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.

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 my sons had a great time last year getting stuck into Scratch, so I thought it might be worth moving them up another level to a more fully blown game development environment

http://www.microsoft.com/express/gamedevelopment/

Our first problem was our graphics card was not up to scratch, so having replaced that just before xmas we are now all set to get started in the new year.

We are going to use the c# version rather than c++. It is a major learning curve compared to Scratch, so it will be interesting to see how they get on. I will keep you posted.

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:

• The front-end functionality is not yet mature enough to present a feasible alternative to Blackboard. Many of the tools are still in the development stage and provide limited feature sets, so would present a step backwards compared to what our academics are currently used to.
• There are some usability issues with the interface that would cause problems for new users, and frustration to more experienced users. The main problem is around the use of iFrames and the need to constantly use the in-built refresh button to bring up the page you want, rather than a cached page in the frame. While the developers are working on a version with no iframes, this would not be available in time for a 2008 trial.
• There are only a limited number of southern hemisphere installations, with only 1 Australian University using Sakai as a full LMS at this stage.
• There are no stand-out features that put Sakai ahead of other LMSs, that would warrant overlooking the above shortcomings.

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:

1. Integrated/homogeneous learning environment (not just a collection of separate open source tools)
2. Active development, with at least 2 full time developers, multiple part-time/voluntary developers, and new releases within last 12 months
3. Active community with users contributing to support forums, documentation, etc.
4. Basic e-learning tools are available, assignments dropboxes, online testing, discussion forums, etc.
5. Basic documentation is available
6. English language version and preferably multilingual

This reduced the list of 29 down to the following 8:

• ATutor - http://www.atutor.ca/
• Claroline - http://www.claroline.net/
• dotLRN - http://dotlrn.org/
• Ilias - http://www.ilias.de/index.html
• KEWL - http://kngforge.uwc.ac.za
• Moodle - http://moodle.org
• OLAT - http://www.olat.org/website/en/html/index.html
• Sakai - http://www.sakaiproject.org/

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:

• Existing medium/large scale University installations in Australasian region

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.

I posted a few weeks ago about Scratch from MIT. I introduced it to my sons and it has been a real hit. Not only have they been self motivated to learn all the ins and outs of it, but they have also organised some lunch time sessions at school to teach other kids how to use it. The first sessions were so popular there were not enough laptops to go around. They have had to limit numbers and have promised to run more sessions next term for those that missed out.

Combined with this, the online scratch community is providing lots of examples for them to download and learn from, as well as feedback on the projects that they upload.

No offence to their teachers, but it has been the most active and engaging learning experience they have had this year, and it has only involved about 15 minutes input on my part.

In Derek’s recent post about the launch of the Nelson Loop he wonders about the danger of under-estimating the ongoing costs of sustaining such networks. The problems he outlines don’t just apply to the introduction of high speed loops, but to the sustainability of IT infrastructure in schools in general, particularly at the primary school level.

I was talking to a principal from one of our local schools recently about this, who had three very profitable years in an ICT cluster and now has some decent network infrastructure in place, good ratio of laptops to teachers/pupils, etc. but is struggling to employ technical support in order to maintain it, both due to a lack of funds and a lack of availability of technical staff - who at present are in high demand in the commercial sector.

There would be no point adding a connection to a high speed loop on top of this without building in the ongoing technical support.

I think there are some solutions, and the cluster concept is one of them, with pooled technical resources serving a number of schools in a district. I know some schools already do this, but perhaps it is time for some sort of centrally planned/funded model. I think the introduction of high speed loops also needs to be seen as an opportunity to rationalise some of the basic application infrastructure. There is so much duplication of effort around such simple things as setting up and maintaining school websites. This sort of thing could be easily pulled back into a single central server.

As always though money is the big question - but perhaps if the Ministry drops MS Office licenses for PCs like they have done for Macs already they might at least have a bit of a seed fund to get things going