Marginalia and Nanogong co-existing in your Moodle 1.9 forums - a match made in heaven

In this post, I will explain how YOU can fortify your  Moodle forum by getting  the non-standard mods Marginalia and Nangong to co-exist in harmony. As Hannah Montana would sing, "it's the best of both worlds!". At least on a Moodle 1.9 site.


Nanogong

The Nanogong voice recorder by Dr. David Rossiter and Gibson Lam of Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is an excellent audio recorder for Moodle. As mentioned on the Nanogong website, "it provides a very simple and transparent voice support for Moodle".



Marginalia

Marginalia is, as Geof Glass, the author puts it, "is an open source Javascript web annotation system that allows users of web applications to highlight text and write margin notes."

Red text indicates grammar mistakes by the student. Green indicates the correct sentence or text.

How to use the humble comma delimited (CSV) file to display private coursework marks right on your Moodle coursepage

Today's post is about a crude but effective method to display confidential user coursework data on any Moodle 1.9.x course page. All you need is the Display Data mod (created by Serafim Panov) and an Excel spreadsheet saved as a CSV (comma delimited) file. You can even dispense with Excel and just use good old Notepad to create the CSV file!

Do you like to use Excel to store your students' coursework marks? Like this?

Would you like to feedback the detailed marks to your online-Moodle students, but are concerned about privacy issues?

If replied "yes!" to both questions, then boy oh boy, do I have a treat for you. It's a Moodle treat from 2007 and it's really very simple to use.

How I speeded up my Moodle site (two essential tips)

Preface
If you are a Moodle 2.x user (Moodle 2.4.1 is the latest as of now - January 2013) looking to speed up your Moodle production site, you might want to check out Cloudways.com's article entitled "Boosting Moodle Performance - Tips To Speed Up Your Moodle Install", Jonathan Moore's excellent "Why Your Moodle Site is Slow: Five Simple Settings",  Frederic Never's equally magnificent "Make your Moodle courses load faster without fiddling with the server" and Jonathan Moore's "Why your Moodle site is slow: five simple settings".

My article below is still useful, but dated since I was using Moodle 1.9.15 during the time of writing. Anyway, I suppose you reading this because you're desperate for ideas to speed up your slow  Moodle site, right? If that is the case, Random Net Surfer, then you've come to the right place!

Credit: Warner Bros

This article was first posted on Moodle.org here on 15th January 2011. At the end of this post, you will know how to speed up your site with mod_deflate. You will also know how to enable PHP caching for your website by installing eaccelerator. Lastly you will know how to monitor your website's resources with munin graphs.

45 days ago, I started by journey of hosting my own Moodle site on a Web Host company. I started off with shared hosting, got turned off by the slow speeds, then upgraded to Virtual Private Server. The site just chugged along but my students complained that the site would load ever so slowly. Now, 1.5 months later, it's a different story.


I have spent countless hours and days, while others are asleep, surfing the Net feverishly for ways to optimize and to speed up my Moodle site. I've surfed to moodle.org, googled my way through, gingerly typed detailed Linux commands along the way. BTW, I love Linux now.

I've experienced hundreds of emails to and from my Web Host company, had a major server outage, times when my domain didn't load, recovered from a full harddisk due to automated & unmonitored backup files (I can't forget that one!), blank Moodle pages, loss of data, recovery and backups along the way. I survived. But TODAY, I think I've finally got it. Henry Higgens of "My Fair Lady" would say, "By George! I think (s)he's got it!!!". Anyway....here are two reasons why I am SO HAPPY TODAY.

Reason1: My Moodle site FINALLY runs with mod_deflate page compression.
So my moodle http requested pages are compressed before they are sent to the users' web browsers. Benefit: faster loading of pages, less waiting by users for their Moodle pages to load. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=165904

Cool Video Quiz: Mashup of Xerte and Moodle quiz

This mashup was originally posted by Joseph Thibault in moodlenews.com on 22 February 2011. As reported by Joseph, it displays "additional quiz information and content in tandem to a Moodle page".  It uses the Open Source e-Learning tool named Xerte. The mashup allows your students to view a video on the same page as the quiz questions that test their understanding of the subject matter taught in the video.

More links related to this quiz format "novelty":
1. Moodle.org forum discussing the mashup.
2. Youtube video demonstrating the mashup.