Moodle Plugins

Posted on October 8, 2008 by Rosalyn Metz

Recently at a meeting I walked away with a to do list that included:

  • find a digital drop box plugin
  • find a way to grade items without giving them a permanent grade (ie give them a letter grade that you can then go back and change at a later date).

Here are some notes on my progress.

Digital Drop Box Plugin

Essentially it seems like the professor just wants a place to store files. There are number of ways to do this here at Wheaton outside of Moodle.

There is a plugin that allows you to upload files, and if you want share the files. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work with Moodle 1.9 yet. There are a number of posts on how to get it to work. Once I get a test system I’ll try out the options on that (rather than something that is in production

Posts on making the plugin work:

Moodle Gradebook Plugin

What are Outcomes

Moodle has something called Outcomes. Essentially an outcome allows you to assign a point, letter, or other type of value without actually assigning a grade. Students can see these outcomes if the professor chooses to show it to the student. The professor can then go back later, say at the end of the semester, and assign a numerical grade.

The Moodle admin has the ability to create an Outcome scale for use by all classes on Moodle. I created one outcome scale, Letter Grades as Outcome. The scale is the usual letter grades assigned by professors.

F-, F, F+, D-, D, D+, C-, C, C+, B-, B, B+, A-, A, A

Professors can choose to use the outcome scales supplied by the Moodle Admin, or they can choose to create their own outcomes.

Using Outcomes

  1. In the administration block on the course page click the Outcomes button. Here you can choose to use the supplied outcomes or create your own outcomes under the edit tab.
  2. When creating the assignment (or by editing the assignment) you can choose which of the Outcomes scales you chose in step one you would like to use for the assignment. Note: It is possible to use multiple outcomes scales for one assignment. This might be something you would do it you wanted to grade content separate from grammar/spelling.
  3. Enter the gradebook for you class and choose the assignment you are using outcomes for. You can then assign outcomes for each student. Below is an image of this:
  4. You can then go back at a later date and assign a grade value to the assignment.

There is also a video about this. How to Use Moodle Outcomes

Removing The Lowest Grade

Moodle doesn’t remove the lowest grade per se, however it is possible to remove empty grades. So after assigning grades find the lowest/highest and change remove the grade.

For calculation, go into the My Report Preferences and change the settings at the bottom, specifically the “Grades selected for column averages”. An image of this is below:

This seems a little clunky, but I’ll search around and see if there is a better way to do this.

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WorldCat API

Posted on October 7, 2008 by Rosalyn Metz

There has been a lot of information out there about WorldCat and to be honest I can’t keep it all straight.  So here is my reading list:

If you figure out how to download the information into my brain let me know.

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Brown University’s easyBorrow

Posted on October 7, 2008 by Rosalyn Metz

Brown has developed something called EasyBorrow that consists of a number of APIs that allow students to do one search and one ILL request. The system seems to work off of a number of custom APIs, most of which could be useful in creating a similar system for us.

The process as I seem to understand it.

  1. Brown seems to have re-purposed SFX (their link resolver…like SerialsSolutions…but better…however I’m a bit biased :) ). They’ve set it up to do a number of things:
    • First they set up the z39.50 lookup feature in SFX so that if the item exists in the library catalog it redirects users directly to the record in the library catalog. I’m sure SS has something like this which is probably easy enough to set up.
    • Second if the book doesn’t exist in the catalog, they seem to redirect users to an easyBorrow search. This is easy enough to set up in SFX since the architecture is open. Whether or not something like this is possible with SS is another question.
    • This seems to lead me to some questions for Jean:
      • Where is the 360 Link Documentation?
      • Can I attend these webinars without us paying for it?
  2. Next, Brown requires users to authenticate…once. In their documentation on easyBorrow they indicated they are using LDAP. How did they make this work? Did they set up an LDAP authentication API? How do Wheaton College users currently authenticate for the different ILL options we offer and are those different authentication methods connected somehow.
    • Question for Elliot: Can you walk me through the ILL process as we explain it to users?
    • Question for Kim: Can you walk me through how ILL requests get processed?
    • Question for Mary: Can you walk me through how InRhode requests get processed?
    • Question for Brian: Does LDAP have an API (because it might scare me if it does)?
    • General Question: Brown discusses III’s Patron Services API. This allows them to pull information from the III catalogs, ILLiad (their ILL borrowing system), and develop a staff interface that shows failures and successes in the easyBorrow searches they do (one for each catalog). Where can I get documentation about III’s API? Do we have to pay to use the API? I wonder if my friend Carol knows (she works at a III library and is interested in doing similar things)?
  3. The remainder of the system seems simple enough (if I can get API documentation for our different systems). Since I would imagine Brown is already checking InRhode, HELIN, and WorldCat we could just ask for their code.

I think the hardest pieces will be the authentication and the ILL, particularly ILL. We may need to look at lending as a whole to figure out the best way to go about this. Brown is working with a lot of automated systems but our ILL isn’t automated the same. This goes back to something we talked about in the web team meetings…making InRhode and ILL borrowing seem more seamless. This system will help do that but i wonder if we would need to do some work on the department level to make it even more seamless (there she goes again…stirring up trouble).

All in all though, I think that this might be doable, assuming Brown wants to share their code.

Some things for me to take a look at:

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