EduGeek Journal » Moodle

Been Too Long Since We’ve Had a Good BlackBoard Jab

Matt Crosslin — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:06:50 +0000

Courtesy of Metamedia and Pete – the Adventures of Bollywood Blackboard-wala:

Ep. 1 Paying The Annual Licensing Fee

Ep. 2 Dealing with Customers Looking at the Open Source Alternative

Ep. 3 Dealing with the Patent Invalidation Ruling

Ep. 4 Confronting the Open Source Challenge

Ep. 5 Live from Blackboardwala World 2008

Ep. 6 Dealing with Customers Looking at the Open Source Alternative, Again

Ep. 7 Improving Customer Support

Ep. 8 The Patent Pledge Explained

Ep. 9 The Future of Blackboardwala

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Ready for This? Moodle 1.9 Was Just Released

Matt Crosslin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:51:37 +0000

Are you ready for it? I have to say that I was not ready, basically because I had put off some programming stuff based on the notion that I needed to “wait until Moodle 1.9 was released to move forward.” Doh! But, other than little personal kick in the pants (that I needed), all I can say: about time! It’s good that they did wait to release this version (it’s been nearly a year since 1.8). They went through the longest Beta testing in Moodle history and even had a bug-a-thon to get the glitches out. So that should lead to a pretty slick, nice new version of their product.

I say “should” because Moodle is so popular that I can’t download the new version off of their overloaded download servers!

But here are the new features that Moodle highlighted in their release announcement (all of which sound pretty sweet):

The Moodle gradebook is all new – designed from the ground up to support expansion and integration with other systems.
For all you pedagogo-philes out there, they added integrated support for outcomes. What this means is that learning goals can be tied to individual courses and activities and can be graded.
Moodle code has been review and tweaked to obtain a “huge” increase in performance. This will apparently be most noticeable on large sites.
One word: tagging! They made tagging core to the programming. Users, blogs, courses, and even external sites can now be easily linked together through simple tags. They mention sites like Flickr and YouTube, so I can’t wait to test drive this one.

I also have to note that test banks can be shared across a Moodle installation (nice) and they have created a single-sign on e-Portfolio integration with the Mahara open-source e-Portfolio program (sweet). You can read a full list of release notes on the Moodle site.

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Moodle 1.8 is Unleased on the Unsuspecting World

Matt Crosslin — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:49:27 +0000

They said it would be out by March, and they just made it by March 31st – Moodle 1.8. And with this release, Moodle continues to put the hurt on the other Learning Management Systems out there. Here are some of the features in the new version of Moodle:

Strict XHTML 1.0 compliance. Not Transitional – Strict! Wow….
Moodle Network. This is still being developed, but promises to be awesome. From the Moodle site:“We can now set up peer Moodle installations allowing users to roam from one site to another, using comprehensive SSO and transparent remote enrollments. Administrators at the originating Moodle install can see logs of remote activity. You can also run your Moodle in “Hub” mode where any Moodle install can connect and users roam across.”
That is just awesome, even though I’m not sure I even fully understand what all it can do.
Improved Roles. Role definition is a great tool is Moodle, because you can create and define roles anyway you want now. For example, I created a “Blog Commenter” role on this site that allows a person to comment on the blog and nothing else. Kind of nice. Of course, Moodle already has a good set of predefined roles, including separate levels for Instructional Designer, Teacher, and Non-Editing Teacher. But this is nice all the way around.

I was also poking around in Moodle, and found that it has a built in course request system. That would be huge where I work – We have to use a clunky and separate system to allow instructors to request a new course.

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Learning Management Systems Go 3-D With Sloodle

Matt Crosslin — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:39:32 +0000

The EduGeeks (all two of us for now) were discussing the Blog Tags sidebar last night. Katrina had noticed that the tags were all the same size. I looked in to it and found that each tag will grow in size depending on the number of times they are used. The more popular ones will be larger. So, my prediction is that the “Second Life” tag will be huge before too long. We all seem to be really excited about Second Life. All two of us, that is.

One fairly new project that I am really excited about takes the popular open-source learning management system Moodle and mixes it with the interactive social environment of Second Life. This program is called Sloodle (naturally). The goal of this project is to have a seamless integration between the two programs.

There are many ideas that they have for this. One is to connect the text chat function in Second Life to the database of Moodle so that the chats are archived for those that can’t make it. A side benefit of this is that people who can’t run Second Life on their machines can participate in the chat through the old fashioned method – in their browser. That’s so 2006….

There are several ideas being thrown around. One is a quiz block that you sit on in SL and answer questions for your Moodle exam. One that we may end up using here at the journal allows an avatar in Second Life to post an entry to their blog in Moodle (Moodle is the program that this site is running on). Jeremy Kemp recently posted a video on YouTube that demonstrates this function. Pretty interesting stuff:

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