How-To Tutorials - Server-Side Web Development

Specifying Custom Grades Currently, I'm marking my projects out of 100 but, as I mentioned previously, that's not how they are graded. According to the syllabus, I can only give students one of four grades: Distinction, Merit, Pass, and Referral. So how do you specify your own grades? Let's learn how to do that now. Time for Action – Create a Custom Grade Scale Return to your course front page and look for Grades in the Administration block: Click on Grades and you'll be taken to the Grader report page. We are now in the Moodle grade book. I'm not going to worry too much about all of the features in the grade book for the moment—but while you are there you might like to spend a little time having a look. As with anything else in Moodle, you can't do any damage by doing something by mistake. At the top left of the page, you will find a list of view options: From the list select Scales. You're now taken to the scales page. We need to add a new scale, so press the Add a new scale button in the center of the page. On the following page, give your new scale a name and in the Scale box you can specify the possible grades contained in your new scale. Separate the grades with commas—no spaces. Make sure you specify the grades in order of increasing value: You don't have to worry about a description. Are the grades you are specifying here used for grading in other courses? If you tick the Standard scale box then your scale will be made available to teachers on all courses. When you are done, press the Save changes button. Your new scale is listed on the scales page. Because I didn't make my new scale a standard scale, it's listed as a custom scale: What Just Happened? I don't give students a numerical grade for the Backyard Ballistics projects. The syllabus requires a qualitative grade, but luckily the system makes it easy to import my own custom grade scales. All I need to do now is modify my two assignment activities to use the new scale. That only involves a few clicks, so let's do that now... Time for Action – Grading Using a Custom Scale Return to your course front page and click on the update icon next to the assignment you want to change to use your new custom scale. The Editing assignment page is displayed. Scroll down to the Grade drop-down list. Click on the list. Scroll up if you need to, because the custom scale we want to use will be towards the very top: With the new grading scale selected, scroll down to the bottom of the page and press the Save and return to course button. That's it. You will now be able to grade your project using your new scale. What Just Happened? We've just modified the assignment to use our new grading scale. All that remains now is to demonstrate how you use it. Now that we are back at the course front page, click on the link to the assignment itself to display the assignment's main page (displaying the description of the task we've set). Click on the View submitted assignments link in the top right-hand corner of the page to take you to the Submissions page. Choose a student and down in the Status column click on the Grade link. If you've already marked that student then the link will say Update: Click on the link to open the Feedback dialog. Click on the Grade list at the top right-hand corner of the page to display the grades you can give to this piece of work. The grades listed are the ones from our new custom grade scale: More Uses for Moodle Assignments We aren't limited to using the four assignment activities just for major projects. Here are some more ideas on using the assignment activity to convert your current teaching over to Moodle... Include an online text assignment for discursive tasks, for example writing a short story or for short essay homework tasks. If you're able to display the submissions page of a single file assignment to the class during teaching time, keep refreshing the page as homework is submitted. You'll quickly find that there'll be a race on to be the first to hand their homework in. You could easily turn that into a game for younger students. Use an Offline activity to manage the grades of any task you set for your students—homework handed in on paper, for example. You don't have to confine yourself to just projects. On that last point, there is another way of managing grades directly. We've already been briefly into the Moodle Grader report when we set up our custom scale. Let's revisit that page to see how we can set up custom grading items. Grading Students on Core Competencies Often, as educators, we need to grade assignments on core competencies, otherwise known as key skills or goals. That certainly applies to my syllabus: A percentage of the final grade for my course includes marks for numeracy, literacy, and the use of ICT. Because we are converting to Moodle, and in Moodle-speak, the competencies that I am grading are called "outcomes", in this final section, we learn how to specify the core competencies we need to grade, and how we can then grade students on them. There are pros and cons of converting to Moodle, specifically: I can choose to enable outcomes on a per assignment basis, but you can't use the default numeric grading scale to grade outcomes, only standard and custom grading scales (like my custom Backyard Ballistics scale that I created in Time for action – Create a Custom Grade Scale).

How Assignments Look to a Student I've logged out and then logged back in as student John Smith. As far as offline assignments are concerned, they are carried out in the real world. In that instance, Moodle is used to manage grades and notes. If I click on my Offline assignment, I just see a description of the assignment: My second assignment requires students to upload a file. In the next section, we experience a little of what life is like as a Moodle student when we try uploading a project submission to Moodle. Taking the Student's Point of View—Uploading a Project File It is a very good idea to see what we are expecting our students to do when we ask them to upload their project work to us online. At the very least, when we ask students to upload their project work to Moodle, we need to know what we are talking about in case they have any questions. If you don't have a student login or you are still logged in as yourself and have asked a colleague to check that your assignment is working correctly, it's a good idea to take a good look over their shoulder while they are running through the following steps. Together, let's run though what a student must do to upload a file to us... Time for Action – Uploading a File to an Assignment I only have one computer to work from, so the first thing to do is for me to log out and log back in as my pretend student "John Smith". If you have the luxury of having two computers next to each other then you can log in as yourself on one and your pretend student on the other at the same time. You might have two different browsers (e.g. Firefox and Internet Explorer) installed on the same computer. If so you can log into one as a teacher and the other as a student. Don't try to log in as two different people on the same computer using the same browser—it doesn't work. Now that you are logged in as a student... Return to the course main page and click on the Advanced uploading of files assignment you added earlier. You will be presented with the following page: The top half of the page is our description of the assignment. The second half allows us to upload a file and, because I configured the activity such that students could include comments with their submission, has an area allowing us to add a note. Students can browse for files and upload them in exactly the same way as we upload our teaching materials to the course files area. If they want to add a note, then they need to press on the Edit button (at the bottom of the previous screenshot). Click on the Browse... button now. The File upload dialog is displayed. This allows us to select a file to upload. You can choose any for now, just to prove the point. I've quickly created a text file using Notepad called example_submission.txt. Select the file you want to upload and press the Open button. The name of the file is now displayed in the box: Press the Upload this file button. You will now see the file listed in the Submission draft box: Repeat this process for your other project files. To add a note to go along with the submission, I can press the Edit button at the bottom of the page. Try leaving a note now. (If your assignment has been configured so that students are prevented from leaving a note, you won't have this option.) If I am happy that this is the final version of the project and I want to send it for marking, then I can press the Send for marking button at the bottom of the page. Pressing this stops me from uploading any more files: That's it. We're done: What Just Happened? It was easy for us to convert our assignments to Moodle. Now, we've seen how easy it is for students to convert to using Moodle to hand in their assignment submissions. Now, we've actually got a piece of work to mark (albeit a pretend piece), I am ready to start marking. Before moving on to the next section, make sure you are logged in as yourself rather than as a student. Marking Assignments Managing student grades and the paperwork associated with student submissions is one of my biggest headaches. By converting to Moodle, I can avoid all of these problems. Let's see how easy it is to mark assignments in Moodle. Marking Offline Assignments My Offline assignment, the poster project, is being carried out in the real world. Currently, I take a digital photograph of the poster and record my comments and grades on separate pieces of paper. Let's see how I can convert this to Moodle... Time for Action – Mark an Offline Assignment From the course front page, click on your Offline assignment. Click on the No attempts have been made on this assignment/View 0 submitted assignments link in the top right-hand corner of the page. You are now taken to the Submissions page. I've only got one student enrolled on my course—the pretend student my admin put on my course for me—so this is what I see: To grade John Smith's work, I need to click on the Grade link, found in the Status column. The Feedback dialog is displayed: I can use this dialog to comment on a student's work. At this point, I could include a photograph of the poster in the comment, if I wanted to (or I could get the students to take photographs of their posters and then to upload the images as part of an online submission).

