SMUG Meeting – 2 August 2018: Summer Upgrades

SMUG members came together in Stirling to share their summer upgrade stories, over coffee and a doughnut (or two). We were fortunate to have Michael step in for a colleague to deliver an active discussion around the new features in Moodle 3.4, which lead to further discussion around some of the features in Moodle 3.5.

New Features in Moodle 3.4
Michael Aherne, Senior Applications Analyst/Developer, University of Strathclyde

The slides don’t really capture the useful information that was discussed on the day. Some highlights were (based on my shaky sugar-infused recollection):

• Updates to Moodle Calendar were welcomed, but long overdue. Few members made real use of the calendar, though many expressed the potential of a single cross-institution solution. Some had tried using Google calendars, but there were problems with formatting being stripped out when embedding within Moodle blocks.
• Collapsible Comments (available from 3.2) was one feature welcomed at the University, matching the functionality of TII Grademark.
• Teacher Activity Completion which allows teachers/lecturers to manually mark an activity as complete was seen as useful, allowing students to progress to hidden activities.
• The Analytics API in Moodle was useful for developers to hook in external analytic processes, but the Inspire Analytics plugin which has been brought into core didn’t impress. Warnings were passed on about disabling the analytics model as it could result in warning unwanted notifications being sent out to staff.
• GDPR – and the privacy API was discussed at length, but few institutions had experienced this used in anger to any great extent, though it was seen as a useful (and necessary) feature.

A full list of the new features in 3.4 can be found here.

As few institutions had moved to 3.5 (only 3 in the room), there wasn’t much to be said about the new 3.5 features that were being introduced. There was a conversation about the ability to directly record audio/video in the Atto editor – on the one hand talking about the potential to offer simple audio feedback options for lecturers, and on the other concerns about where content was stored and impact that might have on the network.

We talked about Moodle Desktop, but members struggled to see the point of offering app functionality on the desktop, aside perhaps for the ability to work offline (though no-one had plans to implement this).

Next up was James who gave a very detailed explanation of the upgrade process at West College Scotland. There’s quite a bit of detail in the slides below.

Moodle Rollover @ WCS
James MacNee, Systems Development Team Leader, West College Scotland

One offer that James made during the presentation was that he has collected a lot of scripts that he would be willing to share with the community. Everything from running a wide variety of reports to Moosh operations to set up Moodle for a new academic term. If you’re interested in this, just reach out to James on the SMUG mailing list at smug@jiscmail.ac.uk

At the end of the day, we discussed the dates of our next meeting – perhaps towards the end of September or the beginning of October. We’ll be looking for members to step forward with ideas for presentations – though one thing we’ll definitely be covering is how environments can be locked down to deliver online assessment. So, we’ll take a look at Safe Exam Browser vs. Respondus Lockdown Browser.

Okay, so that’s about it … we look forward to seeing you at the next SMUG get-together.