Unresolved Threads; Plugin-Store; Bug Tracker; Development; Documentation; Translations; Demo Server; Login or register. Modify moodlesite.tld.conf?… Forums. I finally made a couple of queries to identify waste records in database. So far looks to be superior to the Google Drive converter. Can how I try to bypass that? This plugin uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) services to provide the conversion to PDF, the primary AWS services used are Lambda and S3. All sites upgraded to Moodle 3.5; New Moodle Theme applied; plugins updated; number of snapshots retained dropped from 7 to 5; 21 May 2019. To start the test, you MUST install unoconv version 0.6. You may just want to look at disabling the Annotate PDF Feedback plugin altogether if your server can’t handle the space. Teacher Annotates PDF It’s clear that a good user experience for graders depends on the conversion process running smoothly. PDF Conversion • Non-PDF Documents Must Be Converted • Conversion Occurs Outside Moodle • Conversion Process: 1. The aims of this plugin are to: Pre-requisites. Exclusive Virtual Server. Confirm the version by executing: unconv --version I’ll let Lafayette College’s Charles Fulton (a developer and Moodler of some renown) summarize the vibe: At noon I’d never heard of unoconv. Graphical themes for Moodle can be installed to change the look and functionality of a Moodle site or of an individual course. One of my users reported wait times of up to 2 minutes trying to grade an assignment that student submitted .zip files to before they could save grades and feedback. We should check and warn if their version is too old. Fail delay” which has to be manually cleared, Using Moodle to Respond to Changing Needs, Moodle Multiple Choice Quizzes in Second Language Teaching, Client focus – College of Natural Medicine using Moodle. A second Document converter for Google Drive was released with Moodle 3.3 in 2017. 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). 2 April 2019. Moodle's assignment grading feature requires version 0.7 or higher. … My users were missing the annotation capability on Word files, but I was not optimistic about using unoconv. Honestly this was the last thing I needed during all online instruction in a pandemic so within a week I decided to take another look at alternatives. Update Moodle to version 3.4.9: fixes bugs and security issues; Other changes: Fixed an issue with backup & restore; Retire the course migration tool 4 April 2019. It’s an interesting point. 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!). You should see an warning saying the unoconv version is not supported. Creating a user in AWS, installing the Moodle plugins, and running the script to get things set-up was straightforward and painless – only a little more involved than setting up the Google version. Moodle 3.0/3.1 Plugin Review. Technically speaking, in Moodle 3.1, the File API added the ability to convert files, but local unoconv was a requirement. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! On the unoconv test page, you should see confirmation the unoconv path appears to be properly configured... All the get_string () calls are in the plugin. I was quite pleased with the Google solution. An alternative method for previewing Office formats is to use QuickLook to get previews on the Mac, but using Unoconv enables page previewing and an automatic PDF alternative version of the file. The Google Drive document converter was added by the Moodle core team as an easier plug and play solution. It uses a slick cloud-based solution but allows the end-user to maintain ownership and privacy of student data. Thanks Ben. $600 USD / year $350 / 6 months | $200 / 3 months | $75 / 1 month. Visit Site administration ► Plugins ► Activity modules ► Assignment ► Feedback plugins ► Annotate PDF Click on Test unoconv path link under Path to unoconv document converter You should see an warning saying the unoconv version is not supported. Ben works as a systems administrator, systems architect, instructional designer, and technologist at the University of Portland, managing Open Source tools for learning, including enterprise Moodle & WordPress installs. Site administration ► Server ► Environment, On the unoconv test page, you should see confirmation the. Visit Site administration ► Plugins ► Activity modules ► Assignment ► Feedback plugins ► Annotate PDF At least since Moodle 2.7, the LMS was borrowing the unoconv utility from the Open Source office application suite LibreOffice to handle file conversions. Once that is done this looks good for integration. Document Converted By Moodle 3. But, after working with our IT staff, I was able to get a service account under our Google Apps for Edu domain. Moodle PDF Conversion Plugins: Good, Bad & Ugly. New activity - Custom certificate Plugin. That said, the way it is configured changed in 3.1; it is … Many Moodle themes, based on responsive web design, allow Moodle to be used on mobile devices. Click Test unoconv path. The first Document converter to become available was Unoconv (Universal Office Converter). Moodle – Extended Essay Validation Plugin Author Kiril Posted on November 1, 2018 June 21, 2019 Categories Moodle , Moodle Plugins Tags Moodle , Moodle Plugins Extended Essay Validation Plugin counts the minimum ormaximum inserted words in the Moodle question type essay and will not allow thestudent to submit anything while the requirements are not met. To help you get oriented … LibreOffice needs write access to the current users home directory to create some temporary files. Moreover, the scheduled task for conversions started to fail repeatedly, causing Moodle to add a “Fail delay” which has to be manually cleared,  compounding the problem and making lots of extra work for yours truly. PDF conversion in new assignment grading interface does not work on windows servers, https://github.com/abgreeve/moodle/compare/65cbefc...wip-MDL-53923-master, Visit Site administration ► Server ► Environment, You should see the following warning message under, Visit Site administration ► Plugins ► Activity modules ► Assignment ► Feedback plugins ► Annotate PDF. Apart from unoconv, There are various web services and different applications that can do this conversion work. This is my story. You should NOT see any unoconv related warning. Thank you, Catalyst! Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Hi Ben, I’m very comfortable with mysql. A bug in the onuconv release 0.7 (which is deployed by debian 10) prevent the unoconv to … Now, install the unoconv version 0.7 or higher Unoconv 0.7 is required for document conversions because it fixes some problems with running headless as apache user. Install a wrapper for unoconv on the webservers that forwards the requests to the remote server. My main hesitation in using the Google solution was privacy. I sincerely hope they are able to keep this plugin updated for new versions of Moodle! This folder must be mounted at the same path on all servers. $ string ['privacy:metadata:repository_googledocs:searchtext'] = 'The Google Drive repository user … The plugin interfaces Moodle with the AWS services. SCORM 2004 is not supported in Moodle, however Rustici Software have a Moodle plugin which can turn any Moodle site into a fully compliant SCORM 2004 LMS. LibreLamba, however, seemed to offer the best of both worlds. I haven’t used LibreLambda yet. Meanwhile, professors already stressed by the current state of affairs began to experience significant wait times or performance degradation while trying to use Moodle for grading. We compiled a list of popular 3rd party plugins for Moodle and then determined if they were compatible with 3.0 and 3.1. We are trying to access /usr/bin/gs an /usr/bin/unoconv to allow teachers to grade students. Mobile. Fascinating post Ben ! But now I know it’s from our friends at Catalyst (the “other” Moodle Partner in New Zealand) I will have a look – they are a great company, and we have lots of friends there . Hi Oscar, I didn’t find a way to do this. It was an easy win for a new Moodle admin. 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. Obviously moodle cann't access /usr/bin by permissions. Set the paths to unoconv and ghostscript in Moodle (Site administration > Server > System paths). I’ve disabled the Scheduled Task “Prepare Submissions for Annotation.”. Themes. Click on the Download button and make sure a test pdf was generated. @@ -46,8 +46,3 @@ $ string ['privacy:metadata:repository_googledocs'] = 'The Google Drive repository plugin does not store any personal data, but does transmit user data from Moodle to the remote system.' 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. While we have been keeping an eye on Moodle 3.0.x since its release, most of our testing time at Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2016 at Butler University was focused on Moodle 3.1. Search; This Thread. With high hopes, I followed the guide on the LibreLambda GitHub page. Open the firewall port 2002 between the moodle webservers and the machine running unoconv. Share the moodle data root between the webservers and the machine running unoconv. When I took over as the Moodle admin at my school, I mostly knew Unoconv by it’s reputation, which is… bad (really bad.) This is so the annotation feedback plugin can be used on a wider variety of student submissions. When talking shop with other Moodlers, one common pain point lies with Document Converter plugins. You keep mentioning the lack of privacy/security with various types of solutions; but you seem totally comfortable with “cloud-based” solutions such as Google Docs. Configurable … 0.6 is the default on ubuntu lts - a few people have installed this older version and not checked. Can install plugins or themes; Can use custom domain; Can use official Moodle™ App; Unoconv Document converter; Antivirus; Recycle bin; Access to Web Services; Global search; Moodle™ Stats; Sign up for free. 2 vCPUs; 4 GB RAM; 80 GB SSD (Aprox. I’m now trying to find the way to delete all unnecessary converted documents to get rid of 5 GB of space. View the Unoconv test PDF: Browse to Site administration → Plugins → Document converters → Manage document converters, and click Settings for the Unoconv entry. When researching alternatives, I found two new file converter plugins of interest in the Moodle plugins database. If you can find a list of the file IDs you want to delete, you can use Moosh to purge them: https://moosh-online.com/commands/. Disclaimer: I don’t like Google – I don’t like their licensing, and their marketing machine that seems to convince everyone they are the saviour of the internet, which they definitely are not. Superseeds the Certificate plugin. This might take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes depending on the document and the speed of the conversion process. However, there is a continuum, between security and ease, and sadly many schools for example will happily encourage their students to “buy into” the Googleverse and Microsoftverse, with little of zero ethical consideration as to what this means. I’m not sure what the root cause was: the increase in web traffic to our Moodle servers, a sizable uptick in assignments being submitted, Google throttling on their end, or some combination of the three, but all of a sudden our conversions could not keep pace. Moodle version 