Had emails and met with Mike R of philosophy. Over a year ago(?), he proposed creating a peer-review module for Moodle. This module is a utility. It
- allows students to upload a document,
- distributes those to x other students in a way that anonymizes the source account,
- allows each reviwer to upload a review and on that event updates the authors account to say a review has been received
- allows the author to upload a revised version of their document
Interface the student sees tells them current status of their document (e.g. uploaded, out for review, reviewed, re-uploaded) and provides links to reviews.
Interface for instructor allows that person to invoke the distribution of documents, see status of all documents.
The module does not provide for the actual review process, nor is it a tutorial on how to do a review - it is a utility for managing files.

MR believed in Sept 2010 that implementation on UVic server would be unproblematic. He got a grant and hired a programmer to write the code. MR has been running the code on a test server (using bogus account names) and reports not problems. He says the project is 90% complete and the remaining work is cosmetic and tweaking. He went back to the UVic moodle people who said implementing on the UVic would be difficult for a couple of reasons:
1) the module is not tested enough
2) the module may not provide enough functionality beyond what is already offered in other modules to justify inclusion

I have to find out what, if any, process there is to get a module approved. It appears that UVic has nothing between the production server and little sandbox instances, so it's not clear how one can get a module produced at UVic through a process and onto the production server. Should also see if there is a test suite or something similar that we can run against this module to see what happens.

MR reports that no similar module is available on the UVic instance. In the Moodle world, the closest similar modules are much more tutorials on how to write a review rather than utilities on distributing documents and reporting on document and review status.

There's also the issue of who is responsible for maintaining the module and upgrading it when UVic upgrades to the next version of Moodle.

I might also ask about how MR had the impression a year ago that implementation shouldn't be a huge problem, and then this year is told that implementation will be hard.