1. 20 Moodle
Improvements
Daniel McSweeney – Kyle Goslin

2. 1
Real-time trending course content
Provide an insight to course material that students are
really interested in.
 Could shine a light on material other students missed.
 Lazy students will know something is up when they see
a surge in activity.

3. 2
Advanced fine-grained logging framework*
 Push the existing logging framework one step further.
 Add hooks into existing modules
 Simple API to allow integration
 Unseen levels of data produced
* May need a lot of power

4. 3
Stripped down “Mother Proof” interface
 Prevent our “older” companions from getting overwhelmed
with the amount of links and options available.
 BIG fonts, Simple colours.
 Simple terminology
 Login?!? You mean “Let me in to that there page”

5. 4
Virtual eyes / Poke
 Similar concept to facebook poke feature
 Small set of eyes appear
 Student knows your watching them and better get
going with that work…

6. 5
Open online usage monitor
 Students can see how long they have each been online
for.
 Idle time not counted, only actual usage.
 At the end of the semester, graph pass rate to usage
monitor. Can be used as evidence in exam boards.

7. 6
Integrated … to PDF renderer
 Similar to gmail functionality
 Allow any file type that has a general text layout to be
rendered and downloaded as a PDF.
 If the student does not have .docx / .doc / .rtf ……
viewer, they can just convert to PDF.

8. 7
3 Life System
 Student has 3 lives.
 If the student misses deadlines for submissions they
automatically loose a life.
 If the student looses 3 lives they automatically are
summoned for a face to face progress meeting.

9. 8
Integrated social bookmarking
 Combination of module and browser plugin
 Imagine finding a website or resource you like
 Booking marking by relating it to a moodle course and
even a topic/section of that course
 Your bookmarks and other learners bookmarks can be
visible to all course learners
 Think of Moodle integrated with Delicious
 Moodle meets informal group/social learning

10. 9
Improved User Interface
 Can a user tell the difference between Moodle 1.0 and
2.0 in terms of look and feel.
 Has it changed much in the last 8 years
 Can we make use of more AJAX functionality and
HTML 5?
 Can we speed up use and basic operations for all
users.

11. 10
Simplify the Gradebook
 I get nosebleeds.
 Can we simplify the gradebook and divide the
functionality into easier to understand components.
 It is by far the most difficult component to train staff to
use.
 Is there an argument for a basic grade tool and an
advanced?

12. 11
Assessment load balancer
 A failing of many higher education courses is an inability to
schedule assessment across modules without causing overlap and
periods of excessive workload.
 Can we expand the assignment types to allow staff to estimate the
amount of time it will take to complete an assignment.
 Can we also allow course owners to set the weekly workload for a
module.
 Moodle can then report on assignment clashes and periods of
excessive workload.

13. 12
Student performance monitor
 Another failing of many higher education courses is an inability to
spot a student failing a number of modules.
 Can we develop an integrated alert system when a student has
failed a certain % of assignments or has not submitted.

14. 13
Backup to repository
 Allow moodle users to add a backup repository to their
user profiles (e.g. dropbox)
 Automate course backups to to repositories.

15. 14
Anonymous Usage for some Activities
 There are instances when we may want to allow users
to use activities in an anonymous guise
 Questionnaires
 Votes
 Feedback
 Forum postings
 Assignment submissions
 Peer review

16. 15
Enhanced Student profile
 Students tend to move upwards in third level across
programme boards.
 Not unusual to be managed by 20+ academic staff over
course of 4 years of study.
 Require a student information zone. Details on
 Academic performance, attitude, behavior etc.
 Medical needs
 Learning needs
 Past incidents etc.

17. 16
Core Attendance Feature
 Moodle is a course management system with no core
feature for managing real world attendance.
 Issues with two existing modules.
 Link attendance to previously suggested student profile
feature.

18. 17
Cross server backup and restore
 Many larger institutions take a snapshot of their moodle
server and archive it (write protected)
 Allow moodle courses to be backed to another moodle
instance.
 Allow moodle courses to be restored or migrated from
another moodle instance.
 Allow restore files to exceed course file upload limit.
 Make migrations easier!!!!

19. 18
Citation Manager for Moodle
 Perhaps this is outgrowing the VLE
 Useful to allow students to gather and manage citations
in one central location.
 Moodle would be perfect!
 Could be linked to assignment submissions, peer
sharing and review etc.

20. 19
Make this a resource!
 Sometimes you receive a student submission or
assignment that you would like to highlight or add to
your module as a good example.
 Example to other students
 All students to vote for submissions etc
 What about a „make this a resource‟ button which
would copy the submission to the file area and allow
you to give it a title etc.

21. 20
Suggestions for Moodle.org
 Make it easier for people to suggest improvements (non
tracker based)
 Allow rating of modules
 Show a list of top modules
 Show modules by
 Download
 Popularity
 Age etc
 Keep up the amazing work!!!

22. Finished!