Stage 3 and 4 Implementation

In March, the Chat functionality developed during stage 3 was added to the environment as a Wednesday evening advice session. The idea behind this session was that teachers would be logged into the chat session and would answer students’ questions as they were asked. These sessions continued to run through March but were changed to monthly session in April due to other teaching commitments.

During early April, the quizzes developed during stage 4 were added to the environment to aid with revision. As an exercise students were asked to attempt these quizzes as part of a homework exercise. On completion, the results would be reviewed and used to gauge areas that might need reviewing.

Problems found during Stages 3 and 4

During stage 3, several students complained about being dropped from the chat session at random times. This again was a problem that had not occurred during the testing carried out during the development on the testing platform. Students stated (through the bugs forum) that at random times the panel containing the details of current participants would display an error stating that the database was overloaded or missing. This would cause the chat session to crash and drop them from it resulting in the student having to close the session window and re-enter.

Initially it was thought that this was simply a problem with users being timed out due to being idle. Moodle Chat sessions use this function to remove users who have terminated their connection to the session. Basically if a user is deemed to have taken no action for a significant amount of time (5 minutes by default) then they are removed from the session. Again through research using moodle.org it was found that this idle timeout could be extended by modifying certain variables within the chat session code. This modification was carried out but proved unsuccessful in curing the problem.

After significantly more research into the problem, it was found that it was caused by the amount of concurrent database connections required to sustain the chat session. When many users were engaged in a chat session, the database was being overloaded at the web server and was causing this problem. Again this problem could not be solved as the hosting company were unable to remedy the issue and the only alternative offered by the Moodle creators was a daemon version of the Chat module. This daemon version would provide greater stability but required installing as a background application on the web server, which was inappropriate given the current hosting solution.

Unexpected Benefits

During March a large number of students were snowed in at home and unable to attend school. During this time several chat sessions were used by the Head of ICT to help students catch up on missed work and allow them to continue with their assignments while away from school. Although this facility would be wasted on less motivated students, due to the maturity and respect of the students at LPS school, the sessions proved to be a great asset resulting in several students being able to keep up with the rest of the class.

This also highlighted the fact that as long as the student was suitably motivated, the environment could be used to assist students who may be absent through no fault of their own such as illness.