Experience with the adaptation of Moodle source code Boro Jakimovski University of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje

Moodle  Moodle is a coursework software that can be easely used for building and management of online courses  Several very useful aspects of Moodle: It is free If is very modular It has a great development community for building custom modules

Moodle at our institution  Moodle has been used as a coursework software at our faculty in the past year for several courses  After the initial installation, Moodle has been translated by the students as part of a one course project  Also the Moodle tutorial was localized

Moodle usage  Moodle can be used to organize the courses using several basic elements: Resources Activities

Resources  Compose a text page  Compose a web page  Link to a file or a web site  Display directory  Add a IMS Content Package  Insert a label

Acticvities  Assignment  Chat  Choice  Database  Exercise  Forum  Glossary  LAMS  Lesson  Quiz  SCORM/AICC  Survey  Wiki  Workshop

Assignment  One of the mostly used acctivities is the assignments  We use the assignments to both give assignments and mark them  There are three standard types of assignements: Offline activity Online activity Upload single file

Need for new assignment type  Already implemented assignment types are: Online activity Offline activity Upload single file  We imediately saw that moodle lacked two types of assignments that we used to give New kind of upload single file activity New kinf of offline activity

New kind of upload single file  Upload single file activity is suitable for project kind of activity where students are given a problem and they later upload the solution  But the projects that we usually give is an individual or group project  Since this is not possible with the current upload single file, we needed to make a new kind of assignment type

New kind of offline assignment  Offline assignments are assignments that take place outside of Moodle and the results are not available to Moodle  Then teacher needs to enter the points that each student has done in that assignment  We have one such activity: eTesting system is often used for examination

New kind of offline assignment  Since we can have many students, to avoid manual entering which can lead to the possibility for error and is very time consuming we implemented another kind of assignment which enables very fast grading of such activities

Implementation  The implementation was very easy since Moodle is very well structured and well documented  Because of its object oriented design, for introducing new assignemet types one needs to: Inherit the class that represents the assignment Put the new class and aditional files in certain folder

Implementation  The implementation of assignments is in the file: mod.html which is the page where the assignment is configured (mainly a form for inputting parameters for the assignment) assignment.class.php  Inherit the class assignment_base  Reimplement needed methods for viewing and evaluation of the assignment

Implementation  At the end we need to put this two files in the folder: /mod/assignemt/type/  The assignment shows immediately in Moodle

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Fastgrading

Conclusion  Moodle is very good and easy to modify coursework software  Being very modular allows very good customization and upgradeability  The community for implementation of Moodle is very active and new versions are emerging constantly