Gradebook/Activities in Elgg

I'm try to get an idea of how people are using Elgg as an LMS. What OS code is out there related to activities/grades/gradebooks? It's likely we'll have to develop something custom and I'm open to expanding the schema as necessary.

No spec is too small: Today the site is a collection of resources (files, links, collections) for teachers and what I know is we'll be adding a "gradebook", blocking, of course, on building stuff to grade!

  • I'd also be very interested to know more about this. Currently my clients are using Elgg mostly as a collection of resources and for giving feedback for the resources posted/uploaded by students. I would like it to be much more than that.

    There's currently at least the PiGo LMS: http://www.pigolms.com/

    Also Ismayil has been working on a plugin that converts elgg objects into tincan activities.

  • About stuff to grade - I've been meaning to look into this http://h5p.org/

    Would be nice to have Elgg in the list of supported frameworks :)

  • Dear Steve. Our development team in the Telematic Engineering Department at the University of Vigo (Spain) have been working in several plugins for using Elgg like a social LMS. A preliminar but functional and tested version of these plugins have been used in our social LMS SocialWire (http://www.socialwire.es) for two years in computer networks subjects. This site uses Elgg 1.8 but we are planning to migrate to Elgg 1.10 for the next academic year (starting in September). Now we have already migrated the following plugins:

    • Gradebook: It allows to use grades in other related plugins and it provides the gradebook. The grades are related to each group (for certain subject) and the gradebook shows the grades for a student in every group where grades are used.
    • Gamepoints: It is an alternative qualification system. Instead of using grades and weights, you can use game points that are accumulated for a group ranking
    • Tasks: The teachers can create tasks and the students can answer by writing text, URLs or uploading files. This plugin can use grades or game points for qualifying the answers.
    • Subgroups: This plugin allows to create subgroups into a group (many subgroups in one click). The teachers can assign students to subgroups, or alternatively the students can join to a subgroup. One student can belong only to one subgroup. Tasks can be configured to be answered by subgroups, and so grades/points are equally assigned to each member of the subgroup.

    We would be happy to share this code with you (and other developers) as a starting point to release a collection of plugins related to education.

    Regards

     

  • What OS code is out there related to activities/grades/gradebooks?

    As Juhoo pointed out, we are using elgg as an LMS. Quick things we did to shape it as LMS:

    -Modifications to the Groups Plugin design.

    -Discussion Module converted into "Assignments". This was heavily modified in order to allow teachers to set a due date and time, show the time remaining to submit an assignment, extended tinymce and hooks to automatically close a homework once the due date and time is reached.

    -Modifications to the "Embed" plugin (For homework submissions)

    -Modifications to the Files plugin (For homework submissions)

    -Custom roles using the roles framework

    -Modifications to iZap Contest in order to use it for exams. This took some custom work because it had several issues while a user was taking an exam, such as the plugin skipping question or terminating the exam without notice. Also it had issues with grading, which we solved after some code enhancements and we added the ability to get the list of the grades obtained by users on each exam, ability to duplicate exams, and also the ability to duplicate an exam and move it to another classroom.

    -Complete removal of the Activity page. This was pretty much useless for the purposes of the LMS.

    -Bootstrap integration. This made the site mobile friendly and helped improve the layout and design of the entire LMS.

    -Optimization using Squid. You need to have admin privileges on your server to apply them.

    -Student, Teacher, Supervisor, Admin, Super Admin, Nuke Admin accounts.

    -General design enhancements

     

    All modifications were done by either extending the plugin or by overriding views using the Roles Framework.

    There was a lot of work involved in doing that. I think we spend almost two years working on it before releasing a working demo. Right now it is ready for use. We have the Self Service package where you can download the entire thing and see the changes done.