This document discusses Moodle plugins developed at Harbin Institute of Technology to improve programming courses, including an Online Judge plugin to automatically grade submissions, a Moss plagiarism plugin to detect cheating, and a GitHub plugin to integrate a git repository with Moodle assignments. It provides example architectures and case studies on how these plugins have benefited both teachers and students.

1. Moodle Plugins for Highly
Efficient Programming Courses
Sun Zhigang, Su Xiaohong, Zhu
Ning, and Cheng Yanyu
Harbin Institute of Technology

2. Who am I
 Sun Zhigang (孙志岗)
 sunner@gmail.com
 Maintainer of Moodle Simplified-Chinese
language package
 Associate Professor, School of CS, Harbin
Institute of Technology, China
 Senior Product Designer, NetEase Inc.
(NASDAQ:NTES)

3. My Moodle Site
 Name: 乐学网 (Enjoy learning)
 http://cms.hit.edu.cn
 Founded in 2005
 300+ courses, 20k+ users
 Some of them are outside HIT
 One of the biggest Moodle sites in China

4. Outline
 Online Judge Assignment
 Grade C/C++/Java/Python… submissions
instantly
 Moss Plagiarism
 Detect cheatings in assignments
 GitHub Assignment
 Sync git repo logs/status to Moodle
assignments

5. Online Judge Architecture
A question
type is under Support
development sub-plugins

6. Judge Result
Multi-
testcase
s with
different Hint for wrong
points answer

7. Case Study – Online Judge
 Teachers love it
 One teacher faces 400+ students, no burden
 Students love it
 “Feel like playing online game”
 Try again and again to get higher grade
 Submitted up to 816 times for one assignment and
finally conquered it

8. Average grades of Professor Guo's C
language course in last 7 sememters
95.0
90.0
Applying online 89.6
judge from here
86.6
85.0 83.7
Average grade
80.0
75.3
75.0
70.3
70.0
67.2 67.8
65.0
60.0
2007 fall 2008 spring 2009 spring 2009 fall 2010 spring 2010 fall 2011 spring

9. Moss - Measure Of Software Similarity
 Developed by Alex Aiken from Stanford
 Supports C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Visual
Basic, JavaScript… more than 20
 Also supports plain text
 Can ignore framework codes
 Free for non-commercial use

10. Moss Plagiarism Plugin for Moodle

11. Moss Plagiarism Plugin for Moodle
 Additional features
 Confirmation
 As previous page
 Support of pdf, doc, docx, rtf and odt
documents
 History
 Compare with unenrolled students
 Multi-configures
 Separate files with wildcard

12. Case Study - Moss
 Less students do cheating
 Teachers get
 complain in the first half time
 praise in the second half time
 91.7% students support to use Moss in the
following courses

13. Github Assignment
Github Moodle
 Manage source codes  Manage students and
 Track progress groups
 Collaboration  Manage grades
 Publish  Other teaching activities

14. Github Assignment
 Collect github usernames and repository
URLs
 Group members can share repository
 Synchronize commit histories
 Statistic workload
 Direct links to github pages those teachers
& students may concern
 Inherits standard functions of assignment
type, such as grading

15. Github Assignment

16. Case Study – Github assignment
 Problems in course projects
 Rush only in last minutes
 Not all group members involved
 Github + Moodle’s solution
 Must commit code into github
 Grade in moodle upon git logs
 Github + Moodle’s problem
 Git is not easy for newcomers
 Can not cure procrastination

17. http://git.io/hmdl