Packt Pub is giving Moodlers more chances to win a copy of Ian Wild’s (@iandavidwild) book, Moodle 2.0 Course Conversion. If you haven’t already, check out moodlenews.com to see how you can double your chances of winning!

What will you learn from this book?

• Incorporate your existing handouts, worksheets, and other resources into Moodle courses
• Quick methods to make your Moodle courses engaging, attractive, and fun
• Fast ways to add multimedia to your course, or incorporate existing sounds and videos
• and more

Two ways to win

#1. Learn more about what the book has to offer, FILL OUT THIS FORM and tell me what 1 thing you plan on learning and using right after you finish reading the book. Or perhaps something you hope to learn and use right away after you finish the book. Please enter before Feb. 14th.

#2. Keep an eye out for @moodlerific ..I will be tweeting a question [related to the book] in the next week or so and the first to reply with the correct answer gets the copy! I will tweet a reminder the day I ask the question so everyone knows it’s the question for the contest!

That’s it! Again, head over to moodlenews.com to enter their contests as well.

Some exciting new titles have come to Packt Publishing.

• Moodle 2.0 for Business Beginner’s Guide – Implement Moodle in your business to streamline your interview, training, and internal communication processes.
• Moodle Javascript Cookbook – Over 50 recipes for making your Moodle system more dynamic and responsive with JavaScript.

I’m very excited to get reading these books. Along with using Moodle in a k-12 school district I’m also an admin for a small business. I’m hoping to get some tips to make that site work even better with Moodle 2.0. Hopefully by the time I’m done reading I’ll be itching to upgrade. The Javascript book looks interesting to me to see what I can learn to make our Moodle site more customized and dynamic.

I’ll be writing a review on each of the books. Hopefully I can get started soon, while I’m getting back into testing 2.0! Stay tuned.

Great news, Moodle 2.1 Beta is now available on Moodle.org for download! I just installed and tried restoring a 1.9.9+ course – it worked!

Helen Foster recently posted on Moodle.org asking for Moodlers to help out and send in their 1.9 courses for further testing. The restore 1.9 backups into Moodle 2.1 tracker item has been very busy and the status now says “closed”.

Moodle 2.1 is set to be released on July 1st. Please help out Moodle by testing 2.1 on the QA Moodle site. Learn how to help!

..continuing on with my 1.9 to 2.0 journey

As I mentioned in my previous post I was stuck on the “migrating courses” page when I tried upgrading from Moodle 1.9.11 to 2.0.2. The two errors coming up were “Incorrect pool file content” and a number of stack trace errors:

I did some Googling and found 2 tracker items regarding these issues but it didn’t seem like it was during the upgrading process. I did find one discussion thread from a few months back about this issue that helped me troubleshoot.

First, I turned on as much debugging, error reporting or messages I could in the config.php file (not sure if there are other debugging settings to turn on?):

The debugging information didn’t help too much and I couldn’t find any error logs regarding this issue, so I continued to Google and research online. I checked out the /lib/filestorage/filestorage.php file because that was the file where the apparent first two errors were happening. I’m no expert at PHP so I wasn’t quite sure how to change or echo any further information when upgrading to see if it gave me anything more to work with.

I continued to read through the discussion thread I mentioned over and over and thought maybe it was corrupt file, too big of a course or file, etc. I looked in my moodledata folder [see path below] and found a file named with a random string of characters – which was the same string that was displayed in the “incorrect pool file content” error.

There were two other files with a long string of characters that were the same as two long strings of characters which were being displayed in the debugging information (these strings were successful operations). The two files weren’t big, the problem hash named file however was 500 MB. Was this the problem? I didn’t dare change anything via the moodledata folder.

I figured it was a file issue in one or more courses..I went into phpMyAdmin and started deleting courses, hoping a corrupt file would be removed and fix the issue. I had 3 imported courses from our production server that I restored on the 1.9 testing server to test “real life” courses in the upgrade process.

I deleted two of the four courses, same error.  Went back and deleted another course. Tried again, boom – worked. Since I had all of the debugging and information set to display it displayed all of the database stuff. Clicked Continue. It displayed tons of new settings, clicked Continue – MOODLE 2.0!

Success! Sort of..well..half way…I was able to upgrade from a 1.9.11 to 2.0.2 but I had to delete a few courses first. I believe I had to delete the courses that I imported from our production server (v 1.9.9). Only one course made it through, which I initially created on that install.

So it looks like the course migration is the issue – something with the files (doesn’t surprise me). I’m going to roll back to 1.9 and import different courses, create a few more courses and try again. I’ll post my results after I try it out again.

Related Posts

• Video – Converting Moodle Database from MyISAM to INNODB @mguhlin
• Second attempt at upgrading 1.9 to 2.0
• Starting the Journey to transition to Moodle 2.0 #moodle2

Today was my second attempt at upgrading Moodle 1.9 to Moodle 2.0. The first time I ran into a few problems and tried to solve them but then scrapped the install and left it for a few months. This time I upgraded from an install of Moodle 1.9.11 with the Book module installed and a few “real life” courses I imported, to see how they upgraded.

