Moodle continued…

Just back from the Christmas break this week, so have been mainly catching up on emails, and reviewing current position of everything. The Moodle look and feel was completed before Christmas now we need to finish off some of the functionality. The search facilities need to be enhanced, backed by user input. This will be one of my main foci in the next couple of months.

It occurred to me that while we are doing this for our own repository, it might be possible, with a little more effort, to make this an official Moodle plug-in. I think this has been mentioned before. Some of the functionality needs to be made configurable by site managers, and some help documentation needs to be put together. The rest of the work needs to be done for our own use, so there’s not much needed to make this a releasable product. Since part of our brief is personal resource management this might fit well. As far as I can find there is only one other repository based plug-in for Moodle. This links Moodle to a second server-based application know as Door. More details are available in the Moodle Review report. Feedback on this would be welcome.

I have also been working on a survey on learning objects and metadata for the participants of Meg’s eCat workshops, due to start on Tuesday 15th. Finally I have been preparing a set of questions/criteria to evaluate the six repository demos that are taking place as part of the Leeds Met JISC Repository startup project over the next week or so. The first one was held yesterday via audio conference it was very interesting. I will be reporting on each of the demos and will add documents here as they are ready.

Moodle update

The look and feel for the Moodle-based repository has now been designed and integrated into the site. This screen shot shows the front page. A few things need to be tweaked depending on which features we decided to keep/reject. I am now working on adjusting the search interface to enable users to download objects of interest into a personal space and add objects to the repository.

The portfolio plug-in (visible on the screen shot), may provide a foundation for this, but has too low a level of organisation to do the job itself. This is currently not installed on the live site.

A version of eCat is available on the Moodle site, for download. Some adjustments need to be made if this is going to be an input client of the Moodle repository. In the mean time learning objects should be packed and emailed to myself. These can be stored in the database, searched and viewed.

Moodle review

Moodle is a widely used open source eLearning course management system, available for download from: http://www.moodle.org. It offers a wide range of features which is enhanced by a whole host of plugins produced by the open source community. The following document: Moodle review, reviews Moodle as a candidate for using as a test bed repository for learning objects.

Moodle and the repository

Now the repository is up and running I’ve gone back to studying Moodle and its plug-ins. The repository is presented in Moodle as one of the side blocks (bottom right), giving access to the search facilities. What we need now is a visual means of personal space for storing learning objects. I have found a plug-in that acts as an ePortfolio giving students a personal file space. I’m hoping that this can be quickly and easily adapted to give the repository users an interface to their stored learning objects. As well as a means to organise those searched objects that they wish to retain a reference to. I will be working on this next week, along with making the repository more visually appealing.

Repository now running

The repository is now up and running. There are two versions, one attached to moodle at: http://streamline.leedsmet.ac.uk/learning/moodle/
The other is stand alone at: http://streamline.leedsmet.ac.uk/repo2/search/index.php
The front ends have not been finalised yet this will be one of the first jobs. There are some learning objects in the repository, but these will be replaced soon with more relevant ones. Ben and I are going to work on the permissions (authentication and accessibility) of the second one to enable individual work space.

Test repository

All,

I will be implementing a repository integrated with a Moodle site to store the learning objects that we will be using. The repository is what I call a “light weight” repository built using MySQL and PHP. It provides seraching facilities on the metadata using the MySQL full text indexing functionality and provides browsing using, at present, either the JACS or Learn Direct classifications. The search is also integrated into the browsing so that you may search just within a classification.

I will be liasing with Janet to get this installed on a server in Leeds (or outside if there are problems) over the next couple of weeks. I will populate the repository with some content so that people can have a look at how the system works.

Regards,

Ben