by Tony Butler.
Hi folks,
Since upgrading to Moodle 3.1 we've had a lot of feedback from teachers that, while potentially very useful, the new grading UI still needs quite a lot of work before it could be considered a viable alternative to external solutions such as Turnitin's Grademark tool.
The main criticism is that adding comments to the generated PDF actually covers up areas of the submitted text it refers to, making the annotated submission very difficult to read. We've developed a possible solution to this in the form of an option (configured per assignment with a site-wide default) to make the comments collapse to a small marker icon when not selected for editing/reading, and we'd like to invite members of the wider Moodle community to have a look at it and provide feedback on its potential usefulness and any ways in which it could be improved.
You can find the demo at http://prototype.moodle.net/pdfcomments/ and log in as a teacher or student to see how it works from both pespectives. There are currently 2 student accounts and 2 teacher accounts set up with the following usernames / passwords:
student1 / s1pass
student2 / s2pass
teacher1 / t1pass
teacher2 / t2pass
Please feed back any comments or suggestions to this forum discussion, and if you would like to see the feature integrated into the next release of Moodle, please vote for its tracker issue at https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-55459.
Many thanks,
Tony