Education 2.0 & 3.0

Over the last 15 years, Moodle community has contributed more than 1380+ plugins, which caters to new features and requirements along with Moodle Certificates.

Ah, the “scroll of death” – that processes we’ve all been through of logging into your LMS some weeks into the academic calendar, and becoming painfully aware of how much you are spinning the mouse wheel to find the week’s content. But did you know that Moodle offers several alternatives to prevent this?

At moodlefacts.nl, the Dutch blog of Moodle services provider in Belgium and The Netherlands provider, Avetica, we found a compilation worth checking out and updating. We will also review the navigation improvements the “Boost” theme brought to Moodle 3.2 in regards to this preventable ailment on LMSs.

French developer Danielle Cordella has taken it upon himself to give “answers to the more frequent requirements of end users“, seemingly about the features desired in the Moodle Survey and Questionnaire activities.

He has created Surveypro, which merges and expands on both activities with custom question types, validation, mandatory questions, conditional branching, backup and exporting, among the most notable additions. They bear some resemblance to the latest features availables by activity competitor Google Forms.

As a Moodle site administrator, are you always worried about the size of the images used by the course designers? Being unaware about the impact sometimes they may upload a picture taken by a good quality camera of size more than 5 Mega Pixels when they don’t need such a high-resolution. It will affect the page load time and consume more bandwidth which is crucial for students accessing your course from Mobile devices.

One way to overcome this problem is either to train all the course designers about image size and compression techniques, but they may be reluctant in following the same. The second way and highly recommended way to overcome this is to use the Image Optimizer filter plugin on your Moodle site.

Have you ever thought of providing a model solution to the assignment given to the students? Generally, while teaching subjects like Mathematics and Science, the assignments are accompanied by model solutions which needs to be released to the students after they have submitted the assignment.

Today, I am going to show you a new plugin – “Solution Sheet“, which can be used by teachers to upload a model solution sheet to the assignment activity. The solution can be released manually or at a scheduled time from the assignment submission deadline. You can also specify a date from when the released solutions will be hidden, e.g., the end of term. The new Assignment Feedback type plugin – “Solution Sheet” is developed by Henning Bostelmann.