 Hello everyone. Welcome to this Moodle Academy webinar, Moodle Tracker for Non-Techies. I'm Mary Cooch, Education Manager here at Moodle HQ, but I have with me today who's going to run this webinar, Helen Foster, Moodle Community Engagement Advisor, who's going to talk to us all about how you can make the most of the Moodle tracker even though you're not a technical person or a developer, or actually even though you might be. So it's over to you Helen. Thanks. Thanks a lot Mary and thanks everyone for coming and for your interest in the Moodle Tracker. So let's start first of all, what is the Moodle Tracker? Well, a simple answer is it's the place for everyone to be able to record and manage bug reports. That's problems that you might have with Moodle. And if you have any suggestions for improving it or maybe new features. So the important thing is that it's for everyone. It's not just for Moodle HQ or for developers, it's for anyone that uses Moodle in our Moodle community. So you might have come across it already. Let's just take a quick look. As well as Moodle itself, it's also the place for reporting bugs and suggesting improvements for the Moodle app. Anything with the Moodle community sites and various other projects. If we look at Moodle itself, then I can see here the first screen shows open issues. And here on the right, it says 6,435. Wow, that's a lot. So the first thing we're going to look at is how you can search the tracker to find what you're looking for. So my biggest tip for searching is to use keywords and to use two keywords or phrases with an and in between. Maybe you've done this when you're searching elsewhere on the internet. So for example, manual enrollment and cohort, if you had a problem with that or something. So the best way to explain this is to go for an example. So I've got a couple of links here to quite recent discussions on Moodle.org. Here someone's got a problem with the grader report header no longer linking to the activity. If we have a read, it says since we upgraded to Moodle 4.3, there's been a major problem or disappointment in the grader report. The functionality of clicking on the activity name to open the activity is gone. Now when you click on the activity name, it just does the sorting in the table. And they provide a good image here illustrating it. So to look and see whether this problem is reported in the tracker, I think, okay, it's to do with the grader report. And what else would I search for? Well, it's to do with not linking to the activity. So I'm going to try searching for grader report and activity. So if I go to the tracker, I can just enter in this search box at the top here, grader report in codemarks and activity. And then I get a long list of issues. Now the tracker has got lots and lots of functionality. And I find this initial screen not very helpful. As you see on the left, we've got loads and loads of issues, but the titles are all cut off. So to be able to see the full title, we need to change the view, which is here on the right. Hopefully you can see my mouse there. And it says change view at the moment is detail view. And my tip is to use list view. So here I have list view. And now it's much easier to see the full titles of these issues. And I see the top one, grade item column headings in the grader report should link to activity. So this was exactly the one that I was searching for. Okay, let's look at another example. So this discussion, I don't know if you come across this quite recent problem as well. It says assignment not marked as done. So here we have the problem with a student and they've made a submission, they've received a grade, received a passing grade, it's all ticked, so they've done it, but it still says to do. So with this one, you might think, oh, I'll search by assignment. And sometimes you do have to search for more than one thing to try more than one search to find what you're looking for. It turned out that this problem affected the quiz as well as assignment. So that was not the best thing to search for. But I like to look at words in the interface. You see here the problem was if you try receive a grade, it doesn't mark it as done. So I'm going to search for receive a grade and done. So let's go back to here and I'm going to try receive a grade and I get a weird error message. That's the problem we're doing a live demo. I don't know why that went wrong. Let me just try one more thing and see whether it works better. Sometimes it works better if you put it in here. Receive a grade and we can try to do rather than done. Maybe it likes that better. There we go, that's a bit better. So here you see it's remembered our list view from the right here. And I can see here the second one down. Activity with only receive a grade for the completion condition is being shown as to do when it should already be done. So that was the one. So you might be thinking, yeah, I make it look easy. But I encourage you to have a go. Let's go back to the presentation and see what other tips we have. Okay, so just to recap that tip that I showed you when you're searching that initial screen is difficult to read the titles. So change it from detail view into list view. Another tip when you're searching, sometimes you can end up with hundreds of results. So to