In this article, we take a turn from work I hand out to students to look at how to manage online work that they hand to me. Currently, in my Backyard Ballistics course, I set two major end-of-course projects: A poster on energy sources A PowerPoint presentation to the group on how energy is transferred when objects are sent flying through the air Both tasks are graded separately. For me, the final project has always been a major headache: PowerPoint presentations go missing. Students claim they have emailed me files that never reach me. The school technician is wary of students bringing in work on memory sticks because of the threat of viruses. Marking the posters involves me having to make notes on paper, and having a system to associate those notes with digital photographs of the posters stored elsewhere. I want a system that allows me to manage student submissions in one self-contained tool—one that can be used to exchange files between my students and me without having to resort to other, far less reliable, means. Also, wouldn't it be good to have a tool that allows us to comment (and include photographs, videos—in fact any digital file we liked) and grade work all under one umbrella? Added to that, my course specification also demands that I grade students on key skills: numeracy, literacy, and the use of ICT. And that's not something I specifically set a project for. I need a way of grading students on those aspects of their work separate from any specific project. That's another headache. That may seem like a lot to worry about, but (as you've probably already heard) by converting to Moodle, we can easily find answers to all of these issues, and more. So let's get on with it, and make a start with converting my poster project and PowerPoint assignments to Moodle... Converting Projects and Assignments Moodle provides four types of assignment activity, and they well match any kind of project that you are likely to set for your students. Turn editing on, go to any topic, and click on the Add an activity list. In this list, you will see the four different assignment types Moodle supports. They are: Offline activity—If your student projects can't be uploaded into Moodle because the student submission isn't electronic (just like my poster project), then you can manage grades and your notes on the students' work using this kind of assignment type. Online text—Students are going to be creating the assignment submission using the text editor built into Moodle. That's the one we've been using to create our course so far. Upload a single file—Does what it says on the tin. Students can only upload one file. Advanced uploading of files—Students can upload more than one file. As a teacher, you can also use Moodle as a mechanism for exchanging files between students, instead of using email (unreliable) or a memory stick (virus risk). Don't be afraid to have a look at these assignment types now. With editing turned on, click on Add an activity... and select any of the assignment types. That way you can get a feel for the kinds of settings we'll be dealing with before we start. Remember: if, while you are trying out different assignment types, you mistakenly add an assignment to your course, you can easily delete it by clicking on the delete icon next to the assignment name. How to Structure Converted Projects and Assignments Online For larger projects or assignments, it is often preferable to have a self-contained topic containing the actual assignment itself, together with any supporting materials. You could include exemplars (e.g. work from previous years) and give students the opportunity to discuss them together. Having the assignment, and all of the supporting materials, in a single topic means I can hide the assignment from students until it is time for them to attempt it. To demonstrate how this would be done, firstly we need to add a new topic to our course, and then we can add in an assignment activity... Adding a New Topic to a Course I'm going to add a new topic to my course specifically for my student projects. Then, I'm going to hide that topic until we have covered the course. I'm going to do the same with my projects and the support materials associated with them. You don't have to treat assignments in this way: as you work through the settings for a Moodle assignment, you'll notice that you can specify a time period that those assignments are available for (it's a setting we'll talk about shortly). I've decided that I want to ensure that my students focus on the preliminary work before they start attempting any assignments by completely hiding them from students. Time for Action – Add a Topic to a Course and Hide It Return to your course front page and choose Settings from the Administration block. Scroll down to the number of weeks/topics setting and change the number in the drop down-list to add another topic to your course: At the bottom of the page, press the Save changes button. That's it, we're done—and now there's a new empty topic at the end of your course. For the moment, I want to hide this topic from students. Click on the eye icon on the right-hand side to hide the topic: It depends on your theme but, to show that a topic is hidden, two grey bars are shown on the left- and right-hand sides of the topic: What Just Happened? We've now got a new, empty topic added to our course. I don't want students to be able to view the assignment until we are all ready, so I've hidden this topic from them for now. Which Assignment Type? For the purpose of my project I'm only going to be looking at two different assignment activity types—but by looking at those two we'll gain the skills and confidence to be able to use all four quite happily. Converting a Project to Moodle Example 1 – Using an Offline Assignment The first project—the poster project—is going to be converted to use the Offline activity assignment type. I'm going to use Moodle to manage student grades and to organize my notes and comments on their work. Let's see how easy it is to add an Offline activity... Time for Action – Add an Offline Activity Assignment Make sure you still have editing turned on. In the topic you want to add your new assignment to (in my case my new, hidden topic) click on Add an activity... and choose Offline activity from the list. You're now taken to the Editing assignment page. Give your assignment a name. Enter in a brief description of the task in the Description box. Don't worry if the box looks a bit small. We can include all of the supporting materials in the topic together with the assignment activity itself on the course front page: Use the Grade setting to specify the maximum grade you are going to give for this assignment. I'm going to leave the Grade setting at 100 (meaning I can grade this assignment out of 100). Maybe your assignment forms part of an overall mark and you need to mark it out of less. You could choose to mark your assignment in this way. You can even choose to create your own custom grades (e.g. A, B, C, D, E, or F), which we learn how to do later on in this article. Choose when you want the assignment to be available. I want to hide both the assignment and the supporting resources and materials, so this option is redundant. I do have the option of disabling this setting so this is what I'm going to do, in this instance. If you aren't hiding the assignment, the Available from and Due date settings are a useful way of preventing students handing work to you before you are ready: That's it! We're done. Press the Save and return to course button. A new assignment has just been added to the course: What Just Happened? Converting my poster project to Moodle was as easy as adding an Offline assignment activity to my Backyard Ballistics course. Click on the assignment now to see what happens. You'll see a screen displaying the task you've just set, and in the top right-hand corner you'll see a No attempts have been made on this assignment link: Click on that link now. You'll be taken to a list of students who are enrolled on your course. If you don't have any students enrolled on your course, then this is what you will see: I don't yet want students enrolled on my course until I know it is set up to be just how I want it. The solution is to introduce a "control student" on our course, and later in this article we'll see how. Before we do that, I'm going to think about the second assignment I need to convert—where students are required to produce a PowerPoint presentation.

We're teaching the topic of Rivers and Flooding; so to start with, we'll need to introduce our class to some basic facts about rivers and how they work. We aren't going to generate any new stuff yet; we're just going to upload to Moodle what we have already produced in previous years. Putting a worksheet on Moodle The way Moodle works is that we must first upload our worksheet into the course file storage area. Then, in that central section of our course page, we make a link to the worksheet from some appropriately chosen words. Our students click on these words to get to the worksheet. We've got an introductory factsheet (done in Word) about the River Thames. Let's get it into Moodle: Time for action-uploading a factsheet on to Moodle We need to get the worksheet uploaded into Moodle. To get this done, we have to follow a few simple steps. Go to your course page and click on the Turn editing on button, as shown in the following screenshot: Don't worry about all of the new symbols (icons) that appear. In the section you want the worksheet to be displayed, so look for these two boxes: Click on the Add a resource box (I'll go through all its options when we have a recap, later). Select a link to a file or web site. In Name, type the text that you want the students to click on, and in Summary (if you want) add a short description. The following screenshot gives an example of this: Once you're done with the above steps, click on Choose or upload a file. This takes you to the course files storage area. Click on Make a folder, and in the dialog box that is displayed, choose a suitable name for the folder all your worksheets will be stored in (we'll use Worksheets). Click on Create. Click on the folder that you just created (It will be empty except for Parent Folder, which takes you back to the main course files). Click on Upload a file. You'll be prompted to browse your computer's hard drive for the worksheet. Find the worksheet, select it with your cursor and click Open. It will appear as shown in the following screenshot: Click Upload this file. Once the file has been uploaded, it will appear as shown in the following screenshot: What just happened? We just uploaded our first ever worksheet to Moodle. It's now in the course files. Next, we need to make a link on the page that students can click on to get to that worksheet. I know what you're thinking! Thirteen steps, and there's still no sign of our River Thames worksheet on the course page in Moodle. Is it going to be this long-winded every time? Don't worry! There are only two—at worst three—steps left . And although it seems to be a lot of effort the first time, it gets much quicker, as we move on. We are also trying to be organized from the start by putting our worksheets neatly into a folder, so we took a couple of extra steps that we won't have to do next time. The folder will already be there for us. Ofcourse, you can just click on Upload a file and get your worksheets straight into the course files without any sort of order, and they will display for your students just as well. But when you have a lot of worksheets loaded, it will become harder and harder to locate them unless you have a system. Time for action-displaying our factsheet on our course page To get the Moodle course started, we need to create a link that—when clicked, will get the course started, carrying on from where we left off : Click on the word Choose to the right of your worksheet. (We are choosing to put this on Moodle.) The River Thames worksheet now shows in the Location box, under Link to a file or web site. We are almost there! Scroll down and make sure that you have selected the New window option in theWindow box, as shown in the following screenshot: At the bottom of the screen, click on Save and return to course. Done! The option Search for web page would take you to Google or another search engine to find a web site. You could put that web site into the location box instead, and it would make a clickable link for your students to follow. What just happened? Congratulations! You’ve now made a link to the factsheet about the River Thames that will get our Rivers and Flooding course started! By doing the final step above, we will get taken back to the course page where we'll see the words that we wrote in the Name box. They'll be in blue with a line underneath. This tells us it's a clickable link that will take us to the factsheet. If you can do that once, you can do it many times. Have a go hero-putting a slideshow onto Moodle It's important to go through the steps again, pretty quickly, so that you become familiar with them and are able to speed the process up. So why not take one of your slide shows (maybe done in PowerPoint) and upload that to Moodle? Start by creating a folder called Slideshows, so that in future, it will be available for any slideshows that you upload. Or, if you're too tired, just upload another sheet into our Worksheets folder and display that.   Putting a week's worth of slideshows into Moodle Now let's suppose that we have already prepared a week's worth of slideshows. Actually, I could say, a month's worth of worksheets, or a year's worth of exam papers. Basically, what we're going to do is upload several items, all at once. This is very useful because once you get used to uploading and displaying worksheets, you will very quickly start thinking about how tedious it would be, to put them on Moodle one at a time. Especially if you are studying ten major world rivers, and you have to go through all of those steps ten times. Well, you don't! Let's use my River Processes slideshows as our example. I have them saved in a folder on My Computer (as opposed to being shoved at random in a drawer, obviously!). Under normal circumstances, Moodle won't let you upload whole folders just like that. You have to either compress or zip them first (that basically means squeeze it up a bit, so it slides into cyberspace more smoothly). We first need to leave Moodle for a while and go to our own computer. I'm using Windows; for Macs, it will be slightly different. Time for action-getting a whole folder of work into Moodle in one go To view the slideshows, we need to upload the folder containing them from the hard drive of our computer into Moodle. Find the folder that you want to upload, right-click on it, and select Compressed (zipped) Folder within the Send To option. You'll get another folder with the same name, but in ZIP format. Go to your Moodle course page, and in the Administration box, click Files. We're in the course files storage area—this is another way in, if you ever need one! You can upload anything straight into here, and then provide a link to a file or web site. As we have done before, click on Upload and upload the zipped folder (it ends in .zip). Now click on Unzip, which is displayed to the right of your folder name (as shown in the following screenshot), and the folder will be restored to its normal size. What just happened? We put a bunch of slideshows about how rivers work into a folder on our computer. We then zipped the folder to make it slide into Moodle, and then when it was uploaded, we unzipped it to get it back to normal. If you want to be organized, select the checkbox displayed to the left of the zipped folder, and select delete completely. We don't need the zipped folder now, as we have got the original folder back. We now have two choices. Using the Link to a file or web site option in the Add a resource block, we can display each slideshow, in an orderly manner, in the list. We did this with our Thames factsheet, so we know how to do this. Alternatively, we can simply display the folder and let the students open it to get to the slideshows. We're going to opt for the second choice. Why? Bearing in mind about appearances being vital, it would look much neater on our course page if we had a dinky little briefcase icon. The student can click on the briefcase icon to see the list of slideshows, rather than scrolling down a long list on the page. Let us see how this is done: Time for action-displaying a whole folder on Moodle Let us upload the entire folder, which contains the related slideshows, onto Moodle. This will require us to perform only four steps: With editing turned on, click on Add a resource and choose Display a directory. In the Name field, type something meaningful for the students to click on and add a description in the Summary field, if you wish. Click on Display a directory and find the one that you want—for us, RiverProcesses. Scroll down, and click on Save and return to course. What just happened? We made a link to a week's worth of slideshows on our course page, instead of displaying them one at a time. If we looked at the outcome, instead of the icon of a slideshow, such as the PowerPoint icon, we get a folder icon. When the text next to it is clicked, the folder opens, and all of the slideshows inside can be viewed. It is much easier on the eye, when you go directly to the course page, than going through a long list of stuff . Making a 'click here' type link to the River Thames web site Let's learn how to create a link that will lead us to the River Thames web site, or in fact to any web site. However, we're investigating the Thames at the moment, so this would be really helpful. Just imagine, how much simpler it would be for our students to be able to get to a site in one click, rather than type it by hand, spell it wrong, and have it not work. The way we will learn now is easy. In fact, it's so easy that you could do it yourself with only one hint from me. Have a go hero-linking to a web site Do you recollect that we uploaded our worksheet and used Link to a file or web site? We linked it to a file (our worksheet). Here, you just need to link to a web site, and everything else is just the same. When you get to the Link to a file or web site box, instead of clicking Choose or upload a file…, just type in, or copy and paste, the web site that you want to link to (making sure you include only one http://). Remember that we saw earlier, that if you click on Search for web page…, it will take you to Google or some other Search Engine web page to find you a web site that you'd like to link to. The following screenshot shows how to link a file or web site into our Moodle course : That's it! Try it! Go back to your course page; click on the words that you specified as the Name for the web page link, and check whether it works. It should open the web page in a new window, so that once finished, our students can click on the X to close the site and will still have Moodle running in the background. Recap—where do we stand now? We have learnt a lot of interesting things so far. Lets just have a recap of the things that we have learned so far. We have learnt to: Upload and display individual worksheets (as we've worked on the River Thames) Upload and display whole folders of worksheets (as we did with the River Processes slideshows folder) Make a click here type link to any web site that we want, so that our students will just need to click on this link to get to that web site We're now going to have a break from filling up our course for a while, and take a step to another side. Our first venture into Moodle's features was the Link to a file or web site option, but there are many more yet to be investigated. Let's have a closer look at those Add a resource… options in the following screenshot, so that we know, where we are heading: The table below shows all of the Add a Resource… options. What are they, which is the one we need, and what can we safely ignore? You might recognize one or two already. We shall meet the others in a moment.

