Picture of Oliver Foster
Plugin Development - Email
by Oliver Foster - Monday, 12 September 2016, 10:48 AM
 

Whether it be just a contact form within the course or a sure fire way of getting assessment completions to be emailed to a teacher in the background (Moodle makes a hash of this!) - it would be just amazingly good, because Moodle sucks and Adapt rules.

Would require a "sendto" email address(es) list, amendable body text (either what comes from the input box or a pre-formatted template in the options for the component)

I can see this as a component AND an extension - the extension to send background performance based facts, and a component to send interface-based emails from the course.

 

https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt_framework/issues/1041

Picture of Helen Bailey
Re: Plugin Development - Email
by Helen Bailey - Monday, 12 September 2016, 11:00 AM
 

+1 from me - would be epic to have this as a feature.

Picture of Sam Tsiu
Re: Plugin Development - Email
by Sam Tsiu - Monday, 12 September 2016, 4:58 PM
 

+1

This would be tremendously helpful!

Adapt rules!

Picture of Matt Leathes
Re: Plugin Development - Email
by Matt Leathes - Monday, 12 September 2016, 5:43 PM
 

Should make clear here that Adapt would NOT be able to handle the emailing part of it... you need a email-capable server - or a service like Mailgun - to be able to generate and send emails, so for anything like this you'd have to configure the extension with details of the server/service so that Adapt could pass data to it for it to send on.

Picture of Simon Date
Re: Plugin Development - Email
by Simon Date - Thursday, 15 September 2016, 11:53 AM
 

We've been discussing the need for a component that does this. Lot's of lecturers at King's College want their students to enter 'essay style' answers and aren't satisfied with the MCQ type answers that Adapt assessments usually contain. Whilst there is options like the Open Text Input. Information that is entered here is 'lost' when submitted.

This could have a few options. You could automatically get the email addresses from the LMS of the learner and teacher and have it automatically email, or have the learner add it manually. You could also provide pre-built forms that are emailed out or even converted into a pdf/word doc. Similar to the H5P documentation tool.

Whilst 'sendto' isn't an ideal solution (personally when I use it it tries to use the mac email client which I haven't even setup yet), I feel it is a start and learners can be told to copy + paste the text into their own email client as well. If this isn't doesn't work then looking into a mailing server may be worthwhile as Matt suggested.

The extension sounds of interest too, kind of like a poor man's xAPI. I feel like this would be harder to create. Helen could you think of any specific stats you would like to track with this?

I'll be happy to create this component or assist others in doing so. I should be free next week to start.

Cheers,

Simon

Picture of Matt Leathes
Re: Plugin Development - Email
by Matt Leathes - Thursday, 15 September 2016, 12:43 PM
 

Simon - one thing to bear in mind: if you try to go down the 'send via user's own email client' route is that there's a hard limit on the amount of data you can pre-populate the email with. Varies from email client to email client I think. It doesn't allow for much. Copy+paste may have to be the only solution.

Also, the email address of the user isn't generally available to SCORM (you might get lucky and find that it's the used for cmi.student_id (like it is in Moodle) but I wouldn't count on that. The email address of the teacher definitely won't be.

Picture of Oliver Foster
Re: Plugin Development - Email
by Oliver Foster - Friday, 16 September 2016, 10:53 AM
 

There are some smtp services with restful apis and javascript libraries.

Might be worth looking at https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=strict&q=javascript+smtp

Picture of Oliver Foster
Re: Plugin Development - Email
by Oliver Foster - Friday, 16 September 2016, 11:26 AM
 

actually, it look like there's only one... http://smtpjs.com/ and i'm not sure how secure / reliable it is. 

 

it was written by this guy:

https://blog.dotnetframework.org/2016/02/02/send-email-via-client-side-javascript/

https://blog.dotnetframework.org/author/dananos/

Picture of Matt Leathes
Re: Plugin Development - Email
by Matt Leathes - Friday, 16 September 2016, 11:38 AM
 

yeah probably safest to use something like Mailgun, Mailjet, Amazon SES etc.

Picture of Oliver Foster
Re: Plugin Development - Email
by Oliver Foster - Friday, 16 September 2016, 6:29 PM
 

Yuuup.