refine your search, the easiest thing to do is to start off by selecting Moodle as the project. That's the thing on the left there. And then there's a little more menu where you can add a component to search and then select a component. So let's go back to the track and see what happens there. So here on the left at the moment it's searching all projects and we usually find Moodle things because they're the most common. But you can make the search results less by selecting Moodle. And then more here it gives you lots and lots of things to search by but my tip is to search by component. And then if you're interested in, for example, the assignment or quiz or whatever, you can just select that component and there you see your results, your search results are much reduced. Okay, so we've gone through all this searching the tracker. You might be wondering, why would you want to sign up for a tracker account when you can just search and find issues? Well, I've come up with five reasons that I'm going to go through why you'd want to sign up for a tracker account. So let's to look at the first few. I'm going to, first of all, look at a tracker issue when you're logged in on what you see. So first off on the left, you see the issue status whether the issue is open or closed. This particular one is closed and then it's good to see the resolution of fixed versions. So this is saying that this issue that's the grade in a greater report with activity links that's fixed in Moodle 4.4. So you have to upgrade your site 4.4 to get this fixed. Then on the left, we have the issue type. Sometimes that's important, whether it's a bug or an improvement or a new feature. And then on also going down on the left, the issue description. Now sometimes issues can be a bit difficult to understand. Sometimes there's some comments and it's changed a little bit. So I always recommend looking at the testing instructions because they're very clear about what the issue is about. And then right at the bottom and sometimes issues are quite long. There's add comment button. There is one at the top as well. I'll be talking in the next slide a little bit about comments. But just to say here, we really appreciate it when you add comments. Then on the right, here we have a link that says vote for this issue. And that's very important for indicating if you'd like the issue to be fixed. If it's a bug to be fixed or an improvement to be implemented. And especially with improvements and new features, it helps us to determine development priorities. This particular issue, if you look really closely, that vote for this issue is actually grayed out. And the reason for that is because the issue is closed. So once an issue is closed and it's fixed, you can't vote for it anymore. But you can start watching this issue and watching is what is tracker language for receiving email notifications. So when you search for an issue and it affects you and you're interested in it, then you can click that link to start watching it. And you'll get an email whenever anyone comments or updates it in any way. Okay, on to about comments. So you've found, you've searched and found an issue that's really important to you. These are the kind of comments that can help ensure that the issue gets worked on. First of all, this issue is discussed in the Moodle.org forum thread. And then you would add a link to the discussion thread. This is really good to see because quite often issues are talked about at length in the forums and to link it with the tracker issue. So we know about it. Number two, maybe when you're searching, you found similar issues or maybe an issue that almost looks like a duplicate. So mention that in a comment so that they can be linked. And number three, I see some people helping in this way a lot attaching a screenshot illustrating the problem. I'm not very good at those taking a screenshot and like annotating it and adding comments and stuff, but some people are really good and it helps a lot, especially with suggested improvements. For a complicated problem, sometimes a course backup can help when developers are trying to reproduce it. Then number four, also really useful is confirmation whether the problem can be reproduced. And depending on what the problem is, you might want to try reproducing it on our special sandbox demo site. Or if it was a theme issue, maybe you want to try it in a different browser. If it was to do with the text editor, Tiny MC or Ato to try it with the other text editor to see or even sometimes bugs affected only a particular version of Moodle. So that's all helpful information. Finally, another useful comment is to say why an issue is especially important to your organization. Maybe you've got courses with hundreds of students and a particular screen gets very difficult to navigate because you have so many, so many students in it. Things like that could be really helpful to us. So we've so far gone through why you'd want to sign up for a tracker account to receive notifications of updates by email to vote to help indicate prior to help affect priorities. Useful comments that you can make. And then we now we move on to reporting a bug. Okay, so you searched for an issue and you haven't found it. So the first thing is to check that if it's already been