What are Filters in Moodle?

Filters are a way to automatically transform content before it is showed to the user in Moodle.
You can add a filter at the site level and then remove it at the course or activity level.

You can use filters to...

• add links
• insert multimedia players
• convert Mathematical expressions 
• convert emoticons into images 
• and more...

Video created by Moodle

Here is the list of filters in Moodle.

If you are a developer and would like to create your own filters you could have a look tho this page.



There are different levels to activate filters:

1. Site-wide: Site administration--Plugins--Filters-Manage Filters. In order for Filters to show at a course or activity level they need to be enabled by an administrator.



 
2. Course: Administration--Filters



If you enable a filter at the course level it will apply to all the activities in the course.

3. Activity: Activity administration--Filters





If you enable a filter at the activity level it will apply just to this activity not to all the other activities in the course.

You can read more about how filters work in different contexts here

More about Managing filters here

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Turnitin Direct V2 Integration and LDAP authentication in Moodle

When using the LDAP authentication in Moodle, if an student is set as on hold (could be because he/she didn't pay the fees) in LDAP the student will still have the account and data in the Moodle database but he/she will just not able to login to Moodle.

Under the above circumstances, the student cann't login in Moodle so therefore can not do any submission in Turnitin.

But you might have some questions under the above circumstances,


1. What if a lecturer refresh the and student submission in a Turnitin activity and the student is not active anymore in LDAP, so he can not login into Moodle anymore?

When refreshing you will notice that the similarity changes to 'Pending' and Turnitin will not return any further report for that student, so the similarity percent showed by the Turnitin Direct V2 plugin in Moodle will always stay as 'Pending'.

2. What if a lecturer goes to the Turnitin activity and submit a paper in behalf of the student?

I still need to test it but I suppose the result of that action will be the same as in question 1 above.

Please write your comments bellow...

Replace Active Directory authentication with authentication against a External Database

This method uses an external database table to check whether a given username and password is valid. If the user does not currently exist in Moodle a new account will be created and their information copied from the external database.

I will draw in this post the big picture about how to change the user authentication type in the user database table from "LDAP" to "external database".

1. Activate the external database here: Home / ► Site administration / ► Plugins / ► Authentication / ► Manage authentication



2. Configure the external database. Click in the settings link of the 'external database' and point it to the right table in the database: mdl_user`.

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Find Out Which Sites Have Embedded Your YouTube Video

1. When you are logged into your YouTube account go to the next url: https://www.youtube.com/analytics
2. In the right menu, click in Playback Locations
3. Now you are in the right place, please go to step three in this link to read the next steps

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Activity Chooser in Moodle (Video)

In the below video you can see an introduction to the activity chooser and how to add activities in Moodle...

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Course Reports in Moodle (Video)

Do you have a course in Moodle and want to know how many student are looking at it and what are they doing in it?

Just go to ‘Reports’ under from the administration menu.

Please watch the below video for more information.

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Upload files faster to your courses in Moodle: Drag and Drop (Video)

The below video demonstrate how to upload files to your courses using the drag and drop method (no need to add a file activity).

I highly recommend  you to send these video to the teachers in your institution/company as even people who have been using Moodle for a long time do not know this method and it can save a lot of time.

They will be surprised as to how fast this method is.

Canvas Network: free MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)

Canvas Network offers open, online courses taught by from colleges, universities, and organizations everywhere in the world.

You can access the site and search for courses without any sign up but when wanting to enroll in any course you will be asked for your email and a password.

There are a lot free MOOCs and, as the main deliverers are universities, there are a lot of courses dealing with learning and teaching which is a good new for you if you are in this sector.

I think that in a time when MOOCs are everywhere it´s a very good idea to create a website that bring all of them together.

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Moodle&Totara: Forking

Totara, apart from being a a large New Zealand coniferous tree, was a distribution of Moodle adapted for governments and corporations.

Totara offered a additional features not offered by Moodle. The first release of TotaraLMS was 1 March 2011 and later they created a partner network to offer their services.

The news are that Totara forks from Moodle and the Moodle Community. Richard Wyles, CEO and co-founder of Totara, published the following...

"We have made the carefully considered decision that from 2016 Totara LMS will no longer be in lockstep with Moodle. This will free the team at Totara Learning to focus on big leaps forward in usability and modernising the framework for our enterprise customers."

There seems to be some post in the Moodle community dealing with this: here is one of them.

Please write your comments bellow.

Moodle Blocks: Adding a Twitter widget

If you want to display the tweets from a Twitter account you can use the HTML block in Moodle as follows...

1. Log in to Twitter
2. Go to this address: https://twitter.com/settings/widgets/new
3. Find the Twitter username you want to include (e.g. moodledev) and click the button 'Create widget' 
4. Twitter will provide you some code, copy that code and go to Moodle
5. Add an html block in Moodle and paste the code into the html version of the editor.

