ICT role in 21st century education and it's challenges.
Using Moodle for OpenLearn
1. Jenny Gray, Leading Technical Developer open learn, The Open University 7 May 2010
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Editor's Notes
How we’ve used Moodle to create the OU’s ocw site.
how Moodle meets OCI needs Vle integration is important for the future sustainability of OpenLearn. Single code base = single development team. No brainer. Initial product choice rationale similar to those made by the VLE but initially OpenLearn used more of the basic software even than VLE particularly re authentication, content display, forums, blogs. That’s changing now because of the need to support a smaller set of functionality, so OpenLearn is swapping over to VLE choices for all those things (though we are hoping that many will make a future core version of Moodle one day). It was only as I updated this presentation that I realised how far we’ve changed over the last year! Basic tool set: (forums, blogs, quizzes, wiki …) Currently running 1.9.8 and investigating the cost/benefits of early upgrade to Moodle 2.0 when released in a few months.
For learners Log in or browse Structure based on disciplines > subjects
Range of activities (forums, quizzes, wikis) Collaboration tools : video conf, knowledge mapping Learner tools: personal blog, activity reports
Its heavily customised isn’t it? Yes, and its getting worse because of mainstreaming efforts. Most of the contrib activities used have been written by the OU and made available more widely.
Nb – now we have authentication linked in with wider OU websites so we’re not using email authentication any more but instead an external auth plug-n. maybe refer briefly to vital here.
These things all fill a need which the original Moodle product did not address OU production based on authors writing in structured content xml OU authentication system (external sign up and login) Language e.g. learning journal = blog, user description = about me Themes – OU brand styling, improved navigation and meta tagging for SEO
Rationale: pulling people back to the site, getting our content aggregated into ocw search facilities.
Rationale: improved finding of related material. Users don’t all understand our topic categories, some units fit in several places. Extends that and tags block. Had hoped would be in moodle 2.0, but doesn’t seem to have made the cut.
Rationale: pathways to other related material. User contributions are possible There are other blocks in contrib that do similar things, but often at site level not course, or not quite how we wanted. Includes Folksemantic integration from those nice people at COSL.
Rationale: aids users locating suitable material for their abilities. Course home page display is as a label added by our publishing method, nothing clever!
Open to our own search engine spider as well, and this allows us to skin our search results within the Moodle site. Focus is on getting the keywords in the right place Sharable? Maybe. Trap 404 errors and run through DB lookup to convert to real Moodle url. (text entry is ignored – shortcode is all important).
As you can see we’ve felt the need to change a significant amount of the product, but done within the plug-in framework wherever possible so we can take advantage of many of the underpinnings that Moodle gives us
Should make it clear that many of the criticisms I have about the code quality and framework are being addressed in Moodle 2.0 so hopefully this will be an easier platform to build upon. Because oppenness wasn’t in the plan for the original product it doesn’t do RSS feed, search engine access & optimisation, friendly urls etc which make for a large number of fundamental changes to make a really successful OCW site.
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