One major thing I did this time that I didn’t do last time was migrate my database from MyISAM to INNODB. I followed the directions from Miguel Guhlin (complete with screenshots). So, I really don’t know what this does but it sounds like this is necessary? However, I haven’t seen it documented in Moodle Docs (please provide a link if it’s there!).

I do know that in a fresh 2.0 install it does create the database with the “INNODB” type (you can view it in phpmyadmin, it will be in a column when viewing the database). Needless to say, I want to become more comfortable with what this is doing before I do anything on a production server. The good news is that following Miguel’s directions was easy.

Alright, here is the short run down of what I did:

1.) Exported my database via phpMyAdmin (saved on my desktop)

2.) Migrated my database from MyISAM to INNODB – DIRECTIONS

3.) Made a copy of my moodledata folder (used Fire FTP Firefox add-on for steps 2-7)

4.) Copied the config.php file from my current 1.9 install

5.) Renamed my web files Moodle folder to moodle1910.backup

6.) Uploaded a fresh copy of Moodle 2.0 (named the same as the old Moodle folder in step 5)

7.) Copied the config.php file into the new Moodle folder uploaded in step 6

8.) Visited my Moodle install, Clicked on Notifications

Result after clicking on Notifications

1.) Yippee, I’m doing it! -> screenshot 1

2.) Server checks, CHECK! Yay! -> screenshot 2

3.) Plugin Checks, eh..okay..a few non-standard ones but allows me to continue -> screenshot 3 | screenshot 4

4.) Then I ran into a problem [screenshot of where I'm stuck]. A progress bar (at 0%) is displayed for 3-7 seconds and then a red-highlighted box saying “Incorrect pool file content 17f65e7276dd4895c5fc8970e2aa834622a3696b.” is displayed. I’m also given the following error:

And that’s where I stand now. A weird thing happened as I was writing this  blog post – my computer froze up on me and I restarted. When I came back and restored my tabs in Firefox, the screen I was stuck on that had a progress bar at 0% now has a progress bar at 33.3%. Weird?

I haven’t fully looked into what is causing the “incorrect pool file content” or the other errors but here are a few links I quickly found:

• http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-27137
• http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=163074

I plan to further investigate about the above problem, it seems like there have been some discussion about the errors so I’m confident I’ll figure it out soon.

Minor issue/curious

The other thing I am wondering about is why there are standard (I thought) modules that say they are missing. I know Book is non-standard and I think hotpot, journal, lams and loan calculator are no longer in the core install but what about admin and admin_tree? Is this causing problems?

Like I said, this is my second attempt at upgrading and I haven’t spent too much time preparing or investigating the upgrade progress so I’m not too frustrated yet. I’ve been in the mode of waiting until more and more bugs get fixed and I keep checking the Moodle Tracker.

Originally our district was going to upgrade in the summer after 2.1 is released but we may push that back so we can implement a solid pilot group and create quality training resources.

I was upgrading on a CentOS VPS using cPanel, Fire FTP and phpMyAdmin. I’ll update this post with any updates on the error I received. Any insight into these errors would be greatly appreciated.

I’ve posted several times about Packt Publishing and it’s book offers along with some reviews I’ve done and now they’re offering a great deal on Moodle books for the month of March!

To celebrate the forthcoming publication of the Science Teaching with Moodle 2.0 book, Packt is offering a series of attractive discounts on all Moodle books.

• Buy any Moodle print book and get 20% off
• Buy any 4 Moodle eBooks from Packt at an unbelievable price of $60 / £38 / €45

Check out Packt Pub’s latest Moodle books now!

Just a quick note about a small change in the release of Moodle 2.0.2. It will no longer be January 31, 2011 which I previously posted, but February 10th, 2011.

I’m sure there will be many more changes as this is pretty normal compared with past “release dates”.  You can keep track of the progress on the Moodle Tracker.

This morning I was emailed by a teacher in my district asking if there was a way to get a different type of summary for Moodle Quiz results. He wanted a better way to give a summary with original responses to print and attach to other papers for students. The way he was currently doing it was wasting a lot of paper.

What I need for moodle to do is be able to provide each student’s original response, right or wrong and score for each question and an overall score.

Being a Moodle admin and not having much “real life” experience with Quizzes – grading, viewing reports – I needed to take a look at the default reporting in Moodle 1.9.9 and then head over to Moodle.org to check out the modules & plugins.

After visiting Moodle.org, a CTRL + f and a find “quiz” I quickly found a promising module that could work – Quiz Report: Detailed Responses.

This quiz report plug-in displays all the responses given by students at the quiz in one big table. It allows this table to be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet.

In Moodle 2.0, this was moved into the core distribution.

I installed it by following the instructions I found in a comment:

This module creates a new link called “Detailed responses” when you View your Quiz and then click the Results tab. It’s essentially the same report as “overview” but it shows the student’s original responses instead of just a score.

The columns are: Name | Total Score | Question #1 | Question #2 | etc

Green = Correct Answer
Red = Incorrect Answer

So, a simple report but it could be very useful and efficient for teachers – maybe that’s why they made it standard in Moodle 2.0!

Related Links

• Download Detailed Responses
• Quiz Forum