Moodle Core’s announced a number of big changes to the Moodle gradebook for the 1.9.5 release. Among the changes:

• the student name column is now sticky (which means you can still see if if you scroll to the right to look at additional assignments).
• The categories page has been re-organized and color coded to make things easier to understand.
• Administrators can now reduce the number of grade aggregation methods.
• The Gradebook’s drop-down navigation menu can now be supplemented by tabbed navigation.

There’s a lot of stuff in there. We’re going to be delving into it on a test server just as soon as the code is released to CVS; I’m looking forward to seeing how our usability tests run with this new Gradebook.

The issue appears to be a change in the default settings for the wiki. Making the wiki configuration tweaks described in this Tracker report fixed the problem:

• MDL-10641 Wiki binary files option broken

I experimented with using NanoGong to do this, but unfortunately it was just too unstable; the Java applet running it refused to save files on two of the three computers I tried it on … including computers on which it had worked.

COVCELLL has created the audio recording assignment that works with Moodle 1.9. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, and would love to hear from anyone who has.

Moodlerooms, a SaaS provider of Moodle, just launched an application built on the Moodle platform that lets school admins bring Moodle and Google Apps together with a single sign-in. So now, students who told us they didn’t want to sign in to multiple environments – like an LMS to get their course content and a productivity suite like Google Apps to actually do their work – have the answer they’ve wanted.

If you’re wondering about how this is technically done, read on:

Moodlerooms used the industry standard SAML 2.0 and OAuth protocols to securely integrate with Moodle, building on open extensibility features of Google Apps Education Edition. Using these extensibility features, any educational software vendor can take a similar approach to provide user directory synchronization, single sign-on, and user data integration with their service.

This is cool and all, but there is a downside, as illustrated by a recent bug Google accidentally introduced into Google Docs that allowed documents in Google Docs to be shared with anyone you’ve ever shared a doc with. The bug only affected .05% of users, but still it illustrates the potential drawbacks and dangers of using a web cloud-based app like Google Docs. Which isn’t to say that Moodle itself is perfect, but you’re increasing you’re exposure by relying on two web-based apps.

Details on how to swap out Magpie for SImplePie can be found in Moodle Tracker:

• MDL-7946: Use simplepie instead of magpie for rss parsing

This seems like a no brainer swap to me, but the tracker item could still use some vote love. The tracker doesn’t mention it, but this problem still affects Moodle 1.9.4.

For example S(n) gets turned into an S with a “NO” icon. There are two problems here — S(n) is a legitimate mathmatical formula, so it shouldn’t compete with emoticons. Also, (n) is a pretty obscure emoticon, so it throws people for a loop when they accidentally trigger it.

The emoticon can’t be disabled on the course level, but it can be disabled site wide, per this tracker item:

• MDL-11444: A way to disable emotions

In short, you go to Admin > Appearance > HTML Editor and can then edit a list of emoticons. Here’s a list of the problem emoticons that I’ve disabled within my install of Moodle.

• (y) = yes
• (n) = no
• (heart) = heart
• (h) = heart

I’ll be curious to see what impact this has on iTunes U/Moodle integration. OU is a huge Moodle school, and I have to think that they would want seamless integration between the two services.

• Banner/Luminis Message Broker Plugin for Moodle

This Moodle Tracker report offers one scenario where the problem pops up. I encountered it earlier in the semester as well, and unfortunately the best workaround I had at the time was to tell folks to use IE to do cutting and pasting if they wanted to preserve their formatting (or copy/pasting into Notepad before pasting into Firefox 3 if they didn’t.

The extra code is style data that Firefox 2 omitted, but Firefox 3 includes:

<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New
Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} span.EmailStyle15
{mso-style-type:personal; mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial;
mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; color:windowtext;} @page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;
mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> 

Digging around on the web, I found a post (”Pasting from Word in Firefox 3 Doesn’t Remove Meta/Style Tags”) that explains the problem:

The problem is due to that Firefox 3.0 is presenting itself to MS Word as a XML client and the content pasted in the editor has new format different to this one pasted in Firefox 2.0. That is why the regular expressions used by the editor’s Paste From Word filters are not stripping the new MS Word XML formatting. 

I can’t find anything in Bugzilla that speaks to this (my guess is that it would be viewed as a feature rather than a bug).  

My understanding is that there’s always extraneous code coming over from Word, but that the various WYSIWYG editors (TinyMCE, CKEditor) endeavor to strip out said code. The problem, aside from the fact that Firefox 3 has changed the way it does copy and paste, is that the editors haven’t caught up with the changes. I found posts for both editors discussing how to deal with this.

On the CKEditor site, there’s a tracker report about improving the editor itself:

• Ticket #2291: Simple copy & paste from Word document – extra code not stripped

A report for this bug is up in the Scheduler bug tracker (which is independent of Moodle’s own tracker; registration is required to view/comment on this bug)

• Scheduler doesn’t deal with Daylight Savings Time