3.3 is now available. The queue of pending conversions kept growing. Everything you need to setup both Moodle and AWS is included in this plugin. Now? Moodle 3.3 . A scheduled task runs – every 15 minutes by default – to convert any newly-submitted files to PDF so they can be marked up. All that it requires to set-up are some basic command line skills and a working knowledge of AWS administration – but is far less complicated to manage than unoconv. In the wider Moodle-verse, things didn’t seem much better. One thing that needs fixing is that this patch still uses is_executable instead of file_is_executable that was introduced in the blocker issue. Some of the dependencies, moodle and it’s plugins have are not hard during installation, but they will show up when you use moodle for a while. Powered by a free Atlassian Jira open source license for Moodle. $ string ['privacy:metadata:repository_googledocs:email'] = 'The email of the Google Drive repository user.' During Day 2 of Hack/Doc Fest at Butler the team tackled a review of third-party plugin compatibility with Moodle 3.0 and 3.1, continued our accessibility work by testing new tools and documenting best practices, reacquainted ourselves with the Workshop plugin, and delved deeply into … If you just don’t want to know, why these dependencies are needed, you simply need to do (as root or with sudo) apt install unoconv ghostscript graphviz . who knows what type of data mining would be done on student work? All content on this web site is made available under the. It’s fast, efficient, and critically seems to be keeping up with the surge in online assignments at my school. Moodle becomes art thanks to the “Word Art” exhibit in Butler University’s Irwin Library. Click on Test unoconv path link under Path to unoconv document converter Moodle - the world's open source learning platform - moodle/moodle Moodle 3.0/3.1 Plugin Review. Aren’t cloud-based solutions, themselves, about as secure and private as Microsoft Windows? You should see the following warning message under Other checks : Checking out the PDF Conversion queue one day after installing LibreLambda….24 hours before this it was at over 1250. I don’t want to mess it up with COVID-19 all around and more than 400 students depending on Moodle . 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? It’s my mortal enemy. 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. PRE-REQUISITES I got into trouble with this. You should see an warning saying the unoconv version is not supported. 65 GB usable) No user or course limits applied. This folder must be mounted at the same path on all servers. Hi Oscar, I’m not sure how you would be able to do this….there might be a way if you are clever enough with MySQL queries. Unoconv is used by Moodle since the release of Moodle 3.1 and is used by the Assignment activity to convert documents to pdf so that they can be annotated. and this can be undesirable. This sounds a bit scarier than it is. Install a wrapper for unoconv on the webservers that forwards the requests to the remote server. unoconv installed and working on the host system; ghostscript installed and working on the host system; ghostscript configured in Moodle Each plugin is maintained in the Moodle plugins directory. If you used brew, they will both be installed to /usr/local/bin. 22 May 2017. Plus, since the introduction of Competency-Based Education in Moodle, developers have submitted plugins to work on top of that, and most likely this will remain a trend in the upcoming year. Suffice it to say, it was not long before I started looking for alternatives. If you want to keep unneeded files from being converted into PDFs you can disable the Scheduled Task “Prepare Submissions for Annotation.” However, that would mean that any graders who are using PDF annotation would have to wait for the files to convert when they visit the assignment grading screen. Mostly it was to turn text documents, slideshows, and spreadsheets into PDF so teachers could add annotations and comments without affecting the original file layout. 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. Everywhere; This … This plugin uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) services to provide the conversion to PDF, the primary AWS services used are Lambda and S3. With high hopes, I followed the guide on the LibreLambda GitHub page. Open the firewall port 2002 between the moodle webservers and the machine running unoconv. Site administration ► Server ► Environment The plugin is from CatalystIT, who have done lots of great work in the Moodle community and they really did well making this plugin Moodle admin friendly. Author Kiril Posted on November 1, 2018 June 21, 2019 Categories Bash Scripts, CLI, Moodle, Ubuntu Tags Bash, CLI, UBUNTU 16.04, Ubuntu 18 On Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18 sudo apt-get install python3-minimal -y sudo apt-get install graphviz -y sudo apt-get install ghostscript -y sudo apt-get install du -y sudo apt-get install aspell -y sudo apt-get install dot -y sudo apt-get install unoconv -y From an administration standpoint, it’s important to note that Moodle does not perform document conversion itself. Click on Test unoconv path link under Path to unoconv document converter Also find the moosh command to purge them. Things continued smoothly for well over a year – aside from some blurriness on the converted documents I had no complaints with the Google converter. From version 9.2 you can prevent the system from adding the automatic PDF alternative by including the extension this is not desired for in the configuration option non_image_types . 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