Developer Profile – Joseph Rézeau

This is part of a blog series of short profiles on plugin developers within the Moodle community. Today it is Joseph Rézeau.

Tell us something about yourself

I am a retired English teacher and researcher. I taught English at secondary school level and at university for the last 15 years of my career.  I’ve been interested in using computers for teaching languages since 1983. At university, we used WebCT and then Moodle.

When did you first start programming?

I wrote my very first programs on a Commodore 64, in Basic. Language learning and games.

When did you first encounter Moodle?

When I was a senior lecturer at my university, and Moodle replaced WebCT.

What did you use Moodle for?

I used to use Moodle for my online language courses, of course. Now I do some programming as a hobby.

What was your first Moodle plugin? Why did you write it?

My first Moodle plugin was the REGEXP question type. I wrote it because Moodle was missing (and still is, to this day) a shortanswer question type with student’s answer analysis based on regular expressions.

What is your latest Moodle plugin & why did you write it?

I think my latest Moodle plugin was the Export Glossary to Quiz Block..

What would you say to someone who is considering writing a Moodle plugin?

Have a good look at how similar existing core plugins work.

Final Thoughts

When programing for Moodle (as, I expect, for any Open Source project) you can always rely on the help of the community. That is great!

Some Plugins

This is a list of the plugins that Joseph has contributed to that are currently (Jan 2012) in the Moodle plugins database. To view all these in the Moodle.org Plugin database check this page