Adding the First Question Page Immediately after you save your lesson settings, Moodle presents you with the following page: At this point, it is time to create the first question page or import question pages from another system. Let's take a look at each of your options. Importing Questions If you choose to Import questions, you can import questions created by Moodle and other online learning systems. Some of the formats that you can import are: GIFT and Moodle XML These are Moodle's proprietary formats. GIFT is text only, and XML can include graphics and special characters. Aiken This format is for multiple choice questions. Missing Word This format is for missing word multiple choice questions. Blackboard If you're converting from Blackboard to Moodle, you can export questions from Blackboard and import them into Moodle. WebCT This format supports multiple choice questions, and short answers questions from WebCT. Course Test Manager If you're converting from Course Test Manager to Moodle, you can export questions from Course Test Manager, and import them into Moodle. Embedded Answers (Cloze) This format is a multiple question, multiple-choice question with embedded answers.  

What we will do, is: Do more than make each topic a long list of resources. Use the label resource and Moodle's indenting tool to change this: To this: Find out where we can get lots of free images for our courses. Explore different ways to use HTML to make our courses even more engaging. Include a talking character—an animated avatar—using Voki.com: Arrange Your Resources Why is it important to spend a little time arranging resources in a topic? Isn't it all eye candy? Let's take a look at my Topic 1: I've got a nice colorful title, some text to introduce the topic, and then a long list of resources—which, quite honestly looks just like the list of files in the shared drive I already use to distribute my documents and handouts to students. What if the topic looked like this: This is much more the effect we need. I've reordered my resources and included some labels, so that it is much easier for students to find a resource. In this section, we're going to learn how to bring some order into our topics. Putting Your Resources in Order One obvious difference between a shared drive and Moodle is that in Moodle, you can put the resources in the order you want, not the order the computer insists on (usually, numerical/alphabetical). However, in Moodle, any new resources you add are simply queued on to the end of the topic. This has meant that resources in my Getting Things Flying topic aren't exactly ordered in a sensible way—just the way I added them. I'm going to take action to remedy that now... Time for Action – Arrange Your Resources Remember that you need editing turned on before you start. Choose the resource you want to move. I'm going to move my Backyard ballistics links resource to the end of the topic. To start the process, I need to 'pick up' the resource. I click on the Move icon: This causes two things to happen. Firstly, the resource I want to move disappears. Don't worry—imagine you have it in your hand and you are ready to place it back into your course. Secondly, the boxes that have now appeared represent all the places to which you can move the resource that you are holding: Choose where you want to move the resource to. I want my list of links at the end, so I'm going to click on the box at the bottom. The boxes disappear and my resources have been shuffled: What Just Happened? A list o f resources in Moodle isn't simply a list of files, like you would find on a shared drive. One obvious difference is that in Moodle, you can arrange your resources to be listed in the order you want, and we've just seen how easy it is to achieve this. You can't find the Move icon? Your site may be configured so that you can drag and drop resources. In that case, instead of the Move icon you will see crosshairs next to your resource. To move the resource, click on the cross hairs and, keeping your finger pressed down on the left mouse butt on, drag the resource to its new location. Look for the line in the background—this tells you where your resource is going to be dropped to—then let go of the mouse butt on when you have found the spot. Now I've got my resources in the order I wanted, I have to say that my topic looks like just another resource dump—which is what I am trying to avoid. My resources would be much easier to use if I could introduce each of them with a short piece of text: Introducing a resource with a short introduction is a great way of improving the visual appeal of your course. The tool to achieve this is called a Label resource, and here's how to use it... Time for Action – Insert a Label I'm going to start the process of arranging my resource by having a short piece of text introducing the Backyard ballistics links resource. Make sure editing is turned on, click on Add a resource, and choose Insert a label. In the Editing Label page, enter your label text. When you are done, press the Save and return to course button. The new label is added to the end of the list of resources—which is obviously the wrong place for it. Click on the Move icon, next to the label you have just added: The page is re-displayed. Your new label disappears and lots of boxes have appeared. These boxes represent the places where your new label can go: Click on the relevant box to place your label. You're done! Remember: If you don't have a Move icon, you'll have crosshairs next to the label that you can click on to drag it to the right place. What Just Happened? After all the experience we have had with Moodle so far, using the label resource will be fairly straightforward. Judicious use of labels means our course topics don't have to be simply a long list of resources. Remember to treat labels as a way of leading the student towards and into a resource. Labels are not designed for content, so try to keep labels short—perhaps two or three sentences at the most. Labels are like the glue that holds topics together. You don't want your glue to be too thick. It's looking better, but my topic is still looking a little flat. You can indent your resources by clicking on the Move right icon next to the resource: Below is how things now look with a little indenting: Seeing the course from a student's point of viewAs a teacher, you will see a lot of options on the screen that your students won't. To get a clear idea of how a student will see the course, use the Switch role to… option at the top right of the screen. Choose Student from this list, and you will see the course as students see it.When you're done, click Return to my normal role and you'll get your normal view back. You will also need to Turn editing on to get the edit controls back.

