NC State Enterprise Learning Management System (LMS) Updates

Feature Requests and Bug Fixes

On June 23, 2011 the new WolfWare Feature Request and Bug Tracking system went live. The new LMS Feature Request system (http://featurerequest.wolfware.ncsu.edu/) was put into place to provide more visibility into the status of a request and a greater ability to find out if a feature has already been requested. The features that are requested cover all of the major LMS systems: Moodle, Elluminate, WolfWare Classic and the WolfWare Toolbox.  We are using a product called UserEcho to run the system, and  have slightly enhanced the design to blend with WolfWare. We are taking advantage of their single sign-on capability to use Unity accounts for access control, hosting a WRAP protected login page on the wolfware.ncsu.edu website.

All 96 feature requests and bug reports that existed in our old system (a static spreadsheet) were migrated into the new system, and another 22 have been added since then. Of the 118 requests, 33 of them have been closed so far. Ten more requests are currently under review or started, and the LMS Best Practices and Support Committee has recently discussed about 20 more of the requests to recommend next steps.

There are six Moodle plug-ins that have been reviewed and approved by all of the LMS subcommittees and were added to the production server in time for the fall semester. The first plug-in, the Equella Resource module, went live on July 23 so that folks in the Equella demonstration project could go ahead and use it through Moodle to prepare their courses for fall. The other five additions to Moodle went live in August (Attendance, Elluminate, Turning Point Clickers, Download Assignments as a ZIP file and AJAX Marking [view ungraded items]). With these features, we approached this as a “soft rollout” in order to get some specific user feedback when in production, and are pleased that these features seem to be working well.   Additionally, some of the items that have been patched or fixed include issues with the book title display; csv gradebook export fix; usability fixes related to themes, breadcrumbs, grade submissions, duplicate iframe titles and IE8 HTML editor bugs.