9/12/2023 0 Comments Moodle pdf annotate feedbackIt was an easy win for a new Moodle admin. I was quite pleased with the Google solution. The set-up was easy – Moodle provides good documentation on how to set-up things on the Google side, and then in Moodle it’s plug and play with your oAuth account. My university is a lapsed Google school (now on O365), so I wasn’t sure I would be able to get a proper, institution owned Google account set-up, and I didn’t want to use a consumer Google account as it would not be subject to the same FERPA-compliant terms – who knows what type of data mining would be done on student work? But, after working with our IT staff, I was able to get a service account under our Google Apps for Edu domain. For document conversion, it sends the file to the system account’s Google Drive, converts to PDF, downloads the result, and then deletes the original upload. The way this converter works is to use a Google system account, the same as used to enable oAuth sign-in and Google Drive integration. My main hesitation in using the Google solution was privacy. I’ll let Lafayette College’s Charles Fulton (a developer and Moodler of some renown) summarize the vibe: Much of the sentiment seemed to be that unoconv was difficult and prone to causing headaches. In the wider Moodle-verse, things didn’t seem much better. When I took over as the Moodle admin at my school, I mostly knew Unoconv by it’s reputation, which is… bad (really bad.) My predecessor had so much trouble keeping unoconv running reliably that one of his last acts before leaving the university was to just disable document conversion altogether. Unoconv is about as Open Source and Linux-y as it gets: it’s a command line program that runs a special version of LibreOffice to convert files. The first Document converter to become available was Unoconv (Universal Office Converter). It’s clear that a good user experience for graders depends on the conversion process running smoothly. zip files to before they could save grades and feedback. One of my users reported wait times of up to 2 minutes trying to grade an assignment that student submitted. Worst of all is when an instructor is working with queued submissions of a file type that isn’t compatible with the conversion process, as this often causes lag and long page loads. This might take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes depending on the document and the speed of the conversion process. If a professor happens to visit the grading screen of a submission before it can be processed, they will have to wait while the file is converted ad hoc. A scheduled task runs – every 15 minutes by default – to convert any newly-submitted files to PDF so they can be marked up. When a student adds a file to a submission, an entry is created in the Moodle database in the mdl_assignfeedback_editpdf_queue table (I’m sure there’s more to it, but this is a handy way to check how many conversions your Moodle site is running). Rather, the converter plugins allow integration with a separate utility, which can be run on the same server or elsewhere. Naturally, many professors enjoy the flexibility and convenience of annotating without requiring students to manage submitting their assignments in the correct file format (talk about herding cats!)įrom an administration standpoint, it’s important to note that Moodle does not perform document conversion itself. This is so the annotation feedback plugin can be used on a wider variety of student submissions. Introduced with Moodle 3.1, Document Converters allow Moodle to convert common file types like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice that are uploaded as Assignment submissions to PDF. When talking shop with other Moodlers, one common pain point lies with Document Converter plugins.
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