Category: Moodle (Page 1 of 8)

Moodle

In my quest to make Moodle as easy to use and as efficient as possible, I’ve made two changes to the Login Page.

Reorder Login Fields

The first thing that I did was to reorder the Login fields. Generally, we want users to use the Login with Google button. Thus, I want this the topmost option.

I’ve already written this up, so suffice it to say that putting the best option first is important.

Button Color

Changed the button color of the Google Login button. Added the following code to the RAW SCSS intial field:

a.btn.login-identityprovider-btn.btn-block {
background-color:#ffff00;
}

Note that the color (#ffff00) is a bright yellow.

Summary

I’ve added the following code to the CSS portion of our Moodle theme:

.loginform {
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
}

login.login-form

{
order: 2;
}
.login-identifyproviders
{
order: 1;
}
a.btn.login-identityprovider-btn.btn-block {
background-color:#ffff00;
}

This accomplishs my goals of highlighting the action that I want my participants to take.

More and more schools are transitioning to using Oauth for logins. Moodle allows for Oauth logins. However, by default, the Moodle Login box appears first, above the button to login using a service.

This causes lots of people to enter their credentials into the box. In our case, they are entering the “wrong” credentials (i.e. they enter their Google username and password instead of their district account username and password). This leads to frustration on the end user’s part. Signing in is a really bad place to frustrate users.

Knowing that Moodle is customizable, I know there has to be a way to fix this. A little bit of research leads to a couple of different options:

• customize the CSS
• use a Plugin

I start with the plugin (Login Splash Page). However, upon installing it, I realize that I need to redirect the login page. I decided that I’d rather not do that.

I found a couple of posts with ideas to customize the CSS. The best of which was a post by Steven A. Although the post says that you have to account for each section, my attempts didn’t support that.

I opened our Login page and right-clicked on it to select “Inspect”. This allowed me to verify the different elements present. (Plus, you can drag them around to change the order, which is useful and kind of cool). Anyway, I could now be sure what the name of each element was. Since the post indicated that you needed to account for all of the elements, I did so. However, the elements still didn’t appear in the order that I wanted. So, back to BBedit (where I had entered the appropriate code). I deleted everything but the two elements and Ta-Da!

In the end, I put the following code:

.loginform {
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
}

login.login-form

{
order: 2;
}
.login-identifyproviders
{
order: 1;
}

into the SCSS Raw box in the theme that we. That is, in Moodle, I went to :

• Site Administration | Themes | LearnR | Look
  then clicked on the SCSS tab. I entered the code above into the “Raw initial SCSS” box, scrolled down, and clicked “Save”. (*Note that this needs to be done for each Theme that you use if you use more than one. Or, if you change themes in the future, this must also be updated in that theme.) Now, end users will see the Login with Google Button first.

Whew!

Given the prevalence of utilizing Oauth, I hope that someone at Moodle will make this a checkbox preference in the future. However, at least for now, this is set for me.

On Friday, I upgraded Moodle as the newest version fixes an issue with the Lesson Module. Great. Except, the site crashed during the upgrade cycle.

Great! Time to do some research. I headed over the Moodle Forums to see if this was a known issue. Yep. Yep, it is. That led to a Bug Report. Here I got enough information to get some things running again. I tried deleting different plugins, and adding them back in. No full fix, but I had access to my site.

Then, I flew too close the sun. I used the “uninstall” link from the Plugins Overview page, and broke everything.

Drats.

I’ve been able to return access to my site. I don’t have everything fixed yet though.

I found an article on enabling “disable auto update” while installing. This involved uncommenting out a specific command in .config.php file. For me this was line 457:

$CFG->disableupdateautodeploy = true;

It is commented out. By uncommenting it (removing the //), it has allowed by site to update.

After doing this, I can uninstall plugins from the Plugins Overview page.

By deleting the // at the beginning of the line (those symbols comment out the line, which means that the program won’t run that command), the command is active and, tada!, I can complete the upgrade process.

So, a partial fix. I can now uninstall plugins, but I can’t install them. I’m going through to uninstall plugins that could be the problem, but I’m not completely convinced that this is going to solve the problem. At least the site is back up and available.

Recently I was asked to create a Lock Down environment for students writing essays. This is definitely a direct response to ChatGPT and similar tools.

