Following our move from the text matching service TurnItIn to a rival product Urkund, the most common complaint that we received was the loss of “Feedback Studio” feature of TurnItIn and in particular the ability to easily provide audio feedback to students. Following consultation with our contacts in the Moodle community we concluded that having the ability to provide audio feedback directly to students directly through Moodle would be a very valuable addition to the core Moodle capabilities.

In Moodle 3.5 a new feature was added into core Moodle to provide webRTC audio and video recording into the atto editor (See https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-60848 ). This was initially written by Blindside Networks who work on the Bigbluebutton open source conferencing tool and contributed to the plugin database.

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We found relevant tickets on the issue on the Moodle tracker system and commented along with others that it was essential to have this also work in providing assignment feedback. We also encouraged members of the community to comment on and vote for this item if they thought it would be worthwhile.

Power of the community

Moodle HQ responded as you would expect and agreed to examine the potential of adding audio feedback into core. I’m delighted to report that 12 months later, thanks to the team in HQ we have a “patch” enabling us to provide audio feedback to students on their assignments for our Moodle 3.5 instance and audio feedback will be available as part of core for Moodle 3.6. See https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-27520

The video below illustrates how simple it now is to provide feedback directly through Moodle

This development is yet another example of the benefit of Open Source and the awesome Moodle community. I firmly believe that it would take significantly more time and persuasion to convince a commercial LMS provider to not only take on board users feedback but make significant changes to core product in such a short space of time. The community were able to investigate the code themselves, provide suggestions to Moodle HQ developers and troubleshoot problems as they arose. Of course that it not to mention that this significant enhancement is available at no extra cost to the end users once adopted into core.