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.
Spent most of last week playing around with Moodle’s WYSIWYG editor. We are about to launch a trial of Moodle and I really wasn’t happy with some of the limitations/problems with the existing HTMLarea editor.
There are moves afoot to replace the editor in version 2.0, but we can’t wait for this. Some work had been done by others on integrating tinymce3 and I was able to take this and build on it. I have managed to do a temporary integration by turning off the default editor and pasting the tinymce javascript into a theme header.html file.
Getting it running was the easy bit. I then had to integrate the Moodle image and link file browser, but thanks to reasonable documention for tinymce it wasn’t too much of a problem.
The integration was mostly achieved without having to touch core Moodle or tinymce code, so it won’t be affected by upgrades to either package. The only thing I had to hack in Moodle was the javascript form validation script as the form textarea content in tinymce was not visible to the validation script without tinyMCE.triggerSave(); being run. This is a bit of a pain, but at least it is just one line of code in one file that will need to be re-applied after Moodle upgrades.
It mostly seems to be working now, but I need to do some more extensive testing to make sure!
Details about the integration and download of the required files can be found at
http://www.host4learning.com/moodlemce/
Well we now have the our Open Source LMS shortlist down from two (Moodle and Sakai) to one (Moodle).
We had a very close look at Sakai, including attending the Ausaki07 conference in Canberra and talking to some existing users at Australian Universities. After this process we decided to remove Sakai from the shortlisting process for the following reasons:
We have just been going through the process of short-listing open source LMSs as possible replacements for Interact and Blackboard. So far it has been a reasonably straight forward process as we were able to come up with criteria that quickly reduced the list from 29 down to 8, and then from 8 to 2. This was done without having to look at detailed comparisons of feature and requirements listings.
We started with the list of open source systems at http://www.edutech.ch/lms/ev3/opensource_lms_longlist.php
This list of some 36 systems was compiled in 2005, so we went through the complete list to see which projects were still active and also had a search around to see if any new projects had started. This exercise reduced the list to 29.
We then took the ‘killer’ criteria found at the above site and modified them to suit our needs. We came up with the following six criteria that a system had to meet in order to be short-listed for futher consideration:
This reduced the list of 29 down to the following 8:
Eight systems is still a large number to conduct a more detailed evaluation against, so to narrow it down further we then applied the following criteria:
There was some discussion about the validity of this criteria, but it was decided that there were clear advantages from a support, staff recruitment, and collaboration perspective if there was a local user base. Applying this criteria reduced the list to just two systems - Moodle and Sakai. We are now moving onto the next stage of the process of installing these two systems locally and undertaking a more detailed evaluation of their features against our requirements list.
LeMill have just released a new version. If you haven’t seen it already it is worth a look. They have taken the learning object repository idea to the next level as they provide for not only content, but also methods, tools and people. This means that theoretically in one place you could find some content on basic programming skills, some methods on how to use groupwork to teach programming skills, some links to free programming tools, as well as links to other people that teach programming.
You can sign up and start adding your own content via online content creation tools, and any of the content resources you create or find can be downloaded in SCORM format.
The next feature that would be really nice to see in LeMill would be the ability to upload SCORM objects that you may have created in an offline editor like eXe.
Great to see version 1.0 of eXe available. It is an open source learning object editor. I have been keeping a close eye on this project since its inception as part of the New Zealand governments eCDF project funding. I used it in early beta mode for an online paper I teach “Web sites for teaching and learning”, which didn’t prove entirely successful due to some minor bugs - but these seem to be all ironed out in version 1. Congrats to all the people involved in this project.
A good paper here from Scott Wilson looking at the need to decentralise technologies in higher education institutions, but the points could equally apply to primary/secondary schools.
