Tek4L

If you want a bit of light relief check out the youtube video that an enligthened member of our lms review committee had made in order to generate some student interest in the review process.

I have spent the last few days working on a new Moodle course format.

As we were busy setting up for our moodle trial we became increasingly unhappy with the default formats that display all of the topics/weeks/sections on the course homepage. This can be a bit overwhelming when you first enter a course. Also Section 0 displays at the top of all pages even if you choose to display a single topic.

There are some course menu options that give a left menu to easily access individual topics. However installing these leads to some rather nasty navigation, as you see muitiple links to the same content on the same page.

So, I have hacked the default topics format to create a ‘Single Section’ course format which just displays section 0 and news items on the course homepage, and allows access to other sections via a left menu.

I also hacked the weblib.php build_navigation function so that the name of the current section appears in the top navigation bar.

A demo site (log in as guest) is available at

http://www.host4learning.com/moodlemce/course/view.php?id=4

As part of our LMS review one of the key things we have had to look at are the possibilities of easily moving data from Blackboard (WebCT 6) to Moodle. After an extensive search it turns out that those lucky users who upgraded from WebCT4 to WebCT 6 (aka Blackboard CE6) are in a bit of a trap. Users of WebCT 4, and also native Blackboard, have utilities available that will convert courses into Moodle format.

However WebCT 6 does not have a full course export option, you can only export individual learning modules, and many of our staff are still not using the learning module functionality anyway. We were getting to the stage of thinking that conversion was going to be a very manual cut and paste effort when I happened to bump into somebody from NetSpot at a Sakai conference who mentioned that they were working with an Indian partner to implement some WebCT6 - Moodle export services.

We have provided them with some course backup files and they are currently in the process of running some trial conversions for us to look at. I will keep you posted on the outcome.