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** Changed in: mahara
       Status: Fix Committed => Fix Released

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1940346

Title:
  Submit portfolios via Moodle through Ouriginal for similarity checking

Status in Mahara:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  This is an integration project between Mahara and Moodle. The specs
  here refer mainly to Mahara and the Moodle work will be conducted on
  the Ouriginal (formerly Urkund) Moodle plugin.

  Background
  --------------

  Currently, the Mahara assignment submission plugin doesn't store
  portfolios in Moodle. Archives are created after the grading process
  has been completed for a number of reasons:

  - Portfolios can be revoked and another one submitted without making an archive first.
  - Comments can be left on the portfolio (and not just in Moodle) and become part of the archived submission.
  - The archive is not looked at but the actual live portfolio to which the grader looses access once the grading has been completed.

  Mahara can be connected to Moodle via LTI. The connection is only
  Moodle to Mahara and not reverse, i.e. Moodle is the IdP. The Mahara
  assignment submission plugin uses LTI only for authentication. The
  rest is done via (other) web services.

  The Mahara portfolio archive contains all available export formats,
  i.e. Leap2A (XML), HTML, and PDF (experimental, if turned on).

  Ouriginal cannot process ZIP files at the moment.

  Envisaged high level workflow
  ----------------------------------

  1. Lecturer sets up assignment in Moodle, marks it as Mahara
  assignment and that it needs to go through the Ouriginal workflow on
  portfolio submission when a portfolio is locked.

  Note: For this first implementation we assume that only portfolios
  that are locked from editing are submitted to Ouriginal because it is
  clearer then that the portfolio is ready for review.

  2. Student submits their portfolio to that Moodle assignment.

  3. Student's portfolio is routed to Ouriginal to be checked before the
  lecturer reviews the portfolio.

  4. Ouriginal presents its report in the usual way in Moodle.

  When a portfolio is resubmitted to the same assignment because the
  lecturer wants the student to make some changes, then the portfolio
  goes through the same steps, and a new report is generated in
  Ouriginal and presented in Moodle. Only the latest report is displayed
  in Moodle.

  Assumptions
  ---------------

  - Mahara does not connect to Ouriginal, but sends files to Moodle, which already has all web services connections in place to connect to Ouriginal.
  - Ouriginal can only check textual information, e.g. plain text, text processing documents, PDFs where text can be highlighted, presentation files.
  - Conserve resources as best as possible and only send files that Ouriginal can process, in particular because Ouriginal cannot process ZIP files.
  - The similarity score does not need to be displayed in Mahara or on the live portfolio. Having it available in Moodle only for the files in question is sufficient.
  - Moodle assignments are set up to lock the portfolio upon submission.
  - The normal Ouriginal functionality as available in the Moodle assignment plugin will not be altered.
  - The normal Mahara archiving workflow is not affected by this functionality. Currently, an archive is not possible via the plugin.

  Approach
  -----------------
  When a portfolio has been submitted to the Moodle assignment, a web services call is made to Mahara by a cron job that initiates the export of the portfolio (a single page or a single collection). This export is a 'light' version of the PDF export and only contains the PDF of the portfolio and files included in the portfolio that are of file types supported by Ouriginal.

  Mahara stores this 'light' export in a temporary directory. It exposes
  that file to Moodle via a web services call  that allows Moodle to
  access it and unzip it for transfer to Ouriginal, and the temporary
  file on Mahara is deleted. If Ouriginal failed to send a positive
  response to Moodle, the export is attempted again on the next cron job
  run as per normal Moodle workflow.

  After that, it's the existing Ouriginal workflow with Moodle: A
  similarity score is generated and displayed in the gradebook, and the
  files are made accessible as well in Moodle as well so that their
  actual score can be reviewed.

  Risks
  --------

  1. Higher similarity score

  Issue: When students use templates to create their portfolio, their
  similarity score may be quite high when the template contains
  instructions and other text that is the same on every portfolio.

  Mitigation: We don't include page description and instruction fields,
  i.e. page instructions and text block instructions. This won't help if
  a regular text block is added to a portfolio and instructions written
  in there rather than the instruction functionality used, however, it
  should cut down on general instructions.

  2. Display

  Issue: Portfolios may contain a large number of items that return a
  similarity report – displaying these all within the assignment
  overview report may make the page quite busy.

  Mitigation: Consider limiting the number of reports that are displayed
  for a student's submission on the overview report and provide a
  different method to view the full list of reports for a student's
  submission.

  3. Performance

  Issue: Large portfolios can contain a lot of different media and thus
  slow down the system or the export because certain elements are not
  exported, and they need to be extracted.

  Mitigation: We can look into performance tuning and the new PHP zip
  streaming library if it became a problem.

  4. Reports out of date

  Issue: Portfolios are not always 'locked' when submitting them as an
  assignment – if a student is allowed to continually update their
  portfolio, this would quickly mean the export would be out of date,
  and it would be hard to identify when or if a new export should be
  generated and sent to generate a similarity report.

  Mitigation: The first phase of this project requires the portfolio is
  locked while grading is underway. This is already dealt with in the
  solution design.

  
  ---

  This work is sponsored by Dublin City University

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