Lets get started. Moodle's PreDefined Roles Moodle comes with a number of predefined roles. These standard roles are suitable for some educational setups, but most institutions require modifications to the roles' system in order to tailor Moodle to their specific needs. Each role has permissions for a number of actions that can be carried out in Moodle. For example, an administrator and a course creator are able to create new courses, whereas all other roles are denied this right. Likewise, a teacher is allowed to moderate forums, whereas students are only allowed to contribute to them. Before we can actually do anything with roles, we need to understand the concept of contexts, which is dealt with next. Contexts Contexts are the areas in Moodle where roles can be assigned to users. A role can be assigned within different contexts. A user has a role in any given context, where a context can be a course, an activity module, a user, a block, or Moodle itself. Moodle comes with the following seven contexts that you will come across a lot in this article.

Capabilities and Permissions So far, we have given users existing roles in different Moodle contexts. In the following few pages, we want to have a look at the inside of a role that is called capabilities and permissions. Once we have understood them, we will be able to modify existing roles and create entirely new custom ones. Role Definitions Existing roles are accessed via Users | Permissions | Define Roles in the Site Administration block. The screen that will be shown is similar to the familiar roles assignment screen, but has a very different purpose: When you click on a role name, its composition is shown. Each role contains a unique Name, a unique Short name (used when uploading users), and an optional Description. The Legacy role type has been introduced for backward compatibility, to allow old legacy code that has not been fully ported to work with the new system comprising new roles and capabilities. It is expected that this facility will disappear in the future (this might be for some time since a lot of core code depends on it), and should be ignored in due course unless you are working with legacy code or third-party add-ons. In addition to these four fields, each role consists of a large number of capabilities. Currently, Moodle's roles system contains approximately 200 capabilities. A capability is a description of a particular Moodle feature (for example) to grade assignments or to edit a Wiki page. Each capability represents a permissible Moodle action: Permission is a capability and its value, taken together. So each row of the table in the screen shot represents permission. The left column is the capability name and the radio buttons specify the value. So now permission has a description, a unique name, a value, and up to four associated risks. The description, for example, Approve course creation provides a short explanation of the capability. On clicking, the description or the online Moodle documentation is opened in a separate browser. The name, for instance moodle /site: approvecourse, follows a strict naming convention that identifies the capability in the overall role system: level/type: function. The level states to which part of Moodle the capability belongs (such as moodle, mod, block, gradereport, or enroll). The type is the class of the capability and the function identifies the actual functionality. The permission of each capability has to have one of the four values: Permission Description Not Set By default, all permissions for a new role are set to this value. The value in the context where it will be assigned will be inherited from the parent-context. To determine what this value is, Moodle searches upward through each context, until it 'finds' an explicit value (Allow, Prevent or Prohibit) for this capability, i.e. the search terminates when an explicit permission is found. For example, if a role is assigned to a user in a Course context, and a capability has a value of 'Not set,' then the actual permission will be whatever the user has at the category level, or, failing to find an explicit permission at the category level, at the site level. If no explicit permission is found, then the value in the current context becomes Prevent. Allow To grant permission for a capability choose Allow. It applies in the context in which the role will be assigned and all contexts which are below it (children, grand-children, etc). For example, when assigned in the course context, students will be able to start new discussions in all forums in that course, unless some forum contains an override or a new assignment with a Prevent or Prohibit value for this capability. Prevent To remove permission for a capability choose Prevent. If it has been granted in a higher context (no matter at what level), it will be overridden. The value can be overridden again in a lower context. Prohibit This is the same as Prevent, but the value cannot be overridden again in a lower context. The value is rarely needed, but useful when an admin wants to prohibit a user from certain functionality throughout the entire site, in which case the capability is set to Prohibit and then assigned in the site context.   Principally, permissions at lower contexts override permissions at higher contexts. The exception is "Prohibit", which by definition cannot be overridden at lower levels. Resolving Permission Conflicts There is a possibility of conflict if two users are assigned the same role in the same context, where one role allows a capability and the other prevents it. In this case, Moodle will look upwards in higher contexts for a decider. This does not apply to Guest accounts, where "Prevent" will be used by default. For example, a user has two roles in the Course context, one that allows functionality and one that prevents it. In this case, Moodle checks the Category and the System contexts respectively, looking for another defined permission. If none is found, then the permission is set to "Prevent". Permission Risks Additionally, Moodle displays the risks associated with each capability, that is, the risks that each capability can potentially raise. They can be any combination of the following four risk types: Risk Icon Description Configuration Users can change site configuration and behavior. XSS Users can add files and texts that allow cross-site scripting (potentially malicious scripts which are embedded in web pages and executed on the user's computer). Privacy Users can gain access to private information of other users. Spam Users can send spam to site users or others. Risks are only displayed. It is not possible to change these settings, since they only act as warnings. When you click on a risk icon, the "Risks" documentation page is opened in a separate browser window. Moodle's default roles have been designed with the following capability risks in mind:

Zen Gift of Education Many distributions have special releases around Christmas and New Year. I was planning to look at some of these this month like last year's Ubuntu Christmas Edition. But instead I found a release that's useful enough to maintain all year around. ZenEdu is a Live distribution that packs a whole bunch of educational tools on top of the Slackware-based light-weight and zippy Zenwalk Linux. As per Zenwalk's Wiki, ZenEdu was initiated by a user on the distro's French forum last year in December. That time the distro contained mostly French-only educational programs. This year, several members of the Zenwalk Linux community decided to release an international edition of ZenEdu. The distro is a goldmine of open source educational software and also packs a detailed user manual, which shows the developers' serious approach to do things properly. The educational apps included in the distro cover a broad range of subjects. The ZenEdu ISO is about 700 MB and includes apps that'll help users with subjects like Astronomy, Mathematics, and Chemistry. Since learning is the core idea behind the distro, it goes beyond traditional curriculum subjects and also packs tools that'll teach students the basics of programming and music. Some of the tools I particularly like are Stellarium - the popular 3D planetarium, Stardict - a multi-language dictionary, ghemical - a comprehensive computational chemistry package, Little Wizard that introduces the basics of programming to young students, and Maxima, for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, integration, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear equations, etc. If you want to learn music, train your ears with Solfege, and use TuxGuitar to edit and play guitar tablatures. What sets ZenEdu apart from other educational distros is that it bundles other productivity tools as well. This includes general-purpose applications like the IceWeasel web browser, IceDove email client, Pidgin for instant messaging, Kompozer for authoring web pages, and OpenOffice.org for word processing. Furthermore, the distro packs several other apps, which according to the developers, were chosen based on their usefulness to students while keeping in mind the things that might interest them. This includes a simple program to manage personal tasks and todo lists, a drawing program, a comic book viewer, a video editor, and a program to create a wide array of 3D content. However, there are dozens of free software educational tools that aren't included in this CD due to size considerations. But that's no problem. Since ZenEdu is based on Zenwalk, it too can be expanded with drag-and-drop modules. To create a new customize ZenEdu Live CD, browse and download the modules of educational apps you want and use the remastering application, isomaster to add them to your customized ZenEdu Live CD! The highlight of this distro though is the iTALC tool for teachers. iTALC, which stands for Intelligent Teaching And Learning with Computers, is a powerful cross-platform didactical tool that lets teachers view and control other computers in their network. Using iTALC teachers can see what's going on in computer labs and take snapshots, remote-control computers to support and help students, run a demo on all students' computers in real-time, send text-messages to students, cycle power and rebooting computers remotely, etc. ZenEdu has a special 'teacher' account pre-configured to run iTALC. Once logged in from that user, you can start iTALC and navigate through its interface, first adding student computers, and then controlling or monitoring them. ZenEdu's wiki page advices that if you'll be using the program regularly, you should save the 'teacher' account's iTALC directory (/home/teacher/.italc/) inside zenlive/rootcopy of the Live CD via isomaster. This will load the iTALC configuration the next time you boot the remastered Live CD. If you'll be using iTALC regularly you'd be well off installing ZenEdu on to your hard disk. Unfortunately, ZenEdu isn't installable. It's only a Live CD, and at best can be installed onto a USB Flash stick for portability. Most of the specialized distros I've played with, tend to be too specialized. They do what they are supposed to, but nothing more. ZenEdu is different in that, in a single CD, the developers have managed to squeeze a good number of educational apps as well as everyday tools. I hope members of the Zenwalk community, actively develop and maintain ZenEdu.   Some more articles by Mayank Sharma: Meet the Distro guy Making a Complete yet Small Linux Distribution