reported. So if you search and you can't find it, then you assume it's not being reported, but it's really good yourself to try and reproduce it if possible on the sandbox demo site. This is a good check to make sure that the problem that you're experiencing is not to do with some customization on your site. It's also really important because the developers to be able to investigate an issue, they have to be able to reproduce it. So it really helps developers to know, okay, yep, it can be reproduced on this sandbox demo site. And just a little note there. If you've not reported a bug before, if you're new to the tracker, we have this like anti spam measure, whereby you have to just vote for an existing issue first. And then you're able to create a new issue and report a bug. So if you've done those checks, then click the create button there. And so let's have a look, what makes a good bug report? What can you write that helps increase the chance of your bug being fixed? Well, first off, it's really good to write the steps to reproduce. One, two, three, I logged in as a teacher, I went here, I tried this. And then because we're not all mind readers and sometimes bugs that are really obvious to one person are not obvious to someone else. So it's really good if you write down what you expected to happen when something happened, you did these these steps. And what actually happened, that's a very good way to describe a bug, saying the expected results and the actual results. And then this particular bug report is also good because they mentioned that they could reproduce it on our sandbox demo site. Okay, so we've gone over now up to number four reporting a bug. So we've just left with suggesting an improvement. Just checking, there's no questions so far. No, Mary. I don't think so. No, not yet, although I have you, but we'll wait until the end and see what people have to say. Okay. Right, suggesting an improvement. Well, as well as searching the tracker, because there's a good chance the moodle community is really large someone's already had the same idea and might have suggested already. As well as searching the tracker, try searching moodle.org as well. As you see here, the moodle.org, if you go there, there's a there's a nice search box there in the middle. There's also another search icon top right. The top right one is a search using Google. And the middle one is a search for the across the whole of moodle.org. Or a site, a global site search there. Why not try both searches? It doesn't cost anything. Do your best to try and find if anyone has got the same idea as you. And if you find a discussion, then then you can join it and say, yeah, me too, and maybe you can refine your ideas. Or if you don't find a discussion, then just start a new discussion. The next step is if others agree with your your idea, then to create a tracker issue. And as with the comments, it's important that you include a link to the to the discussion in the tracker issue so that developers can see what people are saying in the forum about your idea. And then number four is going back to your discussion on moodle.org to post the tracker issue number in it to encourage others to watch, vote or comment on it. Okay, so this is really important for helping us and also maybe people are in moodle.org in the forums and they don't know about the tracker. I know myself I was in the forums a long time before I knew about the tracker. So if you can post the tracker issue number in your forum discussion, then that's that's helping other people to be aware of the tracker and to be able to to vote and comment on the issue. Okay. So by reasons to sign up for a tracker account, I hope I've convinced you to get involved and and help us to help you. Now we're on to the questions. And I thought I would just start off with a question that I hear very often. I can't find a tracker issue about a problem I have. Should I still create an issue, even though it's probably already been reported. I think this is really common that the people find it difficult to to search for an issue and think, oh, no, maybe, maybe it's there, but I just haven't found it and I don't want to create a new issue if it's already there. But my answer to that is to say it's much, much more important that an issue is reported twice than not at all. And the tracker can be very difficult to find your way around and some issues can be difficult to find. So I'd really encourage you to to not be afraid and to create that that tracker issue, and it can always be be linked and one of the issues can be closed if necessary. Okay, that's the first question. Has anyone else got any questions? Yes, please. If you have questions now, now is question time, so please type them in or you might like to tell us your experiences with the tracker if you have any. Just while you're thinking and typing your questions, am I right in understanding Helen that if you've made a tracker issue and then you want to put it in a forum on Moodle.org, you don't have to copy the URL and paste it immediately. Is that right? You can just, is there a special way, an easy way to display it? Yep, yep, you're absolutely right. You just type the MDL number. Maybe I can show you because here I replied and I just typed the MDL number there and it automatically