Moodle

From Jacob (jkier at rmcc.edu) Monday, 21 November 2005, 11:48 PM:

I've started working on adding this feature myself. I have the due date option working and am getting ready to take a stab at the penalty portion. I will submit it when it is complete.

I've just emailed Jacob to ask him to let us know if he has made a fix for this yet.

I have attached a small patch that allows for late submissions by duplicating the preventlatesubmissions functionality of assignments. There is, however, no penalties applied to late submissions.

Would it be possible for this patch to be released as a plugin module. I have access to be able to apply plugins and I can text edit a specific file, but am not able to apply this patch.

I am migrating over from Etudes which does have the ability to set both a due date and a close date for quizes and this capability is totally necessary for my courses (with or without penalty).

No, this sort of change cannot be done as a plugin.

For those who might be interested in this fix but who do not have access to patch.exe, I was able to easily use the patch file to patch the relevant files manually in Dreamweaver. Any good text editor that displays line numbers could be used.

I intent to apply penalties manually by adjusting scores based on actual submission dates but this will be a bit tedious. It would be nice to see some development push for a feature that allows late submissions with variable penalties (e.g. 1% per day late, 10% per day late, 5% one day late then another 1% per day therafter). Since I am totally new to the Moodle community I am not sure how such a development push might be brought about.

I have been using the patch listed here because it is absolutely essential to retention efforts in my classes which include many underprepared or disadvantaged students. If the first quiz deadline in a class was absolute, many students would miss the deadline and then drop the class. If I extend any deadline, students will expect all deadlines to be extended and will not perform.

Using the quiz submit late patch has worked well to maintain student retention but there are glitches including resetting of the clock in multi-page quizzes' whenever the student clicks from one page to the next. I am very disappointed to see that the current demo versions of 2.0 do NOT address this issue at all. Student retention may not be an issue for many colleges but it certainly is for many of us. Since Sakai/Etudes has had functionality to deal with this issue AND to allow students to have extra time on tests (those who may have learning disabilities) for at least 2-3 years now, this issue should be relatively easy to address and VERY HIGH on the REQUIRED features list. It appears that Sakai/Etudes are much more responsive to the entire range of student needs, especially the "low" end than the Moodle development community is - exactly the opposite of what I believe is intended.

If nothing else, the simplest fix would be to allow the instructor to edit the closing date that appears to students through the quizzes link page display. We can put a "fake" last day to submit date in the text of the quiz information but that is subverted because the real close date appears to students who just click on the quizzes link.

Is it possible, at least as an interim fix to simply allow instructor override of the information appearing under the "Quiz closes" column on the quizzes display page - preferably for 1.9.3 but definitely when 2.0 hits the streets..

There is no easy or interim fix for this, and no, it has not been addressed for Moodle 2.0, but many other things have, and we can only do so much.

I agree that it would be good to fix this some time, but so far there are only two votes here. This probably needs ot be considered in combination with MDL-3030, which is the other side of the coin.

And I cannot promise when anything will be done about this, I have plenty of other problems (with lots of votes) that need to be fixed first.

Actually there is an easy fix for the main issue of late submissions being allowed. It is exactly almost exactly the way this was done in Sakai/eytudes 3 years ago. here are the basic steps.

1) Set up new variable "timedue" (to add to the existing "timeopen" and "timeclose" quiz variables.
2) Add a new date selection box exactly like the two existing boxes in modedit.php (quiz settings edit page) to set the value of this variable and label "Quiz due time"
3) Add a selection box immediately below the above with two options
"Show quiz due date" and
"Show quiz close date"
4) Set up mod/quiz/index.php so that if "Show quiz date" is selected the new variable timedue fills the dates columns. If "Show quiz close date" is selected fill this column with timeclose data

If done this way, absolutely NOTHING changes with regard to how the quiz close date functionality issues are addressed and NO other changes are needed until there is time to do things like add aotumatic penalties for late submission and, my biggest wish after the quizdue fix, the ability to easily set quiz time limits for specific students.

