By Wilco Alsemgeest on 2018-05-16 17:10 in Certification Exam & Platform Team

Thank you;

First of all, we would like to thank Claudia Weber-Lenck for all the work she did during the last four years as member of the Certification Team.

We wish you all the luck for the future endeavours.

Volunteers:

The Certification team is always looking for volunteers in all levels of the team (Operations & Marketing and Exam & Platform)

For the Exam & Platform team were are looking for the following support, this can be temporary or long term.

 

• Developers to help us develop certain support extensions based on the open development principle.
  Creating a process to use Github for website property version management, development, improvement and maintaining the extension to be created.
  
  
• Developers to help us create the Joomla Developer Exam.
  Creating, updating and maintaining questions for the exam.
  
  
• Platform maintainers / Integrators, volunteers who like to work on maintaining the extensions used within the platform, integrate new ones or replace current extensions to support new processes or improve current processes.

From JoomlaCamp Essen until JAB!

Translators

 

Volunteers who have joined the different translation teams for the languages they can translate, all started the translation on Crowdin.

• 3 for French
• 5 for German
• 3 for Italian
• 7 for Dutch
• 3 for Spanish

All translators and proofreaders were certified before they joined the translation team and are not a Joomla learning partner.

 

The English exam has been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Wilco added the questions and answers for all the languages (except Italian) in exam system and updated the English questions / answers, based on comments from the translators.

 

Moodle / Shika

 

Jeroen & Chris have been testing the Shika LMS from TechJoomla, as alternative for Moodle. Parth did some revisions, based on the Fit / Gap analysis that was made during the Essen sprint in February. Main issues were the way the LMS calculates the total points in case of multiple response questions and a multilingual option.

 

Website

 

• Non-public documents (Dashboard etc.) have been moved from the Exam website to the Certification site.

• Safe exam browser system has been rebuilt including new passwords.

• A new custom field plugin was created to replace Widgetkit for latest news photos and gallery.

• Replaced the exam distribution file system, with a special session download plugin.

@JAB

General

 

• The replacement of the current situation with multiple properties and an external exam system will be finished before January, 2019.
• The idea is to have the first Joomla Developer exam @ Joomladay Germany, this will only be possible if there are volunteers who join the team to work on this, as described in the topic at the beginning of the report.

Exam system (Moodle / Shika)

 

• Day 1: further tested the Shika LMS component, checking the available functions against our specifications. The Fit / Gap analyse, was then updated to reflect this.
• Day 2: we used to sit with Parth Lawate and Ashwin Date from TechJoomla to go through the Fit / Gap analysis, discussing each ‘gap’. Some of these had already been solved, in other cases solved these together or deciding on a acceptable workaround. One example of this is the possible use of language strings for the Q&A’s, if this works we will only need one exam per type (e.g. Administration), instead of one exam per language. This will reduce complexity and maintenance.
• Other gaps were assigned to JCP members or Techjoomla for further analysis / work.
• We will implement the changes and/or workarounds and test these. The Fit / Gap analysis will be updated to reflect any necessary changes to the MoSCoW and priority assignments.
• It was agreed that Techjoomla will begin working on the required changes after the next major update of Shika (approx. end June 2018) that is currently being prepared for release.
• Techjoomla will come with a planning so that we can achieve our deadline of going live with a fully functional and tested implementation at the end of 2018.

Thanks to Parth, Ashwin and Techjoomla for the active participation, we are confident that together we can implement the LMS the JCP wants and needs.    

Website - Topics and future actions

At the two days sprint we discussed different topics related to the Certification team websites.

The main topic is removing, migrating and replacing parts of the system too and within the main Certification website.

 

• Implementing RSTickets!Pro.
• Implementing Shika from TechJoomla to replace Moodle
• Replacing J2Store with the Shika Payment structure.
• Moving RSForm!Pro to RSTickets!Pro.
• Create an extension for easy question management based on language files.
• Create an extension to support the review process of questions.
• Add an import/export feature for translation purpose
• Certified Users Directory will be moved to a central location.
  The information will be stored in the Identity property so people can give consent on displaying the information in the Certification Directory or other properties like Volunteers Portal, Resource Directory or anywhere else.

For the future it means that:

• Exam.joomla.org will be completely merged within Certification.joomla.org, thus removed.

• Moodle the exam system will be removed.

• Certification website will be changed as well.