Create Programming assignments in Moodle using the Virtual Programming Lab plugin

Moodle LMS is used to teach all types of online learning courses across the globe by millions of users. Moodle Plugins allows the educators to extend Moodle’s functionality to meet their educational requirements. In this post, we will see Virtual Programming Lab plugin which can be used to create programming assignments.

If you are an educator who is teaching computer programming or related subjects you might have noticed that the standard question types available in Moodle are not conducive for coding exercises. The Virtual Programming Lab Plugin is an activity plugin which manage programming assignments in Moodle course. You can download the latest version of the Virtual Programming Lab plugin from the Moodle plugins repository here.

Salient Features of Virtual Programming Lab plugin are:

• Enable to edit the programs source code in the browser
• Students can run interactively programs in the browser
• You can run tests to review the programs.
• Allows searching for similarity between files.
• Allows setting editing restrictions and avoiding external text pasting.

The system integrates into Moodle, providing the usual characteristics of activities such as grading, groups, access control based on roles, access logs, backup and restore data, etc. It also has a large number of features tailored to the programming assignments like:

• Submission control
• File management
• Running and evaluating submissions
• Authorship control

There is another companion Question Type plugin which allows you to create coding exercises in Moodle Quizzes. You can check out the VPL Question plugin here.

The plugin comes with good documentation on its official website here – https://vpl.dis.ulpgc.es

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