I do not program in php but I am pretty sure that, if I lknew the existing Moodle structure well (I do not - I only started using it this year) and if it were in a language I do program in (Java, cgi, etc), it would take only a few hours at most to write, and fully test this fix.

I should edit my post so appologies for the typos. The oone that is important is that in step 4 I missed out the word due when I typed "Show quiz date".

Probably a bit longer than that to test properly, becuase it involves a database structure change (new column). Anyway, that is half a day of time I don't have.

Also, it is adding an extra field to a form that already is too long, for a use case that only affects a few people. That trade-off means that doing this change in the standard Moodle release is not a no-brainer.

Anyway, if you can program in Java, you can probalby work out how ot implement this in Moodle, since it is mostly doing similar things to what is already there. If you give it a go and can come up with a patch, please attach it here.

Not so sure this affects only a few people. I believe many instructors would use such a feature once they found what it can do to improve student retention - a huge issue in colleges in many nations and certainly in most 2 year colleges in the United States. Why do I believe it affects a lot of Moodle users? It is not just a gut feeling or my won needs. My information comes from being in the Sakai/Etudes development community and having observed how extensive the use of this feature became and how much push for more functionaily came from large numbers of users once the late submission technique was first introduced there.

You are right that I could probably program this fix myself. I expect it would only take a few hours of my time. However, to do so, I would need to set up an entirely new and unique Moodle (which I may indeed do even though I do not currently have the appropriate server testing environment). My existing implementation, although it is self-administered and used only for my own clases, is an active site with 200-300 students working on the site each day - 24 hours a day - 7 days a week - and I can not take that offline until next summer when there will be a couple of weeks break for me to work in.

If I do develop a fix I will, of course, post it here but it will unfortuntely only be manual patching information not a patch file.

I have been taking a more detailed look at the code and believe I could quickly and easily program the addition of a timedue date for a quiz easily and add an option to display this date on the quizzes list page rather than the time close date. This would satisfy the immediate need for me (although the other aspects of the issue - including different time limits for different students highly desirable).

The only thing I can see as a difficulty in this immediate fix is the display of the quiz close date in the calendar function. Of course, one could simply set the quiz close date to 2012 and it would be out of the way and probably unseen but it would be better if it could be simply switched off in calendar and replaced by the timedue date. Event open and close dates are reported to be automatically shown in calendar but I can not find which file has the code that does this. If anyone knows where this code is I would appreciate you sending me that info. If I have that, I can at least investigate whether I can easily make the timedue modification operate better by having the calendar show the timedue date if it exists and the timeclose date if no timedue exists.

I am pretty sure the events are updated by code in mod/quiz/lib.php. Both quiz_add_instance and quiz_update_instance call quiz_after_add_or_update which does the add event calls.

If you are doing this properly, you also need to look in mod/quiz/backuplib.php and restorelib.php to ensure that this information is backed up and restored with the rest of the quiz data (and if restoring an old backup with the extra data missing, probably set due date to equal close date.)

Finally, if you get all this working, please post about it in the quiz forum (http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=737). I would be interested to see what people think of this solution, and other people may wish to use your modifications. Thanks.

I have just posted a patch file and short explanation of the fix that I mentioned. I have added an optional deadline date for quizzes. Depending on which quiz dates are set, there is now much more flexibilty. It is possible to show the student only a deadline date for a quiz, late submission is accepted and, if late, the student receives a quiz opening message that they are late and penalties may apply. It is also possible to show the student a deadline date and a later quiz close date. Of course, if the quiz deadline is not set Moodle behaves exactly as now.

Sorry forgot. Patch and more information are posted at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=737 and titled "Add a quiz deadline so late submissions are accepted"

This feature would be great for us as I have to manually open every quiz as soon as possible after it closes for our students. I do this for two reasons:
1. as teachers of adult distance learners we have students who have a lot of good reasons to not be able to sit assessments on time and we like to be able to make allowances for them doing them late.