linked. So that's really quick. And that also works when you're logged into the tracker. And if you add a comment saying it's similar to this other tracker issue, you can also just add the MDL blah, blah, blah, and it links it without you having to add the full URL. That's great. Thank you. And while you were answering that, Andreas said, thank you for the overview. How do I tag a person in a comment? Right, let me log in and demonstrate. Okay, so let's find an issue and I'm adding a comment. So to tag somebody, then I'm going to do the at symbol and then I'll start typing somebody's name. So this particular issue, I'm just looking at participants. Usually if you start typing somebody's name, it finds them. I wonder whether... I don't know. Pardon? Have you any ideas, Mary? Is it their surname that if you start typing? Let's try finding me. There's only one of me. Yeah, that's right. I'm wondering whether you have to have special rights to be able to do that. Let me try logging out. And Andreas said that's what he was wondering too. I think I like. Let's try looking in as myself. That's interesting. We love doing things as you know Helen and I because whenever we're showing people things, we always learn from them as well. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And some things you don't know about until you try them out. Social nationalism in action. Yeah. Right, let's try now. Whoops. I had a comment. There we go. That was a very good question and very useful too. Right, so what do I have that other people don't know? That's probably... You have to have developer rights. You have to be a developer in the tracker. You get added to a developer's group. Okay, so Nora has a question. If I report a bug, AG for 4.2.6, do I just have to write 4.2x in the affected version? Another good question. That's a very good question, yeah. So let's have a look at what happens there. So where's my create issue? So I want to report a bug here. So my little bug. And I write some re-description. And then here. Wow, there's loads. So I don't think 4.2.x is an option. So you'd have to choose 4.2.6. But I would say you need to make sure when you're reporting a bug that the version is supported. So this explains that which versions are still being supported. And we see that 4.1 is only supported for security now. So if you want to suggest an improvement that won't work for 4.1 and a general bug, only security bugs. So 4.2, 4.3 are fine. 4.2 is fine up until general support ends 22nd of April, 2024. Which is when 4 comes out, isn't it actually? Yeah. Okay. So basically, if you have a problem with your site and your site is a not supported version, then really you would have to see if you can upgrade and then see if you still have that bug. And if you do, you can report it. But maybe in the meantime, it has been already fixed. I think it's there. Okay. Thank you for that, Nora, for having any more questions with plenty of time. I just wanted to mention a couple of things actually to do with versions of Moodle. So you mentioned the Sandbox site. We've actually got three Sandbox sites. So because we realize that some versions are still supported. So we have the Sandbox 4.3. That's the one with the normal URL. And when you go there on the front page, it actually also shows you that you can get to 4.2 and 4.1. So we will keep three Sandboxes of the supported version. So one of those will probably go shortly. The other thing. Thanks, Mary. That's actually Tim's question I see in the chat there. Are there multiple versions of the Sandbox for testing? So maybe I can just show you on the screen. When you're logged into Moodle.org, you know you've got these links at the top right. And there's this demo link, which takes you to two demo sites. The Mount Orange School, which has got lots of activities that I often use for testing as well. And then the Moodle Sandbox, which is empty. And as Mary was saying, if you go to this Sandbox site on the front page, it mentions earlier versions are also available. So if you wanted to try and see whether there was a bug that you are experiencing in 4.2, then you go to the 4.2 site. Or if you've got a security issue, now the 4.1 is also available. Yes, thank you. Yeah, sorry, Tim. I didn't realize when I was answering it, but that's great. You see great minds. Yeah. So one of the things you mentioned when people are creating track issues, you talked about selecting a component. Could you maybe say what component means? And what if you're not sure what the component is and you put the wrong component or you miss out the one that is the correct one? And can you have more than one component or can you only put one component? Wow, lots of questions there. So here we are on the create issues screen. And if I'm not sure what component to put, if I click on this dropdown, then I start getting a list of all the different things. So assignment, like all the activities, also blocks, book, calendar, we can choose from loads and loads. You don't have to scroll the whole list like if you wanted to say, oh, start typing, then there's grade book or grading methods. If you want to put more than one, then you see you can put as many as you like, in fact. And you just do the best you can with the components because after creating