Here, we will see: Steps involved in the authentication and authorization process Learning file authentication and authorization Implementing active directory authentication and authorization Details of policy template Steps Involved in the Authentication and Authorization Process Oracle Web Services Manager can authenticate the web services request by validating the credentials against a data store. The credentials (e.g. username and password, SAML token, certificate, etc.) that are attached to the web services will be validated against the data store, such as the file system, databases, active directory and any LDAP compliant directory. Once authentication is successful, the next step is to perform authorization by validating the username against a set of pre-defined groups which have access to the web service. The following figure shows the process where the user accesses an application which acts as a client for the web service. The client application then attaches the username and password to make the web service request. The username and password are then validated against file system or LDAP directory by Oracle WSM, either using the gateway or the agent. The authentication and authorization against different directory stores can be configured using Oracle WSM policy steps. Oracle Web Services Manager has predefined policy steps for: File Authenticate and Authorize Active Directory Authenticate and Authorize LDAP Authenticate and Authorize In the previous figure, the Oracle WSM Gateway is used to protect the web services and externalize the security. In order to authenticate and authorize requests to web services, the web services can be registered within the gateway and the request pipeline of gateway will validate the credentials and authorize the access before it forwards the request to the actual web service provider. The gateway steps for authentication and authorization can be summarized as: Log incoming request (optional) Extract credentials get the credentials from the SOAP message or HTTP header) Authenticate (file authenticate, active directory authenticate, etc.) Authorize (file authorize, active directory authorize, etc.) Request is forwarded to the web service provider The response from the web service also follows through a similar response pipeline where you can implement the log, encryption of response, or signing, or response, etc. While it is not required to implement any steps in the response pipeline, there should be a response pipeline even if it's doing nothing. Oracle WSM: File Authenticate and Authorize Oracle Web Services MManager can authenticate the web services requests against a file that has the list of usernames and passwords. In this example, the username and password information are part of the SOAP message, however one can also send a username and password as HTTP header, or it can be any XMML data that is a part of the web services message. While file-based authentication can easily be compromised, it is often used as a jump start or testing process to validate the authentication and authorization process. Authentication and authorization of web service requests against a file requires three main steps, and these are described below. There is a default log step which will log all the request and response messages, and you can also include that log step at any point to log messages: Extract Credentials File Authenticate File Authorize The first step to authenticate a web service request against a password file (file authenticate) is to extract the username and password credentials from the SOAP message. The client application attaches the username and password to the SOAP message, as per the UserName token profile. In the policy to authenticate the web service against the file, add the step in the request process to extract credentials. Since this is a web service request, as opposed to HTTP post, configure the Credentials location to WS-BASIC (refer to the following screenshot). Note: WS-BASIC means that it is WS-security compliant. WS-security is the oasis specification that specifies how security tokens are inserted as a part of the SOAP message. In other words, WS-BASIC means that the username and password can be found in the SOAP message, as per the username token profile of the WS-security specification. Once the credentials are extracted, the next step is to validate them against the file. The default implementation of the Oracle WSM File Authenticate requires the username and password to be in a comma separated format and the password should be the hash value using a MMD5 or SHA1 algorithm. In order to authenticate the credentials against the data store, the next step is to configure the File Authenticate step in Oracle WSMM. In this step, the options are straightforward. We have to configure the location of the password file and the hash algorithm format as either md5 or SHA1 (see the next screenshot). The sample file with username and password is: bob:{MD5}jK2x5HPF1b3NIjcmjdlDNA== You can use the wsmadmin tool provided as part of Oracle WSMM standalone or SOA suite). Type: wsmadmin md5encode bob password c;.htpasswd     Now that the authentication steps are configured, the next step is to configure the authorization policy step to ensure that only valid users can access the web service. For the file authorization method, it is no different than the file authenticate method i.e. even the user-to-role mappings are kept in the file. The following figure shows the File Authorize policy step. In this step, we have to define the location of the XML file that contains the users to roles mapping, and also the list of roles that should be allowed to access the service. The roles XML file should look like: <?xml version=‘1.0' encoding=‘utf-8'?> <UserRoles> <user username="joe" roles="guest"/> <user username="Bob" roles="Admin,guest"/> </UserRoles> In the previous XML file, the list of roles the user belongs to are defined as a value of roles element and is comma separated. Now that we have completed the steps to extract credentials, authenticate the request and also authorize the request, the next step is to save the policy steps and commit the policy changes. Once the policy is committed, any request to that web service would require a username and password, and that user should have necessary privileges to access the service. Oracle WSM: Active Directory Authenticate and Authorize In the previous section, we discussed authenticating and authorizing web service requests against a file. Though it's an easy start, security based on a file system can be easily compromised and will be tough to maintain. Authentication and authorization of web services are better handled when integrated with a native LDAP directory, such as active directory, so that the AD administrator can manage users and group membership. In this section, we will discuss how to authenticate and authorize web service requests against an active directory. Active-directory-based authentication and authorization of web service requests involves the same steps as file-based-authentication and authorization, and they are: Extract Credentials Active Directory Authenticate Active Directory Authorize

XML is the most suitable format for data exchange, but not for data presentation. Adobe's PDF and Microsoft Excel's spreadsheet are the commonly used formats for data presentation. If you receive an XML file containing data that needs to be included in a PDF or Excel spreadsheet file, you need to convert the XML file to the relevant format. Some of the commonly used XML-to-PDF conversion tools/APIs are discussed in the following table: Tool/API Description iText iText is a Java library for generating a PDF document. iText may be downloaded from http://www.lowagie.com/iText/. Stylus Studio XML Publisher XML Publisher is a report designer, which supports many data sources, including XML, to generate PDF reports. Stylus Studio XML Editor XML Editor supports XML conversion to PDF. Apache FOP The Apache project provides an open source FO processor called Apache FOP to render an XSL-FO document as a PDF document. We will discuss the Apache FOP processor in this chapter. XMLMill for Java XMLMill may be used to generate PDF documents from XML data combined with XSL and XSLT. XMLMill may be downloaded from http://www.xmlmill.com/. RenderX XEP RenderX provides an XSL-FO processor called XEP that may be used to generate a PDF document.   We can convert an XML file data to a PDF document using any of these tools/APIs in JDeveloper 11g. Here, we will use Apache FOP API. The XSL specification consists of two components: a language for transforming XML documents (XSLT), and XML syntax for specifying formatting objects (XSL-FO). Using XSL-FO, the layout, fonts, and representations of the data may be formatted. Apache FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) is a print formatter for converting XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO) to an output format such as PDF, PCL, PS, SVG, XML, Print, AWT, MIF, or TXT. In this  article, we will convert an XML document to PDF using XSL-FO and the FOP processor in Oracle JDeveloper 11g.The procedure to create a PDF document from an XML file using the Apache FOP processor in JDeveloper is as follows: Create an XML document. Create an XSL stylesheet. Convert the XML document to an XSL-FO document. Convert the XSL-FO document to a PDF file. Setting the environment We need to download the FOP JAR file fop-0.20.5-bin.zip (or a later version) from http://archive.apache.org/dist/xmlgraphics/fop/binaries/ and extract the ZIP file to a directory. To develop an XML-to-PDF conversion application, we need to create an application (ApacheFOP, for example) and a project (ApacheFOP for example) in JDeveloper. In the project add an XML document, catalog.xml, with File | New. In the New Gallery window select Categories | General | XML and Items | XML Document. Click on OK. In the Create XML File window specify a File Name, catalog.xml, and click on OK. A catalog.xml file gets added to the ApacheFOP project. Copy the following catalog.xml listing to catalog.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><catalog title="Oracle Magazine" publisher="Oracle Publishing"> <journal edition="September-October 2008"> <article> <title>Share 2.0</title> <author>Alan Joch</author> </article> <article> <title>Restrictions Apply</title> <author>Alan Joch</author> </article> </journal> <journal edition="March-April 2008"> <article> <title>Oracle Database 11g Redux</title> <author>Tom Kyte</author> </article> <article> <title>Declarative Data Filtering</title> <author>Steve Muench</author> </article> </journal></catalog> We also need to add an XSL stylesheet to convert the XML document to an XSL-FO document. Create an XSL stylesheet with File | New. In the New Gallery window, select Categories | General | XML and Items | XSL Stylesheet. Click on OK. In the Create XSL File window specify a File Name (catalog.xsl) and click on OK. A catalog.xsl file gets added to the ApacheFOP project. To convert the XML document to an XSL-FO document and subsequently create a PDF file from the XSL-FO file, we need a Java application. Add a Java class,  XMLToPDF.java, with File | New. In the New Gallery window select Categories | General and Items | Java Class. Click on OK. In the Create Java Class window specify a class Name (XMLToPDF for example) and click on OK. A Java class gets added to the ApacheFOP project. The directory structure of the FOP application is shown in the following illustration: Next, add the FOP JAR files to the project. Select the project node (ApacheFOP node) and then Tools | Project Properties. In the Project Properties window, select Libraries and Classpath. Add the Oracle XML Parser v2 library with the  Add Library button. The JAR files required to develop an FOP application are listed in the following table: JAR File Description <FOP>/fop-0.20.5/build/fop.jar Apache FOP API <FOP>/fop-0.20.5/lib/batik.jar Graphics classes <FOP>/fop-0.20.5/lib/ avalon-framework-cvs-20020806.jar Logger classes <FOP>/fop-0.20.5/lib/ xercesImpl-2.2.1.jar The DOMParser and the SAXParser classes

