{"id":23,"date":"2007-02-21T00:01:18","date_gmt":"2007-02-21T00:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=23"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:23:55","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:23:55","slug":"the-extraordinary-ease-of-moodle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2007\/02\/the-extraordinary-ease-of-moodle\/","title":{"rendered":"The extraordinary ease of Moodle"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have just been through the wringer with my hosting service, which provides Moodle<\/a> 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<\/a> 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<\/a> user posts seems to have saved me (not for the first time), and all seems OK for now.<\/p>\n

\"moodle\"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!<\/p>\n

[Regarding the hosting problem, I’m going to start recommending that folks use a Moodle Partner<\/a> host, like ClassroomRevolution.com<\/a>.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cmslms","category-pedagogy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10091,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/10091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}