the issue, the teams in HQ who are responsible for these components will review the report. They'll do what's called a tracker issue triage and they'll check whether the components are correct. And if they think it's better to have different components, then they can easily edit the issue and change them. So you don't need to worry about it at all. You just put what you think is the best. And if you're not sure, there's a component called general. And there's also a useful component called course, which covers a lot of stuff. That's great. That is useful to know. In fact, leading on nicely from that is Julia's question. How can I track the status of my reported issue? Track the status. So that means the status, whether it's open or closed. So I would say the best way is to watch the issue. I suppose if you've reported it... What do you mean? Well, if you've reported it yourself, presumably you're automatically watching it. Oh, right. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. So if you report an issue, you're automatically considered a watcher. And then when you add a comment by default, you're added as a watcher as well, although you can change that in your profile if you don't want to be a watcher. Is that answering a question, Julia? Yes, let us know. Feel free to ask more questions, everybody. I was just wondering, when you showed the list of components there, I thought, oh, they're in alphabetical order. And then I thought, only in English. Is the tracker only in English? Can you not post a question in your own language? The tracker is only in English because it's kind of an agreement that English is the language that everyone is going to collaborate and communicate in. And we have on Moodle.org all these different forums in English, including the General Developer Forum, where a lot of people whose first language isn't English still join the discussions. And there's a lot of developers in the tracker whose first language isn't English. So although everything has to be in English, we try and always be very considerate of people whose first language isn't English and who maybe use Google Translate or similar to be able to phrase things in English. And if you're not sure, you can always create a tracker issue or a forum post and put it at the bottom. I used a translation for this. It might not be quite right or something. Yeah, I've seen people do that and that's absolutely fine. Another thing you can do on Moodle.org is there's lots of community areas in other languages. So you can always post in your own language community asking if someone's experienced a bug or can help with a tracker issue. Thank you. Now, Andreas asks, what makes a helpful user story when writing a feature request or an improvement? Which information should I provide? Well, that's a good question, Andreas. I'm just going to go back to the presentation because what makes a good bug report? I often use this when I want to suggest an improvement. I put the steps to reproduce. Because it's a good way of describing what you're doing. And then what you expect is like what improvement you would like, what you think would be easier. For an improvement, it could be really helpful if you describe it with the steps of what you expect and what would you expect if it was an improvement and what you actually get. For a new feature, what information? Well, it really depends how big the feature is, but I would definitely recommend it starts with a discussion on Moodle.org and you'd be hoping that a lot of people would contribute to discussion to indicate that it's important for a lot of people. Because, as you know, Moodle is so full of improvements and so full of features that we only want to add more features if we're really sure that it's going to be beneficial to the majority of people. Yeah, yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Andreas. Any more questions? By the way, I did say in the chat, but I'm repeating it here, that these screenshots you've done with all the arrows, you did actually say you weren't very good at screenshots, but I think these are excellent because you're pointing out on each of these slides what you need to look at and where you need to go. So we will be sharing the presentation as well as the webinar recording when that's done shortly. Yes. Thanks, Mary. So we'll wait a little while to see if we have any more questions. You started searching the tracker not logged in and then later on you logged in. Does that make any difference to what you find or you don't need to have a tracker account to search it? You can search everything not logged in presumably. Yeah? If you're just a regular user. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Yeah, you don't need to be logged in. And again, I know when you said about components, if you're not sure, just put the component and don't worry about it. Is that the same if you're not sure whether it should be Moodle MDL or whether it should be something else? Will someone be able to fix it for you? Yep. So that's here. Now by default, you should have Moodle selected, but maybe if you found a problem on one of the Moodle community sites, then you can change it there. But again, if you made a mistake or maybe you want to report a bug about the Moodle app, where's the Moodle app somewhere here? Moodle app. If you make a mistake, it can always be as I said, checked by a team in Moodle HQ and moved to the appropriate project. Right. So if it is a problem with the Moodle app, that's got its own project rather than component in MDL, because we might not know that. Okay, thank you. Yeah, we talk MDL, but all of these projects, when you look in the interface, they say exactly what they are, like Moodle or Moodle community sites. It's just a shortened form to call it MDL. Okay. Are there any more questions? There was one thing that I forgot to say as I was going through about generally, if you search the tracker and you can't find what you're looking for, a good thing to do is to post in a forum on Moodle.org and say, hey, I've got this problem or I don't know what's wrong. Can you advise? And then we can always suggest that you create a tracker issue later for it. Because if you post first on Moodle.org, then maybe you can find out if it's specific to your own site. Or maybe you come across, someone can answer and say, oh, I've heard of that problem and they can point out the tracker issue for it. Okay. So now Nora is asking, well, we've got two questions. Okay, Nora first. Apart from and, are there any other possible search queries to refine my search? Oh, the tracker is very powerful and there's masses you can do when searching for issues. I just focused on a few things that I use all the time that I found to be the most useful and work really well for me. What works for me is to just put two terms separated by and. But if you want to do more, there's masses and masses of things you can do. I think here it links you to documentation for advanced searching that enabling you to do all different keywords, operators, functions, everything. Wow. That looks a bit too advanced for me, but it's good to know that it exists for people who want to go beyond and yes, definitely. Okay. Kat is asking, is there a page to view the issues you're currently watching or voted for? Not sure if I can't just find it. That's a good question too. Yes. Yeah. I think there is. But I don't know where it is because I end up watching so many issues that. Yeah. I was going to say I would tend to go there and I could see if I click on issues and I could see my reported issues, for example, or issues assigned to me. Oh, here you mean. Reported by me. Yes. I completely forgot about that one. But that's not watching or voted for. Well, watching if you reported, yes, but if you voted for them, I'm not sure really. Maybe if we find it later, we can post it somewhere, but I'm not sure. We could have some tracker tips in one of the Moodle.org posts. Yes, that could be good. Yeah. Anything else from anybody? That's a good sign that we exhausted the questions. Well, we've done pretty well for time. So if you wanted to go back to the slideshow, Helen, if we're not going to have any more questions, then there's just a few things I wanted to say before we finish. So keep an eye on the questions. Okay, Nora just said, you can set a filter in your profile voted. Oh, you see how it's useful to run webinars and learn things. Thank you, Nora. That's really okay. So in the absence of any more questions, I just wanted to go through with you a few things about how you can get more involved in Moodle Academy if you've enjoyed this webinar and how you can encourage others to come and join. So we have a course called Get Involved. It's linked to on the front page of Moodle Academy. And please go and suggest topics to be covered in future webinars and courses. This was one, for example, that was suggested. So we're doing it. And also, if you're knowledgeable about Moodle, you're very welcome to volunteer yourself to present webinars for us and help co-create courses on Moodle Academy. So we don't only do webinars, we also do courses and we do webinars within courses. And very close to my heart, if English is not your first language, then please help us to translate our courses on Moodle Academy into your language so that more people can access them. So we just have one copy of each course, but you can change your language to your native language and see it translated if it's been translated. So please go to our Translate Moodle Academy course and join that to find out how to do that and help us bring our courses to a wider audience. And then finally, help us spread the word. So please tell your friends and colleagues about Moodle Academy and M-E-C by telling them that, for example, if you complete our courses, you can earn a badge which you can then share on your social networks. And tell others about Moodle Academy. We have regular webinars and we have courses coming up regularly. So please join, especially if you enjoyed this one. And if you're an educator and you're an experienced Moodle educator, have a look at our Are You Ready for M-E-C quiz? There's a course for that. Again, advertised on the front page of Academy, the Moodle Educator Certification to see if you can become a certified Moodle educator. So I think that's all I have to say. So we've really enjoyed this. This has been really useful. So thank you to everyone for coming and I'm going to end now. So thank you and goodbye from me, Mary Cooch. And thank you very much, everyone, from me, Helen Foster.