I’ve finally set up moodle so that each student in my intro course, when they log in at moodle, automatically sees their own individual custom info (such as progress on assignments, “team” assignments, personalized feedback) within a tiddlywiki iframe.
This matters because it means I no longer have to send the students to an off-campus link, and no longer have to ask students to copy and paste special custom permalink/permaview urls. (And of course their feedback benefits from all the dynamic links, css clarity, and depth of detail that I could never provide within the clunky LMS interface.)
The keystone step was having my campus tech folks install the generico filter plugin, which allows for a template (an iframe, in my case) that inserts a bit of moodle’s info (unique individual metadata about the logged-in-student) into a “dumb” string of my choice (yielding an iframe, within moodle, that loads a unique permaview for each student).
The TW interface itself (when it’s in that iframe, with lots of readonly css simplifying the GUI) is pretty opaque with respect to how and where student info is embedded. That’s because the solution makes use of “ghost / phantom / virtual tiddlers” for each student (in other words, each student’s custom “front door” permalink is actually a “missing” tiddler, set up with cascades and templates to draw on lists and other fields to assemble the personal overview).
The custom url hashtag itself is not displayed within moodle; from the student’s POV, it “just works.”
And there’s no quick way (as far as I can tell) for them to replicate the view (and hence to quickly reverse-engineer it) outside of the iframe (say, by choosing the browser’s view-source tool). So I’ve achieved what I’d call “polite privacy.”
Of course, all the info is in a hosted tiddlywiki which is “out there”, and I’m not willing to build and maintain custom encryption for each student. So in theory it’s hackable. (That is, a determined techie student could figure out how to see other students’ info – say, by inspecting the source code and using background clues about other students, plus lots of educated guesses about how student info is encoded.)
For that reason, I’ve kept away from having anything like an overall grade-status displayed in this tiddlywiki, even in the personalized iframes. But I am comfortable including qualitative feedback (“coaching” on submitted work), and an up-to-date overview of submitted work and its status.
Rather than give the whole recipe here, I would just invite educators – especially if you use moodle, but also if you’re using a different LMS with analogous features – to reach out and PM me here, if you’d like to learn more.