Moodle

What are conditional activities? Since the introduction of Moodle 2, it has been possible for users to track which activities/resources they have completed. This means that resources/activities are ‘aware’ of their completion status for each course user. This completion status awareness allows a teacher to have activities/resources show up only when certain conditions have been met, for example Resource B will only be shown to users who have completed Activity A....

Note: this post is aimed towards admins who run their Moodle installation on a Ubuntu Linux server. As usual, this is not meant to be a definitive list or how-to, but rather an introduction to what a Moodle administrator can do to ensure their installation is running smoothly. Monitoring tools The following tools are listed in increasing order of difficulty of use. I have used them all but I have found that unless I load test, the first 3 tools tend to be enough for me....

Note: this post is part of the Oktobertest Moodle series Loadstorm is a web based load testing service. Their business is to simulate multiple virtual users simultaneously navigating a website, following a scenario that you pre-recorded using the loadstorm point and click interface. This tutorial will show you how to test your Moodle installation with 25 simultaneous users, as you get 25 lifetime free virtual users with loadstorm. It also turns out to be the maximum number of students I have in my classes....

Note: This is by no means supposed to be a definitive guide to load testing. It is an introduction to what can be done to ensure a Moodle installation can cope with a specific number of simultaneous users. It is aimed at Moodle admins who haven’t really done load testing before. Be careful, load testing can crash your server and you could get in trouble with your host company – always check with them first....

1. Do some of the work for them Don’t you love it when you come back to a hotel room to find out that it has been tidied up for you, bed made and a chocolate left on the pillow, maybe even some cool towel art? Before creating new Moodle courses for teachers, I ask Heads of Department/Faculty for their unit/subunit titles for each course. I then create the course ‘shells’ or ‘templates’, so that the first time the teacher logs in to their course (even if they are first time Moodle users), they feel as though they are in known territory, as their syllabus is there right in front of them looking all pretty....