2. I want my students to be able to retake the quiz as many times as they like for the purposes of study. They are scored on their first attempt, but I want them to have free access after that so they can explore all the feedback even for options they did not choose the first time around (which is all you see when you review your attempt).

I could also achieve the above by not putting in a closing date, but then I would lose the functionality of the quiz calendar entries, and the quiz itself would not show due dates. I would have to add calendar two entries myself, so either way something has to happen manually.

Yes, it seems that there are a LOT of instructors who would very much like to see this late quiz functionality implemented. The objections that the developers seem to have are that it requires an additional field in the database and another entry box on the "already crowded" quiz settings page. I personally think these objections are bogus. The page is far from crowded with the new box added and most instructors I know would certainly tolerate a little more "clutter" to obtain an important functionality. The argument about not adding another database field is also very puzzling to me. It took me about 3 minutes to do that even though I have zero formal programming education or experience. Also, what does one more data field matter in a database that has many hundreds of data fields already? I have actually added several more data fields to various tables for my specific needs and it certainly does not in any way adversely affect performance. . The patch I developed could easily have been incorporated in 2.0 with about 1-2 hours work at most. In fact, I am planning to do that soon since I will probably upgrade to 2.0 next summer. When I do, I will post a new patch here. This deadline date patch has now been working successfully for me for 2 semesters and I simply will not teach with any courseware that does not have this functionality or to which I can not add it easily.

The real 'objection' to doing this is simply that I have not had time.

Your patch has errors. (e.g. the computation of $timerstartvalue in attempt.php. Try that on a multi-page quiz.)

Also, any solution to this bug really needs to address the 'with penalty' requirement, which needs to be configurable. And solving this bug should be done in tandem with MDL-3030. So, while it is easy to make a patch that works well enough for the use cases that you care about. Coming up with a solution that pleases everyone is harder. Hence the fact it has not been done.

(And you ranting at me does not make me any more inclined to fix the bug. Please try to keep your contributions constructive.)

I thought I was being constructive. The major point is that to implement this as far as I got is easy and it solves the biggest problem for many (granted not all) instructors. Automatically generated penalties would be highly desireable for many people but penalties can be assesed manually (as I now do) and quizzes would not have to be reopened for one or two students who might have very good reasons for being late. This is the way I use the patch now - students can take quizzes late and only get penalized if they have not expressed a good reason for being late e.g. yesterday I had one student who was hospitalized and who will not be penalized for being late.

I know my patch was not perfect but it does work even for multi page quizzes (which I use all the time) and simply cleaning the patch up and implementing it would be a major enhancement that users could have available now.

I realize that the vote on this is only 9, but this is a very important feature for me from a classroom management perspective.

Unlike other systems, Moodle does not discern between a due date and a close date (as far as I can tell). To get an item in the calendar it must have a close date.

I teach 8 classes and I have structured Moodle to handle all of my assignments. However, it is very time consuming to open activities for those students who have legitimately or illegitimately missed a date.

My preferred functionality would be to set a start date, a due date, and then a series of penalty dates, or a penalty rule, then a close date.

I might make an assignment work something like this:

Start date: first day of class
Due date: date material is discussed in class
After x time: deduct x%
After y time: deduct y%
Etc.
Close Date: end of class

This puts all of the accountability for the assignment in the hands of the student, they may earn what ever grade they would like, with deadline being a factor.

To me this mirrors the real life I am trying to prepare them for. In real life, getting tasks ahead of time has extra value, getting it done on time has value, getting it done just a bit late has most of the value, the later it gets, the less value it has until it has no value (or even negative value)

The last comment on this was over a year ago, is there any work being done on this now? I have worked with several open source projects and recognize the community driven nature of priorities and I appreciate all of your hard work. The tone of some of the comments above is a bit off-putting and I wanted you to know I appreciate you.

If there is a work around that gets me close to this, I would also be interested.