mail
No support in the comments section on this page
Please note that we don't provide any support for this plugin in the comments section on this page anymore.
We appreciate your commendation and reviews for this plugin in the comments. For bug reports and support requests create a ticket in the bug tracker which is linked below.
Thanks for your cooperation.
Screenshots
Contributors
Learnweb – University of Münster (Lead maintainer)
Tobias Reischmann: Maintainer
Max Schulze: Initial committer
Alexander Bias: Feature contributor
Claus A. Us: Former Maintainer
Jan Dageförde
Ulm University: Contributer
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Comments 
Comments
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For some reason it appears that the copyright notices are still not showing your name in the following files.
./db/upgrade.php: * @copyright 2011 Your Name
./grade.php: * @copyright 2011 Your Name
./index.php: * @copyright 2011 Your Name
I am going to go ahead and approve this and see if I can add in the German language file as it has been some time since I have looked at AMOS. Please do not hesitate to let me know if there is anything I can do to be supportive of your efforts. Peace - Anthony
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I noticed that you did not specify an issue tracker for your plugin. Providing a place for users of your plugin to report issues encourages participation and provides a way for users to report bugs, make feature requests, or suggest other types of improvements. There are a couple of options. You are welcome to request that a component be created in the Moodle Tracker. This will allow for you to become more familiar with how issues are managed in Moodle core but may take a little more time to setup. Alternatively, for folks who are using Github.com, you can use the issues feature of Github to handle such requests. Kindly let me know which of these two options seems best for you. Peace - Anthony
Many thanks for your contributions and I really like the design of this plugin, it is much more user friendly.
Our University plan to use this plugin for the optional class selection. But there's 2 issues I've encountered.
1. The exported allocation report does not contain the student ID. There is a column "ID", but it is not the student ID which can identify student with same name.
2. In the exported csv file, Chinese characters cannot display correctly.
Since the new semester will come soon and we plan to provide the optional class selection function to students at the end of this August. Would you please help with the 2 issues above?
Many thanks and I'll be looking forward to your reply.
Best wishes,
Lina
Thanks for your message.
To 1: The column "userid" in the report does belong to the students internal moodle userid. You can use it, for instance, to browse the profile of the user (http://your.moodle/user/profile.php?id=THEUSERID). The other field which could help you to identify students with the same name is the username. Since to my knowledge moodle does not allow to create the same username two times, this should be a unique identifier.
There are no plans at the moment to extend the report to custom user fields. I think you use one to store the student id assigned by the university. But if you would like to have a functionallity like that please put an issue in the github repository (Like above, see "Bug tracker"). Of course you are welcome to contribute extensions like that yourself.
To 2: This is no problem of the plugin but of the combination with the program you use to open the file. The report is encoded using UTF-8, which is quite common. If you use a program, which is capable of displaying UTF-8 encoding, you should be able to view Chinese characters, as well. For Microsoft Excel this should help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6002256/is-it-possible-to-force-excel-recognize-utf-8-csv-files-automatically#answer-6488070
I hope this helps you.
Best wishes,
Tobias
Many thanks for your kind help. That's really helpful. I've changed the code in ratingallocate/renderer.php and added the idnumber field into the export function and it works. We can now export the student ID information.
$ratingscells[$user->id][3] = $user->idnumber;
Thanks again for the UTF8 issue, I've tried the data import function in Microsoft Excel, I changed the file origin to UTF-8, Chinese GB, simplified Chinese (Mac), simplified Chinese(Windows), I tried all the possible options but still cannot get the correct Chinese character. We will ask teachers to use English only as a temp solution.
Thanks for you help. We really appreciate it.
Best wishes,
Lina
I checked the encoding issue again. For me it is working with 65001 : Unicode (UTF-8).
However this might be dependend on the platform your server runs on or its configuration. Indeed the plugin itself does not define the encoding for the file.
You can find the encoding of your server using YOURMOODLEINSTANCE/admin/phpinfo.php.
There the encoding is displayed at Content-Type -> charset and at default_charset.
I hope that information is helpful.
Best wishes,
Tobias
Hi Tobias,
Thanks for your prompt reply. I really appreciate it. I've installed the new release and it is good that we can export the email information now. I like the other features in the new release. Many thanks for your great contributions.
About the encoding issue, I've checked the phpinfo.php on our server and it shows the following information:
Content-Type text/html; charset=utf-8
The charset is utf-8, but didn't show if it is unicode or not. I'm reading this article:https://www.toptal.com/php/a-utf-8-primer-for-php-and-mysql
From that article that I need to many changes to my moodle instance, I will investigate more about this.
Many thanks for your help.
Best wishes,
Lina
I have a request from a costumer. He's interested in the details of the algorithms used. I didn't found any additional information. Could you add some links or information to the documentation?
Best wishes,
Thomas
Thanks a lot for this wonderful plugin. We've used this plugin to support the optional course allocation for all the students in our University. We love this plugin.
Students have provided many feedbacks. One of the most important feedback is about the allocation result. Could you please help to check this feedback and to see if you could help with the function which we really need?
Here's the detail information:
We've selected "Rank Choices" as the rating strategy. Take the monday's optional courses for example. There will be 10 optional courses for 1000 students to choose. Each students can rank the 10 options from 1 to 10. But since this is optional courses, many students only want to attend their favorite courses. They want to have a function which they can select the courses that they don't want to attend. So that system won't allocate them into these courses.
Would you please help to see if we can have this function?
Many thanks.
Best wishes,
Lina
you can find this information here: https://github.com/learnweb/moodle-mod_ratingallocate#algorithm
Best wishes,
Tobias
is there a reason that 3.2-r1 (which does not add more than a language string according to https://github.com/learnweb/moodle-mod_ratingallocate/commits/master) is published but set to "unavailable" here?
Thanks,
Alex
the version 3.2-r1 does add one important aspect, which is the support of moodle 3.2. When I created this patch, I already read through all change logs for the new version and all should still work as before. However, there were changes in the behat framework and therefore the automatic tests fail currently. Until now I was not able to identify or fix this issue, which is why I do not want to publish a version with 3.2 support, yet. Behind the failures of the tests due to the changes in the behat framework other more severe failures could be hiding. Although, I don't think so, I set the version for now to unavailable.
I will publish the next version as soon as possible (probably end of February).
Best wishes,
Tobias