From: Jeff Rose Date: 2006-04-19T18:26:54+09:00 Subject: Re: Google Summer of Code -- It's back Huh. I don't know if you guys are actually using moodle or just administering it, but as someone who uses it a ton I can tell you I would love a replacement. It's pretty much horrible to use as a teaching assistant. When posting an assignment I have to make about 15 clicks, copy and paste a url, upload a "resource", blah, blah, blah. The grading interface makes it incredibly easy to loose a whole class worth of grades, the comments for each graded assignment are only about 50 chars long, it's difficult to find things that should be simple... I could go on for a while, and so could every other assistant in my department. Please write a better moodle! Beyond me being incredibly annoyed at moodle almost daily, I don't think the fact that something exists should ever be much of a deterrent. How many search engines were "working just fine" before google came around? How many programming languages already let you do the same things that you can do in ruby? It's all about learning from what others have done and doing it better, isn't it? I guess there might be diminishing returns if you are re-implementing something huge for minimal improvement, but I can bet that won't be the case with moodle. -Jeff P.S. If you need user input I've got 20 colleagues who would love to vent, er, help moodle on rails :-) M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > I don't know that there would be any advantage to a course management > system other than Moodle at this point. I have two web sites running it > and I'd hate to see a bunch of Ruby/Rails developers reinventing Moodle > just for the joy of it. It's a package, it does exactly what I need and > I don't much care about the internals. I don't even know PHP and barely > know how to configure Apache and MySQL. It's that easy to set up. :) > > I'd rather see Rails effort go into new application areas. Basecamp is a > perfect example. There's nothing else like it that I've found written in > any technology. > > Nicolas Kassis wrote: >> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: >> >>> I'll second Moodle ... only problem with it is that it's written in >>> PHP, not Ruby/Rails. :) >>> >>> It's a piece of cake to get up and running. In fact, if you're >>> willing to wait a couple of days, I'll have a VMWare virtual machine >>> with a complete Gentoo Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP/Moodle stack up on my >>> web site. It's queued up behind a similar virtual machine with a >>> Rails stack. :) >>> >>> >>> >> So, would there be an advantage to having a Rails CMS? I was also >> thinking about developing a testing module for this CMS. One thing >> I've noticed is that most of the current systems out there have poor >> testing modules. I envisioned something similar to Lon-capa and >> Webwork to very popular systems with Physics and Math professors. >> >> Nic >> >> >