Look and Feel: An Overview Moodle can be fully customized in terms of layout and branding. It has to be stressed that certain aspects of changing the look and feel require some design skills. While you as an administrator will be able to make most of the relevant adjustments, it might be necessary to get a professional designer involved, especially when it comes to styling. The two relevant components for customization are the Moodle front page and Moodle themes, though this article will focus only on Moodle front page. Before going into further details, let's try to understand which part is responsible for which element of the look and feel of your site. Have a look at the screenshot that would follow. It shows the front page of Moodle site after you are logged in as an administrator. It is not obvious which parts are driven by the Moodle theme and by the front page settings. The next table sheds some light on this: Element Settings Theme Other Logos - x - Logged-in information (location and font) - x - Language Drop Down - - x Site Administration block (position) x - - Available Courses block (position) x - - Available Courses block (content) - - x Course categories and Calendar block (position) x - - Course categories and Calendar block (icons, fonts, colors) - x - Footer text - x - Footer logo - x - Copyright statement - x -   While this list is by no means complete, it hopefully gives you an idea that the look and feel of your Moodle site is driven by a number of different elemen In short, the settings (mostly front page settings as well as a few related parameters) dictate what content users will see before and after they log on. The theme is responsible for the design scheme or branding, that is, the header and footer as well as colors, fonts, icons, and so on used throughout the site. Now let's move towards the core part of this article. Customizing Your Front Page The appearance of Moodle's front page changes after a user has logged in. The content and layout of the page before and after login can be customized to represent the identity of your organization. Look at the following screenshot. It is the same site that the preceding screenshot was taken from, but before a user has logged in. In this particular example, a Login block is shown on the left and the Course categories are displayed in the center, as opposed to the list of available courses. Front Page Settings To customize the front page, you either have to be logged in as Moodle administrator, or have front-page-related permissions in the Front Page context. From the Site Administration block, select Front Page | Front Page Settings. The screen showing all available parameters will be loaded displaying your current settings that are changeable. ts. Setting Description Full site name This is the name that appears in the browser's title bar. It is usually the full name of your organization, or the name of the dedicated course, or qualification the site is used for. Short name for site This is the name that appears as the first item in the breadcrumb trail. Front Page Description This description of the site will be displayed on the front page via the Site Description block. It can, therefore, only be displayed in the left or right column, never in the center of the front page. The description text is also picked up by the Google search engine spider, if allowed. Front Page Moodle can display up to four elements in the center column of the front page when not logged in. List of courses List of categories News items Combo list(categories and courses) The order of the elements is the same as the one chosen in the pull-down menus. Front page items when logged in Same as "Front Page", but used when logged in. Include a topic section If ticked, an additional topic section (just like the topic blocks in the center column of a topics-format course) appears on top of the front page's center column. It can contain any mix of resources or activities available in Moodle. It is very often used to provide information about the site. News items to show Number of news items that are displayed. Courses per page This is a threshold setting that is used when displaying courses within categories. If there are more courses in a category than specified, page navigation will be displayed at the top of the page. Also, when a combo list is used, course names are only displayed if the number is less than the specified threshold. For all other categories, only the number of courses is shown after the category name. Allow visible courses within hidden categories By default, courses in hidden categories are not shown unless the said setting is applied. Default frontpage role If logged-in users should be allowed to participate in front page activities, a default front page role should be set. The default is None.   Arranging Front Page Blocks To configure the left and right column areas with blocks, you have to turn on editing (using the Blocks editing on button). The menu includes blocks that are not available in courses such as Course/Site description and Main menu. Blocks are added to the front page in exactly the same way as in courses. To change their position, use the standard arrows. The Main Menu block allows you to add any installed Moodle resource or activity inside the block. For example, using labels and links to (internal or external) websites, you are able to create a menu-like structure on your front page. If the Include a topic section parameter has been selected in the Front Page settings, you have to edit the part and add any installed Moodle activity or resource. This topic section is usually used by organizations to add a welcome message to visitors, often accompanied by a picture or other multimedia content. Login From a Different Website The purpose of the Login block is for users to authenticate themselves by entering their username and password. It is possible to log into Moodle from a different website, maybe your organization's homepage, effectively avoiding the Login block. To implement this, you will have to add some HTML code on that page as shown: <form class="loginform" name="login" method="post" action="http://www.mysite.com/login/index.php">   <p>Username :     <input size="10" name="username" />   </p>   <p>Password :     <input size="10" name="password" type="password" />   </p>   <p>     <input name="Submit" value="Login" type="submit" />   </p></form> The form will pass the username and password to your Moodle system. You will have to replace www.mysite.com with your URL. This address has to be entered in the Alternate Login URL field at Users | Authentication | Manage authentication in the Site Administration block. Other Front Page Items The Moodle front page is treated as a standalone component in Moodle, and therefore has a top-level menu with a number of features that can all be accessed via the Front Page item in the Site Administration menu. Having now looked in detail at the front page settings, let's turn to examining the other available options. Front Page Roles The front page has its own context in which roles can be assigned to users. This allows a separate user to develop and maintain the front page without having access to any other elements in Moodle. Since the front page is treated as a course, a Teacher role is usually sufficient for this. Front Page Backup and Restore The front page has its own backup and restore facilities to back up and restore all elements of the front page including any content. The mechanism of performing backup and restore is the same as for course backups.   Front page backups are stored in the backupdata folder in the Site Files area, and can be accessed by anybody who is aware of the URL. It is therefore best to move the created ZIP files to a more secure location. Front Page Questions Since the Moodle front page is treated in the same way as a course, it also has its own question bank, which is used to store any questions used on front-page quizzes. For more information on quizzes and the question bank, go to the MoodleDocs at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Quiz . Site Files The files areas of all courses are separate from each other, that is, files in Moodle belong to a course and can only be accessed by users who have been granted appropriate rights. The difference between Site files and the files area of any other course is that files in Site files can be accessed without logging in. Files placed in this location are meant for the front page, but can be accessed from anywhere in the system. In fact, if the location is known, files can be even be accessed from outside Moodle. Make sure that in the Site files area, you only place files that are acceptable to be seen by users who are not authenticated on your Moodle system. Typical files to be placed in this area are any images you want to show on the front page (such as the logo of your organization) or any document that you want to be accessed (for example, the curriculum). However, it is also used for other files that are required to be accessible without access to a course, such as the Site Policy Agreement, which has to be accepted before starting Moodle. To access these publicly available Site files elsewhere (for example, as a resource within other courses), you have to copy the link location that has the format: http://mysite.com/file.php/1/file.doc. Allow Personalization via My Moodle By default, the same front page is displayed for all users on your Moodle system. To relax this restriction and to allow users to personalize their own front page, you have to activate the My Moodle feature via the Force users to use My Moodle setting in Appearance | My Moodle in the Site Administration block. Once enabled, Moodle creates a /my directory for each user (except administrators) at their first login, which is displayed instead of the main Moodle front page. It is a very flexible feature that is similar to a customizable dashboard, but requires some more disk space on your server. Once logged in, users will have the ability to edit their page by adding blocks to their My Moodle area. The center of the page will be populated by the main front page, for instance displaying a list of courses, that users cannot modify. Making Blocks Sticky There might be some blocks that you wish to "stick", that is, display on each My Moodle page, making them effectively compulsory blocks. For example, you might want to pin the Calendar block on the top right corner of each user's My Moodle page. To do this, go to Modules | Blocks | Sticky blocks in the Site Administration block and select My Moodle from the pull-down menu. You can now add any item from the pull-down menu in the Blocks block. If the block is single instance (that is, only one occurrence is allowed per page), the block will not be available for the user to choose from. If the user has already selected a particular block, a duplicate will appear on their site, which can be edited and deleted. To prevent users from editing their My Moodle pages, change the moodle/my: manageblocks capability in the Authenticated user role from Allow to Not set. The sticky block feature is also available for course pages. A course creator has the ability to add and position blocks inside a course unless they have been made sticky. Select the Course page item from the same menu to configure the sticky blocks for courses, as shown in the preceding screenshot. Summary After providing a general overview of look and feel elements in Moodle, the article covered front page customization. As mentioned earlier, the front page in Moodle is a course. This has advantages (you can do everything you can do in a course and a little bit more), but it also has certain limitations (you can only do what you can do in a course and might feel limited by this). However, some organizations are now using the Moodle front page as their homepage.

