I have just been through the wringer with my hosting service, which provides Moodle as a script but doesn’t have actual support for the software itself. I am currently teaching five classes in Moodle, and discovered something called a cron job wasn’t working properly. Cron jobs apparently are self-checks that Moodle runs which send things out (like forum posts students have subscribed to, or my announcements). I learned a few weeks ago how to set mine to run every 10 minutes, so everyone would stay updated. But a few days ago my host contacted me saying that my cron jobs were exceeding my allotted CPU usage, and this had to stop or they’d force me over to a private server. I didn’t have the knowledge to really deal with this, but the Using Moodle user posts seems to have saved me (not for the first time), and all seems OK for now.
So after several late nights grumbling (a mild term) about my hosting problems, I return to Moodle itself today to grade tests and (again not for the first time) find myself totally delighted with the ease of using it. Today’s example is that I was adding in the correct answer to essay questions before I started grading, and I was able to make them purple so I could easily see the difference between a student’s answer and my own feedback. Then, instead of grading quizzes on a student-by-student basis, I was able to use Manual Grading to see all instances of answers to the same question, and grade all of them on the same screen page. While breezing through this, I noticed that a good student had a better answer than my own. So I just opened the quiz and changed the feedback. No problem, instantly saved, viewable immediately by students, even though I was in the middle of grading and the quiz had already been deployed. Try that, Blackboard!
[Regarding the hosting problem, I’m going to start recommending that folks use a Moodle Partner host, like ClassroomRevolution.com.]
