Another addition to planet Earth for one proud Moodler in Montreal

Congratulations to you, Nicholas Walker, and to your wife, Helen, on the birth of your baby son, Julian, on Saturday 11:49pm, 14th January 2012 in Montreal, Canada! What a GREAT moment this is.

Way to go, Nick! And Nick, thanks for all the help you've been to me, thus far. May the joy you experience during this time of rejoicing, bring about more innovative ideas and creative information systems for the good of your family, students and colleagues.

Frankie Kam

Online Users block (Part I) - How to be invisible on the Online Users block. A Moodle 1.9.x and 2.x solution

Learning Outcome: at the end of this post, you will know how to allow your Moodle 1.9.x and 2.x users to hide themselves on the Online Users block. This is Part I out of two parts. You can read Part II here.

Now I don't know about you, but I like, no, LOVE, the Online Users block by Andy J. Davis. It lends an air of Web 2.0 for Moodle. The feeling of a learning community that the block helps to foster is priceless. This block is useful for students and teachers to know who is online.

Figure 1: Online Users block.
A Moodle core block.

An adaptation of Gareth Barnard's excellent Collapsible Weeks course format for Moodle 1.9.x.

Today I decided to adapt the Collapsed Weeks course format, originally developed, and copyrighted by the talented Gareth Barnard. The result of the adaptation is that the course format can now be organised by week, and you can display the topic title for any week.

Here's a screenshot:

Screen 1: Adapted Coursepage format from Garath Barnard's Collapsible Weekly format.

Student / Normal mode view.

What video inspires you?

Hi. Watched any inspiring videos lately? 


I trying to build a list of inspiring videos to share with my students. To watch them on my Moodle site, I really enjoy using Matt Bury's Media Player plugin to create a video playlist for my students to watch videos (of my choice). It's really versatile.

You can play the videos from my Moodle website here by using Guest access. 

The playlist is created from an XML file that I edit using Windows Notepad. Here's an example of a XML playlist file. And here's another one.