Confidentiality and integrity are two critical components of web services. While confidentiality can be ensured by means of encryption, the encrypted data can still be overwritten and the integrity of the message can be compromised. So it becomes is equally important to protect the integrity of the message; digital signatures helps us in doing just that. Overview of Digital Signatures In the web services scenario, XML messages are exchanged between the client application and the web services. Certain messages contain critical business information, and therefore the integrity of the message should be ensured. Ensuring the integrity of the message is not a new concept, it has been there for a long time. The concept is to make sure that the data was not tampered while in transit between the sender and the receiver. Consider, for example, that Alice and Bob are exchanging emails that are critical to business. Alice wants to make sure that Bob receives the correct email that she sent and no one else tampered with or modified the email in between. In order to ensure the integrity of the message, Alice digitally signs the message using her private key, and when Bob receives the message, he will check to make sure that the signature is still valid before he can trust or read the email. What is this digital signature? And how does it prove that no one else tampered with the data? When a message is digitally signed, it basically follows these steps: Create a digest value of the message(a unique string value for the message using a SHA1 or MD5 algorithm). Encrypt the digest value using the private key—known only to the sender. Exchange the message along with the encrypted digest value. MD5 and SHA1 are message digest algorithms to calculate the digest value. The digest or hash value is nothing but a non-reversible unique string for any given data, i.e. the digest value will change even if a space is added or removed. SHA1 produces a 160 bit digest value, while MD5 produces a 128 bit value. When Bob receives the message, his first task is to validate the signature. Validation of signature goes through a sequence of steps: Create a digest value of the message again using the same algorithm. Encrypt the digest value using the public key of Alice(obtained out of band or part of message, etc.) Validate to make sure that the digest value encrypted using the public key matches the one that was sent by Alice. Since the public key is known or exchanged along with the message, Bob can check the validity of the certificate itself. Digital certificates are issued by a trusted party such as Verisign. When a certificate is compromised, you can cancel the certificate, which will invalidate the public key. Once the signature is verified, Bob can trust that the message was not tampered with by anyone else. He can also validate the certificate to make sure that it is not expired or revoked, and also to ensure that no one actually tampered with the private key  of Alice. Digital Signatures in Web Services In the last section, we learnt about digital signatures. Since web services are all about interoperability, digital-signature-related information is represented in an industry standard format called XML Signature (standardized by W3C). The following are the key data elements that are represented in an interoperable manner by XML Signature: What data (what part of SOAP message) is digitally signed? What hash algorithm (MD5 or SHA1) is used to create the digest value? What signature algorithm is used? Information about the certificate or key. In the next section, we will describe how the Oracle Web Services Manager can help generate and verify signatures in web services. Signature Generation Using Oracle WSM Oracle Web Services Manager can centrally manage the security policy, including digital signature generation. One of the greatest advantages in using Oracle WSM to digitally sign messages is that the policy information and the digital certificate information are centrally stored and managed. An organization can have many web services, and some of them might exchange certain business critical information and require that the messages be digitally signed. Oracle WSM will play a key role when different web services have different requirements to sign the message, or when it is required to take certain actions before or after signing the message. Oracle WSM can be used to configure the signature at each web service level and that reduces the burden of deploying certificates across multiple systems. In this section, we will discuss more about how to digitally sign the response message of the web service using Oracle WSM. Sign Message Policy Step As a quick refresher, in Oracle WSM, each web service is registered within a gateway or an agent and a policy is attached to each web service. The policy steps are divided mainly into request pipeline template and response pipeline template, where different policies can be applied for request or response message processing. In this section, I will describe how to configure the policy for a response pipeline template to digitally sign the response message. It is assumed that the web service is registered within a gateway and a detailed example will be described later in this article . In the response pipeline, we can add a policy step called Sign Message to digitally sign the message. In order to digitally sign a message, the key components that are required are: Private key store Private key password The part of SOAP message that is being signed The signature algorithm being used The following screenshot describes the Sign Message policy step with certain values populated.   In the previous screenshot, the values that are populated are: Keystore location—The location where the private key file is located. Keystore type—Whether or not it is PKCS12 or JKS. Keystore password—The password to the keystore. Signer's private-key alias—The alias to gain access to the private key from the keystore. Signer's private-key password—The password to access the private key. Signed Content—Whether the BODY or envelope of the SOAP message should be signed. The above information is a part of a policy that is attached to the time service which will sign the response message. As per the information that is shown in the screenshot, the BODY of the SOAP message response will be digitally signed us in the SHA1 as the digest algorithm, and PKCS12 key store. Once the message is signed, the SOAP message will look like: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><soap:Envelope soap_encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" > <soap:Header> <wsse:Security soap_mustUnderstand="1"> <wsse:BinarySecurityToken ValueType="http://docs. oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss- x509-token-profile-1.0#X509v3" EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open. org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message- security-1.0#Base64Binary" wsu_Id="_ VLL9yEsi09I9f5ihwae2lQ22" >SecurityTOkenoKE2ZA==< /wsse:BinarySecurityToken> <dsig:Signature > <dsig:SignedInfo> <dsig:CanonicalizationMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/ xml-exc-c14n#"/> <dsig:SignatureMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/ xmldsig#rsa-sha1"/> <dsig:Reference URI="#ishUwYWW2AAthrx hlpv1CA22"> <dsig:Transforms> <dsig:Transform Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/xml-exc-c14n#"/> </dsig:Transforms> <dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1"/> <dsig:DigestValue>ynuqANuYM3qzdTnGOLT7SMxWHY=</dsig:DigestValue> </dsig:Reference> <dsig:Reference URI="#UljvWiL8yjedImz 6zy0pHQ22"> <dsig:Transforms> <dsig:Transform Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/xml-exc-c14n#"/> </dsig:Transforms> <dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1"/> <dsig:DigestValue>9ZebvrbVYLiPv1BaVLDaLJVhwo=</dsig:DigestValue> </dsig:Reference> </dsig:SignedInfo> <dsig:SignatureValue>QqmUUZDLNeLpAEFXndiBLk</dsig:SignatureValue> <dsig:KeyInfo> <wsse:SecurityTokenReference wsu_Id="_7vjdWs1ABULkiLeE7Y4lAg22" > <wsse:Reference URI="#_VLL9yEsi09I9f5ihwae2lQ22"/> </wsse:SecurityTokenReference> </dsig:KeyInfo> </dsig:Signature> <wsu:Timestamp wsu_Id="UljvWiL8yjedImz6zy0pHQ22"> <wsu:Created>2007-11-16T15:13:48Z</wsu:Created> </wsu:Timestamp> </wsse:Security> </soap:Header> <soap:Body wsu_Id="ishUwYWW2AAthrxhlpv1CA22" > <n:getTimeResponse > <Result xsi_type="xsd:string">10:13 AM</Result> </n:getTimeResponse> </soap:Body></soap:Envelope>