See the result on the right.

Please write your comments below.

Turnitin Assignment shows a ‘Read Only’ mode?

You might find the message on the right in your turnitin activities.

A. What does this message mean?

When you are using the Moodle Direct v2 plugin and a Turnitin activity is created for the first time in a course, a Class ID corresponding to that course is applied in the Turnitin database.

The default end date for this ID is set to six months from the creation date or to the date of the latest post-date for the Turnitin assignments in the class. Once the end date is reached, the Turnitin course becomes “expired,” which means any submissions in the class are read-only.

B. When is it happening?

This is a problem that is happening in this course because you are reusing Turnitin Activities created last year or in the years before. When you start a new semester you get a copy of your course where you can reuse everything from the last year but you shouldn't reuse the Turnitin activities, in that case, everytime you start a new semester, you need to delete the old Turnitin activities and create new activities.

C. How do I solve the problem?

To solve this problem the post date will need to be extended by...

1. Go to your course main page and click in the Turnitin activiy link where you have the read only mode

2.Mare sure you are on the Summary tab. You will see the Start, Due and Post Date as in the screenshot below...



3.On the right (see above in red) click in the icon and you will see the dates as below...



4. Change the Post Date to a future date (*Note: The Post Date is the date that marks and feedback from GradeMark are released to students).

5. Open some of the student reports and check that now the read mode is not showing

6. Go back to the same setting and set the 'Post date' to it original value or to the date you wish

7. Even you changed the date back to it's original value, the read only mode still not appearing again


* To solve this issue I got inspired here

**Here and here are complete guides for Turnitin in Moodle Direct V2

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Moodle dabase error: 'question categories should belong to a valid context'

When running a ‘health-check’ test in Moodle (to do that just go to the next address in your intallation: http://mysite.com/admin/tool/health)

You might find the problem 'Question categories should belong to a valid context', it's not an important problem for your database but still you might want to solve it.



If you  have this problem, when running a ‘health-check’ you will get something similar to the below...

 

Accoding to this post in the Moodle community, the safest way to sort out this problem would be to...

1. Create a temporary course.
2. Find that course's context id.
3. change the orphan question_categories (in the database) to point to the temp course context id.
4. Go into the question bank for the temp course, and see what is there, and either move anything that should not have been deleted to the right place, or delete anything that is junk.

If you want to  to solve the problem in a easier way you could go to the the quiz listed in the error and delete the problematic questions form it. The problem is that the quiz title in the error list is not clickable so you will need to find the in which course is your quiz and go there to delete the questions.

If you have a lot of courses there could be a problem to find the quiz. what I did in the above situation was to find all the courses with quizzes using the information in this post and after search them for the specific quiz.

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Influence of public funding in Higher Education in the E-learning sector in Europe

The 'Higher Education in Ireland' is facing a rising in student numbers and dwindling resources since the crash in 2008. As the below table shows, it seems that the Higher Education in Ireland is suffering more than Higher Education in other European countries affected by the economic crash.



I am wondering about the impact of the above situation in the e-learning sector in Higher Education in Ireland and the EU. I think that all the Institutes of Technology and Universities in Europe have a LMS (Learning Management System) to support their face to face classes or even to deliver full masters and degrees online, but i doubt that all of them have a professional that can properly administrate that system.

From my point of view, this situation will have two main consequences in the e-learning sector:

1. A fostering in the use of online resources by lecturers in Higher Education, as they face classes with a lot of more students. Some of the lecturers that have never use a LMS in their classes before are pushed to do it to save time and effort and manage to overcome their busy schedules.

2. At the same time, the lack of funding might influence the implementation of LMSs and the recruitment of qualified e-learning professionals that could manage the new tendency.

The challenge for the European Higher Education sectors in countries like Ireland, Spain, Portugal... will be to provide enough professionals that could properly show the right path to all lecturers that struggle with new educational technologies in their classes.

The Higher Education system will need to plan the provision of more degrees and masters in e-learning in all that countries in order to counteract this situation.

Please write your comments and ideas below.

Statsilk: Interactive Maps and Graphics

Some days ago I found statsilk, a really useful tool to increase the motivation and engagement of students in courses.

 You will be able to create interactive maps with statistics in different topics. Once installed you can import data from Excel. 

In their website they have a long list of examples already developed and ready to use and they explain how you can create maps with your own data.

------------------------- Article translated to Spanish--------------------------------------

Hola compañeros: hace unos días baje de esta web una aplicación que puede resultar muy útil en e-learning.

Si en tu curso puede resultar útil un mapa interactivo con estadísticas sobre cualquier tema merece la pena que lo pruebes. Una vez instalado puedes importar datos a Excel y de forma automática te genera el mapa interactivo que fomentará en gran medida la motivación de los alumnos.