Amtrak, B-Movies, Web Development, and other nonsense

Month: August 2017

Running Moodle CI tests in GitLab

I maintain about a dozen plugins in the Moodle plugins repository. I use Moodlerooms’ moodle-plugin-ci project to test all of them on Travis CI. It’s a fantastic tool and rely heavily on it.

This fall I’ve been working on a plugin which, because of various hooks into Lafayette’s internal infrastructure, I’m not releasing publicly. I’d still like to test it in the usual way, so I decided to run the tests on our internal GitLab infrastructure.

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Implementing a course archiving strategy in Moodle

A course archiving strategy is the white whale of higher education. I can remember being part of discussions a decade ago about how to keep a Moodle instance at a manageable size while preserving information. There were two challenges: come up with a policy that faculty could support, and execute a reasonable technical implementation of that policy. In this post I’ll discuss the tools we built to implement our chosen policy.

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Measuring activity in Moodle

It’s a simple question with a complex answer: in a given academic term, what percentage of our Moodle courses are “active” (used by a faculty member in the teaching of their course). We have to start by figuring out what counts as a “course” in a term, and then come up with an inclusive measurement of activity.

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