We had great evening on Tuesday at June's seminar. Will blog about it more when I have a moment but in the mean time here are a few snaps from the evening.

Spotted this brand new development for themes added to Moodle 2.0 Preview 1.

As you can see in the screenshots the theme has some drop-down menus in the header. The neat thing is that these are already incorporated in the theme and can be edited and extended by the site administrator without access to the server.

Excellent. I'm sure this will be really popular and be massive aid to site navigation.

We have a situation where we want to allow a facilitator (who is assigned to the the Non-Editing Teacher role for the course) to be able to edit a label on the course page so that they can personalise their welcome message. However we don't want them to be able to have permission to be able to change any other aspect of the course design.

These are the steps:

1. Login as admin or another role that allows role assignment.

2. Create the label with the default welcome message, save and return to course.

3. Re-open the label.

4. Click the "Locally assigned roles" tab.

5. Click Teacher and assign the facilitator to that role.

The facilitator will now see the "Turn editing on" button and when in editng mode they will be able to edit the required label to personalise their welcome message. As the Teacher role was only assigned for the label they won't be able to adapt other resources or activites.

If you're using Moodle 1.9.x (sorry 1.8. users) tucked away at Bulk User actions (Home -> Administration -> Users -> Accounts -> Bulk user actions).

Filter users as required and add them to the "Selected" column and then from the "With selected users" drop-down select "Add / send message" to bring up the messaging interface.

One thing to watch out for is that the messaging system at Home -> Administration -> Security -> Site policies must be enabled.

Over the last year or so we've been working with Samaritans, a charity that offers 24-hour confidential emotional support via volunteers to anyone in emotional distress.

Samaritans has developed a series of elearning courses to provide a cost effective and convenient way for volunteers to be trained at home.

Read more in our case study here

February 23rd has come and gone and so has our first seminar....

We had a really interesting group of speakers and attendees from a broad range of sectors and organisations.

The evening kicked off with a presentation from Gary Mahon, Director at Enovation Solutions (our technical partner) with an overview of extensions and integrations that we can now offer to Moodle users to manage different groups of users across the site into programmes with a host of additional management options such as dependencies, course catalogues, waiting lists and periodic reminders (which is really handy for the compliance type scenarios). Gary also provided an overview of integrations with Alfresco to overcome the long standing issue of sharing files across courses and JasperReports a business intelligence application that enables the ability to generate a vast array of reports from the data already captured across a Moodle site.

My overview of new course based functionality that's coming up in Moodle 2.0 was an interesting one as we'd fully expected that Moodle 2.0 would be in beta by the end of February. Nonetheless there are enough interesting tweaks that should be in the eventual beta and subsequent full release to talk about. However one feels about the programmed release of activities and resources as a method of managing learners' progress through a course, there's no doubt that this is some of the most frequently requested functionality for Moodle. The "conditional activities" code has been developed at the Open University and has been around for quite a while and works very nicely (I can now reveal that there was a bug that caused me a lot of issues when testing my demonstration setup that was only fixed on the day of the seminar. Phew!). What's more this dovetails nicely with the dependencies between courses that Gary covered in his presentation.

Our final speaker of the evening was Squadron Leader Andy Perkins of the Royal Air Force. I first met Andy in September 2008 when we were asked to deliver some training by BT (who host the RAF's Moodle site which links into the Defence Learning Portal) at the Defence Academy, Shrivenham. It's great to hear how Andy and the wider RAF team have embraced the challenges they have in their move to transition to online learning.

Separately from the onsite training that we provided, we were commissioned to develop a course to develop the online facilitation skills of the RAF personnel. Andy recounted the impact the online discussions had in moving the understanding of the issues forward, especially as there had been countless internal meeting and many of the participants were physically located just a few feet from each other or in office next door! We have a case study that expands upon this which will be in the HowToMoodle website soon.

Edit: RAF Case Study now on website.

I can't remember all of the HowToMoodle inspired tips that hade found their way into the RAF's own courses, but one that stuck out was the use of the Moodle wiki to create spaces for reflection. Apparently these are put to good use and are very popular. Great stuff!

So, on the list for the next seminar on 22nd June are to find a more spacious venue and to look into some food for the evening (early feedback is that this would be welcome. June will soon be here!

When you're using group enrolment keys users are normally given a prompt if they enter the wrong enrolment key on attemptng to enter a course. The issue is that the enrolment key prompt refers to the course enrolment key not a group enrolment key. This can cause confusion and a fair amount of frustration too.

If you're not using course enrolment keys, or you are and can live without a prompt, you may find it useful to disable the enrolment key prompt option at:

Site Administration > Course > Enrolments > Internal Enrolment - Edit.

Set "enrol_manual_showhint" to "No".

(You'll need to be logged in a as an administrator to change this).

Most people are aware that the Short Answer question type allows checking of submissions on a case sensitive basis. The short answer element in the Embedded Answer (Cloze) question type can incorporate case sensitive matching too!

Simply use "SHORTANSWER_C", or "SAC" instead of "SHORTANSWER" or "SA" when constructing your question.