48. How to include or exclude stuff that are appearing on the Grade reports?
The Grade settings that are found in the Administration help you do every thing that is related to grade sheet generation. You can include/exclude the administrators and teachers from appearing on the grade sheets. You can also configure other such aspects like grade sheet template, customized evaluation statistics etc in there.
49. Is there any Teacher’s planning module that I can use to manage my activities and courses as a teacher?
There is not in-built such component. But there are plug-ins that have been created for such purposes. Each have their own way of handling and managing things. Most of such plug-ins have come in for latest versions of Moodle (from 1.5.3).
50. Can I create survey activity in Moodle and get the feedback from the students?
Yes you can create the survey activity easily from the Moodle courses’ “edit” section. There is a survey activity that you should select and give in the type of survey and question set. Now you are done with it. The survey will get you the percentages of replies from the student for each option and you can just get the survey option turned into the feedback session by having the appropriate questions in the survey.
51. What is the MCCC?
The Moodle Course Creator Certificate (MCCC) is a certification given out by Moodle with the help of Moodle users community. It just tests the competencies and skill set of the candidate (who may be an administrator or teacher) in various ways and gives out the certificate. This is more of a bench marking kind of evaluation that can give us a standard view of the organization that is employing the Moodle based learning solution.
52. What is the difference between the main configuration settings for the Moodle and the configuration settings for the plugins?
There are two prominent differences:
1. The main configuration settings are loaded when the Moodle loads. The loaded values are stored in the $CFG variable. This can be accessed globally from the Moodle scripts and from the mysql database too.
2. The configuration settings for plu-gins are stored in a separate table in the mysql database – Config_plugin. The direct accesses to mysql records should be fine with plugin settings, but may not be an advisable one when accessing global settings of Moodle.
The functions for accessing the settings and configuration values are: set_config($name, $value) & get_config($name) for main configuration and set_config($name, $value, $plugin) and get_config($plugin, $name) for plug-in settings.
53. How to increase/decrease the file size limits for upload?
There are many levels of control over upload limits. As an admin you can try to do one of these to take care of setting the right values:
1. The Apache’s server has httpd.conf and php.conf inside the installation folder. These have the “LimitRequestBody” variable whose value is in number of bytes that can be taken in from the server side.
2. The php.ini file conforming to the PHP configuration of PHP engine also has the “upload_max_filesize” and”post_max_size” which also have to be configured if the Moodle has to jump to higher limits of upload size.
3. The Configurations of Moodle has settings for variables. There is a variable with byte size limit over uploading data. These also have to be changed.
After all these have been changed according to your requirements, the teachers can still impose file upload size (Usually meant for programming exercises) through the course configurations.
54. What are the possible debugging setting from the Moodle server side?
There are many out-of-the-Moodle ways involving configurations of PHP.ini directly and apache server that can help you get the debugging logs out. But the most advisable way is to enable debugging to desirable level in the Debugging setting of the website from Moodle Admin configurations. It is essential that you should be a privileged user to do this. Most of the time though the setting of error display to just error level without warnings should be enough to get the problem solved from programming side.
55. Can there be guest viewer access for courses?
Yes the teacher can configure the course to have a guest access to the course materials and discussions. But most of the time they will not allow for such accesses, considering the dedicated users who have enrolled for getting the same information. This is true when there is a commercialized course on offer.
56. What are the different levels of permissions and contexts that one deals with inside Moodle as an user?
The permissions are the access control mechanism. One can get involved in an activity but the allowance of him in creating, editing the data in activity is decided by his permission basically translated as “Allowed/Not Allowed”. The context is the specific instance of Moodle entity, which may be an activity, block etc. The creator of such contexts will give out the access controls to the various users based on the roles (teacher, student, moderator, admin etc) or just based on specific users individually.
57. How do I go about customizing the course/block look and feel as a teacher?
While creating a new activity there are many components that you use to create what is required for the course page. It is just like maintaining blog based CMS. You have many available plug-ins- just drag and drop the different items into the page window you are designing for the course. There are many components that you can additionally install too.
58. What are the permissions and privileges that a teacher can offer to a student inside a course?
One of the main things that many give students as a privilege is the ability to un-enroll themselves from the course they are dealing with. Apart from this there are additional privileges regarding activities like the upload files and content limitation related settings. There are also teacher-students discussions which will have more controls to teacher on what the student is allowed to discuss, more as a moderator. There are many third party plugins that have additional activity creation and ability to control the access permissions can be more descriptive depending upon the activity you are dealing with.
59. How does the automatic activity and course allocation for the students and teachers work?
The category is the super set of all the courses. And courses can have many activities within them. So a teacher/student who is enrolled inside a specific category usually get automatically enrolled in the same role inside all the courses inside the category. Similar thing happens when it comes to activities inside the courses.. But both of them can be controlled easily when they are created. You can just make the activities available to a set of students according to batches or just individual persons.
60. How do roles help the administrator in maintaining a very manageable learning solution?
The usual roles that are found in the Moodle server are Staff and student to start with. Taking a real world school or university as an example, the more cadres and roles that you bring in, as incharges of specific activity it will become a more manageable and very much structures learning solution. This way roles can be made to encompass a management or moderation cadre. This is advanced level of management but can come in real handy when there are lot of people involved in the Courses and learning solution.
61. How can we organise an activity in the Moodle CMS which is just as effective as real course test activities?
It is simple. You can just create a category of activities that are graded internally, but may/may not go into the final grade calculations of the students. This way they can be taken more seriously at the same time, can just be additional informal tests for the students.
63. How many choices can I have for a choice oriented activity in Moodle?
There is actually no limit on number of choices that you give out to the students in an activity. Even though, you are shown only 10 choices to be input while setting it up, this screen can just go on and on by clicking “Add More choices” button. You should enter the choices in sets of 10. But practically there is no visible limit that can hinder your activity.
64. CMS can be deployed in Linux/Windows. Which one is the better solution?
The Operating system on which you deploy the CMS is more often the choice which is made with considerations of the stability of the system and other aspects that are surrounding the server based operation of yours. There may be additional server activity that can be done only on Linux based OS. Considering most of the CMS are available to be installed in both the platforms of servers, it is more about the system wide control that you expect to have out of the server on the whole.
65. What storage mechanism does the WCMSs usually employ to get the portability and flexible presentation across various technologies?
XML is the standard on which the stored data is serialized into the database. Having the XML based standard helps in the access from different platforms. XML data representations are very much portable even without any of the wrapper of the Moodle.
66. What is referred to as “Workflow management” in the Web Content Management System terms?
The workflow management refers to the path a data takes before getting published onto the website. Usual ways of editorial inspection can be viewed as the cycle that every article takes before being approved.
67. Why are WCMSs called “frying” systems?
The Web Content usually is pulled out on demand. You do not have statically stored HTML data that is fetched just like in normal web server. The template and other layout information that is necessary in giving out the final page is added to the data that is taken out of the mysql database or cached somewhere else in some format. This is happening just on the go, and so they are also called as “frying” systems- taking the necessary heating procedure as and when required just like frying before eating.
68. How to avoid the latency factor involved with any CMS?
It is purely a tweaking mechanism that have to applied to all the run-time entities like the cache size, mysql database configurations, hardware based accelerations, processing prowess of the server computer etc. These little things add up to the final impact that is the latency. Having the best system configurations and OS level optimizations mostly would do the job.