The Open University’s SocialLearn project looks like it is still worth keeping an eye on. No sign of any beta access yet, but they are obviously still putting quite a bit of research and work into it. An update worth a glance from 7 April 2010 here …
A good summary of some of the big changes coming in Moodle 2.0:
http://blog.hansdezwart.info/2009/12/10/did-you-know-moodle-2-0-will-online-educa-2009/
Some more background to the Open University’s SocialLearn platform development.
Lots of other people playing around in this area also, but the OU has resources to throw at a project like this, so it will be really interesting to see how it shapes up. It will also be interesting to see where it leaves Moodle in the OU mix medium-long term, as moodle is very much focused on taking traditional approaches to education online at the moment.
An interesting sounding project from the Open University
http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/sociallearn/2009/09/10/sociallearn-announced-softly/
Yet another new system claiming to be the latest and greatest in online learning
“The first course management system built on a social networking platform” they claim – but it is interesting to note that the key features of their new system that they highlight on their homepage are – manage attendance, upload documents and course material, and manage student grades – doesn’t sound awfully social constructivitist to me 
If you are interested in online discussion, discourse based learning, etc. then check out Google Wave if you haven’t done so already.
Well, while I am in the winter wonderland of Queenstown somebody from Sun kindly added a comment on my previous post about Wonderland to point out that it does not run on Mac, as it is no longer dependent on Java 1.6. I have just installed the server and client on my Macbook Pro and it runs fine. I am looking forward to getting the server installed on a linux box so I can play around with some of the shared application functionality.
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
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.