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WeBWorK with Moodle
What is WeBWorK ?
WeBWorK is an open-source web based homework system for math and sciences courses. WeBWorK is supported by the MAA (Mathematical association of America) and the NSA (National Science Foundation) and comes with a NPL (National Problem Library) of over 20,000 homework problems. Webwork can be used for college algebra, discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, single and multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra and complex analysis.
Brief history of WeBWorK
Webwork is being used in many colleges and universities. This application has been developed and maintained by mathematicians since 1994 with the goal of providing a robust, flexible mathematically capable online homework system for science and math educators.
Webwork being open source, allow users and organizations to deploy and work with it for free on their own servers.
Running pdnsd with split dns, bind and windows dns for your internal network
As a follow up to my last post on installing and configuring a sample pdnsd setup for cache only dns server, I wanted to share the context I made my setup in.
In our scenario we have a windows AD environment supporting all windows workstations and domain authentication. We also have a bind dns server on the side where we update all other local dns server entry for various servers.
We have placed couple of pdnsd server to process all dns requests from the local network
All dns requests are served by pdnsd server, while pdnsd server forwards appropriate requests to appropriate server and cache the data as per the systems configuration.
pdnsd Server: 192.168.XXX.99 Active directory dns1: 192.168.XXX.X1 Active directory dns2: 192.168.XXX.X2 Bind dns: active directory dns1: 192.168.XXX.X2
Read the rest of this entry
Howto pdnsd on redhat/centos from Source
What is pdnsd
pdnsd is a cache only name server can be used independently or alongside your authoritative name server for faster name lookup.
pdnsd does not aim to be a complete name server implementation, such as the BIND. It is optimized for caching, and you can only specify a small subset of all dns record types pdnsd knows in your local “zone” definitions. This of course reduces the code size drastically, and such the memory footprint. There are some features especially interesting for dialin networks, ordinary (non-server) internet hosts and computers that are often not connected to to their network, e.g. notebooks (I originally wrote this program for use with my notebook). These features are:
- permanent disk cache (useful for frequent power-offs/reboots)
- usually smaller memory footprint (depends on cache size) (see next question)
- better control about timeouts (also to prevent hangs)
- better control over the cache
- better run-time control of the cached records
Moodle Demo site on Moodle 2.4
http://demo.xeois.com/moodle is setup to demonstrate a sample Moodle Course. The goal is to provide end user experience of Moodle in the role of student.
This demonstration includes, video, quiz, lesson, wiki, assignment, choice, survey, html content, Moodle book and more.
This site is also accepting course from from teachers who would like to showcase their courses for free.
For your demo experience at http://demo.xeois.com/moodle you may use one of these Demo Login password
| Demo login: moodledemo01 Password: Moodledemo*1 |
Demo login: moodledemo02 Password: Moodledemo*2 |
Demo login: moodledemo03 Password: Moodledemo*3 |
you may also create your own account in that site.
for teachers access, to contribute a course you may email to info@xeois.com
Hope you find this sample Moodle course useful, your feedback is appreciated.
Moodle changes across 2.3 to 2.4
As a follow up to my earlier blog, i wanted to publish new features of Moodle from 2.3 to 2.4, was released on December 2012. Many of the bugs from previous Moodle release has been fixed. Check the list of bugs fixed in Moodle 2.4.
Requirements for Moodle 2.4 installation
- Recommended browsers for moodle 2.4: Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 8 (IE 10 required for drag and drop of files from outside the browser into Moodle), Safari 5, Google Chrome 11
- Moodle upgrade: If you want to upgrade to Moodle 2.4, you must be running Moodle 2.2 or above. If you have a Moodle version lower than Moodle 2.2, you must upgrade to 2.2 first
- Minimum DB versions: Postgres 8.3, MySQL 5.1.33, MSSQL 2005 or Oracle 10.2
- Minimum PHP version: PHP 5.3.2
Performance improvement
Moodle 2.4 was introduced some major performance improvement which includes better indexing in PostgreSQL, improved statistics performance, data base meta caching, question related caching and more. All these resulted in over all performance improvement.
Plugin updating from within Moodle
New Moodle plugin interface now support update check as well as updates from the web interface as well as update the plugins from the web interface.
Course format plugins
Course formats can now provide their own settings for courses and sections, and developers can also have a lot more control of all the pages in a course.
Themes
- Support for HTML5 themes
- Improved compatibility with Internet Explorer 8-10.
- The default icons used for activities and editing actions have been updated for the first time since Moodle 1.0. This is a major look and feel improvement. Now they a little bigger and more colourful. These icons are SVG format and support full scaling on all devices.
- SimpleYUI enables similar coding style to JQuery, it is intended especially for theme designers.
Other improvements:
- Improved TinyMCE editor integration, Support for fully configurable add-on plugins extending standard, customizable toolbar, and built in browser spell check.
- Improved enrollment plugin, cohort synchronization with course group also fixes on the plugin.
- Integration with external calendar: You can now stream your external calendars (such as Google Calendar, or a calendar from another Moodle site) into Moodle’s calendar via the iCal standard.
- Assignment enhancements
- Workshop module enhancements
Security issues
All security issues that were fixed in 2.3.x and 2.2.x were also fixed in 2.4.
to read the full list of changes in Moodle 2.3 to 2.4 follow this link
Reference:
docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.4_release_notes
St. Francis Xavier’s Cathedral HDR
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cblue98/sets/72157631988472029/
St. Francis Xavier’s Cathedral HDR, Bangalore India