To save the world from a lot of boring t-shirts, this article covers the way in which CI uses objects, and the different ways you can write and use your own objects. Incidentally, I've used 'variables/properties', and 'methods/functions' interchangeably, as CI and PHP often do. You write 'functions' in your controllers for instance, when the OO purist would call them 'methods'. You define class 'variables' when the purist would call them 'properties'. Object-Oriented Programming I'm assuming you—like me—have a basic knowledge of OOP, but may have learned it as an afterthought to 'normal' PHP 4. PHP 4 is not an OO language, though some OO functionality has been tacked on to it. PHP 5 is much better, with an underlying engine that was written from the ground up with OO in mind. But you can do most of the basics in PHP 4, and CI manages to do everything it needs internally, in either language. The key thing to remember is that, when an OO program is running, there is always one current object (but only one). Objects may call each other and hand over control to each other, in which case the current object changes; but only one of them can be current at any one time. The current object defines the 'scope'—in other words, which variables (properties) and methods (functions) are available to the program at that moment. So it's important to know, and control, which object is current. Like police officers and London buses, variables and methods belonging to objects that aren't current just aren't there for you when you most need them. PHP, being a mixture of functional and OO programming, also offers you the possibility that no object is current! You can start off as a functional program, call an object, let it take charge for a while, and then let it return control to the program. Luckily, CI takes care of this for you. Working of the CI 'Super-Object' CI works by building one 'super-object': it runs your whole program as one big object, in order to eliminate scoping issues. When you start CI, a complex chain of events occurs. If you set your CI installation to create a log, you'll see something like this:     1 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:39 --> Config Class Initialized    2 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:39 --> No URI present. Default controller    set.    3 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:39 --> Router Class Initialized    4 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:39 --> Output Class Initialized    5 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:39 --> Input Class Initialized    6 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:39 --> Global POST and COOKIE data    sanitized    7 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:39 --> URI Class Initialized    8 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:39 --> Language Class Initialized    9 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:39 --> Loader Class Initialized    10 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:39 --> Controller Class Initialized    11 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:39 --> Helpers loaded: security    12 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:40 --> Scripts loaded: errors    13 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:40 --> Scripts loaded: boilerplate    14 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:40 --> Helpers loaded: url    15 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:40 --> Database Driver Class Initialized    16 DEBUG - 2006-10-03 08:56:40 --> Model Class Initialized On startup—that is, each time a page request is received over the Internet—CI goes through the same procedure. You can trace the log through the CI files:      The index.php file receives a page request. The URL may indicate which controller is required, if not, CI has a default controller (line 2). Index.php makes some basic checks and calls the codeigniter.php file (codeignitercodeigniter.php).      The codeigniter.php file instantiates the Config, Router, Input, URL, (etc.) classes (lines 1, and 3 to 9). These are called the 'base' classes: you rarely interact directly with them, but they underlie almost everything CI does.      codeigniter.php tests to see which version of PHP it is running on, and calls Base4 or Base5 (/codeigniter/Base4(or 5).php). These create a 'singleton' object: one which ensures that a class has only one instance. Each has a public &get_instance() function. Note the &:, this is assignment by reference. So if you assign to the &get_instance() method, it assigns to the single running instance of the class. In other words, it points you to the same pigeonhole. So, instead of setting up lots of new objects, you are starting to build up one 'super-object', which contains everything related to the framework.      After a security check, codeigniter.php instantiates the controller that was requested, or a default controller (line 10). The new class is called $CI. The function specified in the URL (or a default) is then called, and life as we know it starts to wake up and happen. Depending on what you wrote in your controller, CI will then initialize any other classes you need, and 'include' functional scripts you asked for. So in the log above, the model class is initialized. (line 16) The 'boilerplate' script, on the other hand, which is also shown in the log (line 13), is one I wrote to contain standard chunks of text. It's a .php file, saved in the scripts folder, but it's not a class: just a set of functions. If you were writing 'pure' PHP you might use 'include' or 'require' to bring it into the namespace: CI needs to use its own 'load' function to bring it into the super-object. The concept of 'namespace' or scope is crucial here. When you declare a variable, array, object, etc., PHP holds the variable name in its memory and assigns a further block of memory to hold its contents. However, problems might arise if you define two variables with the same name. (In a complex site, this is easily done.) For this reason, PHP has several sets of rules. For example:      Each function has its own namespace or scope, and variables defined within a function are usually 'local' to it. Outside the function, these are meaningless.      You can declare 'global' variables, which are held in a special global namespace and are available throughout the program.      Objects have their own namespaces: variables exist inside the object for as long as the object exists, but can only be referenced through the object. So $variable, global $variable, and $this->variable are three different things. Particularly, before OO, this could lead to all sorts of confusion: you may have too many variables in your namespace (so that conflicting names overwrite each other), or you may find that some variables are just not accessible from whatever scope you happen to be in. CI offers a clever way of sorting this out for you. So, now you've started CI, using the URL www.mysite.com/index.php/welcome/ index, which specifies that you want the index function of the welcome controller. If you want to see what classes and methods are now in the current namespace and available to you, try inserting this 'inspection' code in the welcome controller:     $fred = get_declared_classes();    foreach($fred as $value)    {$extensions = get_class_methods($value);    print "class is $value, methods are: ";    print_r($extensions);} When I ran this just now, it listed 270 declared classes. Most are other libraries declared in my installation of PHP. The last 11 came from CI: ten were the CI base classes (config, router, etc.) and last of all came the controller class I had called. Here's the last 11, with the methods omitted from all but the last two:     258: class is CI_Benchmark    259: class is CI_Hooks,    260: class is CI_Config,    261: class is CI_Router,    262: class is CI_Output,    263: class is CI_Input,    264: class is CI_URI,    265: class is CI_Language,    266: class is CI_Loader,    267: class is CI_Base,    268: class is Instance,    269: class is Controller, methods are: Array ( [0] => Controller [1]    => _ci_initialize [2] => _ci_load_model [3] => _ci_assign_to_models    [4] => _ci_autoload [5] => _ci_assign_core [6] => _ci_init_scaffolding    [7] => _ci_init_database [8] => _ci_is_loaded [9] => _ci_scaffolding    [10] => CI_Base )    270: class is Welcome, methods are: Array ( [0] => Welcome [1] =>    index [2] => Controller [3] => _ci_initialize [4] => _ci_load_model    [5] => _ci_assign_to_models [6] => _ci_autoload [7] => _ci_assign_core    [8] => _ci_init_scaffolding [9] => _ci_init_database [10] => _ci_is_    loaded [11] => _ci_scaffolding [12] => CI_Base ). Notice—in parentheses as it were—that the Welcome class (number 270: the controller I'm using) has all the methods of the Controller class (number 269). This is why you always start off a controller class definition by extending the controller class—you need your controller to inherit these functions. (And similarly, models should always extend the model class.) Welcome has two extra methods: Welcome and index. So far, out of 270 classes, these are the only two functions I wrote! Notice also that there's an Instance class. If you inspect the class variables of the 'Instance' class, you will find there are a lot of them! Just one class variable of the Instance class, taken almost at random, is the array input:     ["input"]=> &object(CI_Input)#6 (4) { ["use_xss_clean"]=> bool(false)    ["ip_address"]=> bool(false) ["user_agent"]=> bool(false) ["allow_get_    array"]=> bool(false) } Remember when we loaded the input file and created the original input class? Its class variables were:     use_xss_clean is bool(false)    ip_address is bool(false)    user_agent is bool(false)    allow_get_array is bool(false) As you see, they have now all been included within the 'instance' class. All the other CI 'base' classes (router, output, etc.) are included in the same way. You are unlikely to need to write code referencing these base classes directly, but CI itself needs them to make your code work. Copying by Reference You may have noticed that the CI_Input class is assigned by reference (["input"]=> &object(CI_Input)). This is to ensure that as its variables change, so will the variables of the original class. As assignment by reference can be confusing, here's a short explanation. We're all familiar with simple copying in PHP:     $one    =    1;    $two    =    $one;    echo $two; produces 1, because $two is a copy of $one. However, if you re-assign $one:     $one    =    1;    $two    =    $one;    $one    =    5;    echo $two; This code still produces 1, because changes to $one after $two has been assigned aren't reflected in $two. This was a one-off assignment of the value that happened to be in variable $one at the time, to a new variable $two, but once it was done, the two variables led separate lives. (In just the same way, if I alter $two, $one doesn't change.) In effect, PHP creates two pigeonholes: one called $one, one called $two. A separate value lives in each. You may, on any one occasion, make the values equal, but after that they each do their own thing. PHP also allows copying 'by reference'. If you add just a simple & to line 2 of the code:     $one = 1;    $two =& $one;    $one = 5;    echo $two; Then the code now echoes 5: the change we made to $one has also happened to $two. Changing the = to =& in the second line means that the assignment is 'by reference'. Now, it's as if there was only one pigeonhole, which has two names ($one and $two). Whatever happens to the contents of the pigeonhole happens both to $one and to $two, as if they were just different names for the same thing. The principle works for objects as well as simple string variables. You can copy or clone an object using the = operator, in which case you make a simple one-off new copy, which then leads an independent life. Or, you can assign one to the other by reference: now the two objects point to each other, so any changes made to the one will also happen to the other. Again, think of them as two different names for the same thing.

Signature Verification by Oracle WSM Oracle Web Services Manager can actually validate the signature in the incoming i.e. request SOAP message. By using Oracle WSM to validate the signature, organizations can actually centralize the policy enforcement and also the public key management. As organizations deploy more web services that are accessed by other divisions and business partners, managing the signature verification process might become tedious, as with each new consumer, the certificate information should be maintained. Oracle WSM can address such issues by centralizing those operations. This section  will describe how to configure Oracle WSM policy to validate the signature of the SOAP request message. In order to view the policy, you can click on Policy Management and then Manage Policies. This will bring you to the screen with the gateway information and a hyperlink for policies (see the following screen capture).   You can then click on Policies to see all the policies and you will see theVerifyAndSign policy too that is created by default. A default policy is attached to the service. We can now click Edit to edit the  policy. When you click Edit, you will see the policy steps as shown in the  following screenshot. In this section, we want to configure the Request pipeline to validate the signature of the incoming SOAP message. In order to validate the signature, click Add Step Below to add the Verify Signature policy step as shown in the following screenshot. Once you click OK, the verify signature policy step is added, but that policy step should be configured. If you click on the Configure button on the verify signature policy step, it will take you to the screen where you can configure the verify signature policy information as shown in the following screen capture. In the previous screenshot, I configured Verify Signature policy steps with: Location of the key store Key store type as PKCS12 Password of the key store Public key alias in the key store Set Remove Signatures to true to remove the digital signature after the signature validation Enforce Signing is set to true to make sure that the incoming requests are signed In order to generate a PKCS12 key store from certifcate that is installed already in Microsoft certifcate services, you should frst export the certifcate (with or without private key) and then import that certifcate in FireFox (Advanced option) and then export back to PKCS12. Once the verify signature policy has been configured and saved (Commit Policy), the policy would enforce that any request for the time service with the particular service ID be digitally signed. Signature Generation by Oracle WSM In the last section, we discussed how to digitally sign a web service request by Microsoft .NET application and how to validate the signature by Oracle WSM. In this section, we will discuss how to digitally sign the web service response message. In the earlier section, we discussed how to register the service and how to attach the verify signature policy step to the request pipeline. In order to digitally sign the response message, the response pipeline of the policy should be modified to include the sign message policy step. The policy with the request pipeline that is already configured to verify signature would look like: Now we have to add the step in the Response pipeline to actually sign the response message. In order to add the policy step, click on Add Step Below and then select the Sign Message policy step. Once the Sign Message policy step is added, it can then be configured, as shown in the following screenshot, to include the appropriate key store location for the public key to digitally sign the message. In the previous figure, the location of the key store that has the private key, along with the Keystore password, alias and part of message to be signed are specified. Once the policy is created, it would look like: In the previous screenshot, the Response pipeline has two log steps—one to log the message before digitally signing and one to log the message after digitally signing the message. In this sample, we are using the same WSEQuickStartServer certificate to sign the message. Once the policy is saved, the response message will be digitally signed. The client application (Microsoft .NET) can be configured to validate the signature.