I’ve set up Moodle with Safe Exam Browser. This is well supported by Moodle. However, I had to make sure to add a “Quit Password” to the assignment. It is also easiest to let Moodle take care of the configuration. It is absolutely crucial to set a “Quit Password”.

Next, the teacher wants two things:

• A Word Count for students
• Indented paragraphs

The good news is that there is a plugin for the Atto Editor called Word Count. Not surprisingly, that provides a Word Count feature directly within the Atto editor. Once you add that plug-in (AND add “count = count” to the Toolbar config within the Atto Editor settings – this makes the button visible), students have access to see how many words they have written with the click of a button. This is AWESOME!

I’m still trying to solve the indenting a paragraph issue. Since hitting the tab key moves to the next component for websites, that is a no-starter. However, I’m reviewing some plugins that may help. I’ve tried Components for Learning (c4l), but that doesn’t have what I need. It is a great plugin, just doesn’t solve this issue.

Currently, I’m taking a look at the Atto Editor to see if there is anything there that I can do.

*Padlock image by Roy Harryman: www.RoyHarryman.com

I posted about having students prioritize choices (Ranking The Bill of Rights). I’ve now created a Comic with instructions on how to do this. Although I’ve used the Bill of Rights, this could easily be done with a wide variety of topics.

For example, you could have students prioritize study skills, Presidents, financial goals, geologic characteristics, and more. This is limited only by your content.

Students Prioritizing is also posted on my MoodleNet account.

The teacher wanted the students to rank the Bill of Rights. This can be a great discussion exercise. The students decide which of the first ten amendments to the Constitution are “most important”.

The teacher had used a site in the past. However, since it had been used in the past, the stated that voting had already occurred.

Moodle to the rescue. Well, Moodle and Questionnaire.

Moodle -> Questionnaire and 3 minutes of copy/paste, the teacher now has the activity completely under control. No external website needed.

Plus, Questionnaire has awesome reporting. The teacher can decide if the kids do it once or more often.

So our use case is that the teacher is talking about the Bill of Rights in general. Then the teacher will then have the kids rank the Bill of Rights in terms of importance. Once all of the students have ranked them, the class will discuss their rankings and why. Then the students will rank the Bill of Rights again.

This activity uses Moodle and the Questionnaire Module.

Here are the settings that I used:

These Settings are for the Questionnaire as a whole. Thus, these will be set up when you create the Questionnaire. You must give the questionnaire a Name. The Name is what the students will see. You can provide directions in the

Response Options:

Type: I set this to “respond many”. This could easily be set to “respond once”.

Respondent Type: “full name”. This could be set to “anonymous”, but I’d want to see if student answers change.

Students can view ALL responses: Never. If you’ve set the Respondent Type to anonymous, you could let the students see the results. However, I would share the results via the projector.

Save/Resume answers: I almost always set this to “yes”. This is a quick poll, so it doesn’t have to be “yes”.

Activity Completion

The default on Activity Completion is “Student can manually mark the activity as completed”, but I almost always (and out of habit), change this to “Show activity as complete when conditions are met” (and then tick the box for “Students must submit this questionnaire to complete it”

I generally avoid adding dates on activities as that can come back and be an issue in the future. Naturally, you could set the Availability for Allow responses from and Allow responses until if you wish.

I added a question of the type [Rate (scale 1..5)]

Question Settings

I clicked the tick box to make “Response required”

I also changed the scale (Nb of scale items) to 10 since there are 10 Amendments in the Bill of Rights.

I chose “No duplicate choices” as the teacher wants the Amendments ranked.

Question Text is where you enter the question/directions. We entered

“Rank the Amendments. 10 is the MOST important, 1 is the LEAST important. Please note that each column can have only ONE choice. Thus, if you rank Amendment I as the Most Important clicking on Most Important for another Amendment would remove the ranking from Amendment I. “

Next, I copied and pasted each Amendment in the Possible Answers box (make sure that each Amendment is one line – i.e. there are no “hard returns”).

Then I added the Named Degrees:

1=LEAST important
2=2
3=3
4=4
5= Mid-point of importance
6=6
7=7
8=8
9=9
10= MOST important

Save the question. Then use the Preview link to view your awesomeness.

Since this is a questionnaire, we do have lots of options that we could add. For example, we could have students explain why they ranked the Amendments where they did. However, this will be done as a class as a whole group discussion.