Monday 27 March 2017

We've moved

This blog has now moved to http://its-insights.blogspot.co.uk/ because OBIS is changing its name to IT Services. Please update your bookmarks.

We also took the opportunity to upgrade to the new Blogger template.

Friday 17 March 2017

Moodle Blue Card for lecturers

Here at Oxford Brookes, we have a Blue Card scheme enabling students with specific learning difficulties (SpLDs) to flag their work with a blue card, so the tutor will mark it with due consideration.

There are two ways of submitting a Moodle assignment that might be required to be assessed differently if a student has a specific learning difficulty: the Turnitin assignment, and the Moodle assignment.

Here's what the JavaScript blue card functionality will look like in Moodle to a lecturer.

Please note this is a proof of concept and is not yet available in live Moodle.

Monday 13 March 2017

Friday 10 March 2017

We're in Onstream

The pilot phase of the Brookes ID project was announced in the latest issue of Onstream, the staff magazine of Oxford Brookes University:
Brookes ID (Individual Development) is an inclusive co-curricular framework which has been created with students and is a PESE (Programme to enhance the Student Experience) project. It recognises and rewards student engagement and commitment beyond their programme of study and is aligned to the Brookes Guiding Principles. As part of the Brookes ID initiative a new app has been launched which will run this semester as a pilot, leading up to the official launch of Brookes ID expected in September 2017. The Brookes ID app has been developed by the project team (Professor Alison Honour ADSE, Dr Bob Champion PLSE, Lindsay Williams PLSE, Yvonne Aburrow) and the Student Experience team in OBIS, in partnership with students. It monitors the extra and co-curricular activities of students and rewards them with ‘achievements’. Initially the number of activities is limited for the pilot phase. However, once the programme is launched in September there will be a range of activities, some which will be discipline based and more which are University-wide and available to all students.
Read the full article in Onstream

Friday 3 March 2017

Moodle Blue Card for students

Here at Oxford Brookes, we have a Blue Card scheme enabling students with specific learning difficulties (SpLDs) to flag their work with a blue card, so the tutor will mark it with due consideration.

There are two ways of submitting a Moodle assignment that might be required to be assessed differently if a student has a specific learning difficulty: the Turnitin assignment, and the Moodle assignment.

Here's what the JavaScript blue card functionality will look like in Moodle.

Please note this is a proof of concept and is not yet available in live Moodle.

Wednesday 1 March 2017

Moodle Assignment Blue Card

Here at Oxford Brookes, we have a Blue Card scheme enabling students with specific learning difficulties (SpLDs) to flag their work with a blue card, so the tutor will mark it with due consideration.

We needed a way of making it easier for students to flag their work with a blue card, and I have come up with the following script, which goes into the Additional HTML section in Site Administration in Moodle, and works with the Moodle Assignment functionality (see previous post for a blue card script that works with the Turnitin plugin).

First the student clicks the button to add the blue card, which inserts a comment with the words "Blue Card" in the submission comments field. When the form is submitted, the JavaScript looks for a comment in the grading table, and adds a flag in the status column to remind the tutor to review the comments. The tutor can then display the comment and see the words "Blue Card" (which are a link to the dyslexia marking guidelines).

Turnitin Moodle Blue Card

Here at Oxford Brookes, we have a Blue Card scheme enabling students with specific learning difficulties (SpLDs) to flag their work with a blue card, so the tutor will mark it with due consideration.

We needed a way of making it easier for students to flag their work with a blue card, and I have come up with the following script, which goes into the Additional HTML section in Site Administration in Moodle, and works with the Turnitin plugin. (See the next post for a script that works with Moodle assignments.)

First the student clicks the button to add the blue card, which inserts the text "Blue Card: " at the start of the assignment title. When the form is submitted, the JavaScript looks for the text "Blue Card" on the next page, colours the table cell blue and appends a link to the dyslexia marking guidelines.

Friday 24 February 2017

Tooltip popup box for Moodle

I want to add a tooltip to an HTML element in Moodle, using the custom CSS available in the theme settings. I want only to use CSS, and not add any HTML or JavaScript to the page. Here's how I did it.

Friday 27 January 2017

Agile roles

There are a number of different roles in the agile methodology, and these need to be well-understood to make agile work effectively in your organisation. In particular, the scrum master and product owner need to have enough time to devote to doing their roles properly.


Thursday 26 January 2017

Agile artefacts

For agile methodologies to succeed, there needs to be maximum transparency and planning. A number of agile artefacts have been developed to ensure that the team and the stakeholders have a clear understanding of what's happening.

Wednesday 25 January 2017

Agile methodology in the wild

Agile methodologies like Scrum sound amazingly efficient when presented by people who have implemented them in a non-hostile environment. But conditions are not always perfect, and things can sometimes go wrong.

One of the key features of agile project methodologies is that they have different types of meetings. Each different type of meeting has a very specific function. They can become tedious and unproductive if they deviate from the prescribed form and function. With that in mind, let's look at the different types of meeting, how they are meant to work, and what can go wrong.

Monday 23 January 2017

Getting agile to work for you

Different project management tools will work for different types of work and different scales of organisation. Depending on the context, your project may work better with agile, lean, scrum, kanban, or some hybrid approach.

Friday 13 January 2017

Upload a PDF and link to it from your blog

Sometimes you need to upload a printable document, such as a flyer, a newsletter, or an information sheet to your blog or website.

The Blogger tool (unlike Google Sites) doesn't have the facility to attach documents.

Fortunately, you can create a public folder for documents on Google Drive, and link to it from your blog.

Here is a step-by-step guide to how to do that.

Friday 6 January 2017

jQuery style switcher

It's often the case that you want to provide more than one CSS stylesheet for your app or website. You can do this by including a style switching function in your app. Here's how to do it in jQuery.

Thursday 5 January 2017

Angular promises

I have been struggling to understand Angular promises for months, and I finally found an answer on Stack Overflow that explains them really well. There's also this really helpful cartoon which has a nice story explaining the fetching of data. However, the Stack Overflow answer was what really did it for me, and fully deserves its current status of 383 upvotes.

The problem

The problem that promises set out to solve is that when you make asynchronous calls to a server where the results of one call are dependent on another call, you need to return the results in the order of your dependencies, not in the random order that will happen depending on which server call returns its results first.