At the XMarks meeting today, we talked about what remains to be completed
on the synchronisation of assessments.

We have designed this activity to be carried out by a tutor using an assessment tool of some sort, in our case our Moodle installation.

Moodle

Paolo demo-ed the current XMarks Moodle plugin. We agreed that it was now
ready enough to be trialed with faculty. Carol and Paolo to take forward.

The plugin currently allows a tutor to associate a Moodle activity with an
assessment on the student records system

It also allows a tutor to dis-associate the activity.

In our sequence diagram, after a sync or desync, the enterprise system
returns the assessment object and Moodle uses this to re-set itself. Paolo
to update code to carry out this additional step.

Web service/persistence framework

We have not yet designed a de-sync method to implement the dis-association
from Moodle.

WSDL still under construction. A SOAP service will need to run on the
enterprise database. Arran to report back on progress at next meeting,
hopefully with a running service and ideas about how to make it easy for
other institutions to implement.

Enterprise level

When an assessment is synched, the moodle activity id needs to be passed
and stored so there needs to be a new column created to manage this. Carol
to request this col.

We talked quite a lot about ways of ensuring XMarks is easy for other
institutions to use.

Where John has used Sussex Direct functions, he'll build these into an
XMarks library so that the code can be used by other institutions. We will
build functions to make XMarks as easy to use as possible - John discussed
functions that would handle translations between the required XSD XML
formats and data arrays, working on the assumption that the array indexes
matched XSD element names. John to develop library

We also talked about ways of designing a generic layer and an
institution-specific layer, possibly using the object interface features of
PHP5 - John and Arran are going to explore this further and report back at
next meeting

The xmarks plugin enables Moodle to be integrated with a student grades database.

The Moodle-specific plugin provides a Moodle block that allows the quiz, lesson and assignment activities to be synchronised to assessments on a grades database. It flags any conflicts, such as hand-in dates and hand-in methods, and on the click of a button resolves them. An overview of the original assessment syncronisation process is available here

The awarded and updated grades of a synchronised assessment are passed to the grades database using the standard Moodle cron job (which is recommended by the Moodle community to be fired every five minutes).

The Moodle xmarks plugin was initially designed for version 1.8, but has been modified to run for version 1.6. I don't expect there to be major developments needed to change the version for which it will run until Moodle 1.9, where they have changed the grading database tables significantly.

Labels: integration, moodle