why moodle? an overview of free (open source) e-learning tools (icalt 2005 + dmi experiences)

1 6th Workshop “SEERE”, Ravda, 18-23 September 2006

Why Moodle?An overview of free (open source) e-learning tools

(ICALT 2005 + DMI experiences)

Živana Komlenov

Department of Mathematics and Informatics

Faculty of Science

University of Novi Sad


Topics:

• Why Moodle?

• Latest Moodle release (1.6)

• Fifth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT'05)

• 5-8 July 2005, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

– “An Evaluation of Open Source E-Learning Platforms Stressing Adaptation Issues”

• DMI extensions and customization


Why Moodle?


Why Moodle?

• Course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities.

• Can be downloaded and used on any computer (including web hosts)

• Can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University.

• Has been evolving since 1999 (since 2001 with the current architecture).

• Major improvements in accessibility and display flexibility developed in version 1.5.

• The current version is 1.6 - released in June 2006.• Designed to be compatible, flexible and easy to modify.


Why Moodle?

• Written using the popular and powerful PHP language, which runs on any computer platform with a minimum of effort.

• Built in a highly modular fashion and uses common technologies such as shared libraries, abstraction, and Cascading Style Sheets to define the interfaces.

• Can be linked to other systems such as mail servers or student directories.

• Runs without modification on Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X, NetWare and any other systems that support PHP, including most web hosting providers.

• Data stored in a single database: MySQL and PostgreSQL are best supported, but it can also be used with commercial databases, ADO and generic ODBC database access, since it uses ADOdb.

Martin Dougiamas


Why Moodle?

• Strong Open Source community

moodle.org (using Moodle to run it)

– large and diverse user community with over 130,000 registered users on the official site alone

– speaking 75 languages in 163 countries– 15657 registered sites (12 of those from Serbia)– 177 registered Moodle sites that are larger than 5000 users– The site with the most users is of course moodle.org with 41

courses and 135248 users.– The site with the most courses is HSU Moodle (Humboldt

State University, Arcata, CA) with 12288 courses and 42121 users.

• Commercial guidance and extra helpmoodle.com (+ partners)


Why Moodle?

Moodle sites world distribution


Why Moodle?

Total known Moodle sites


Why Moodle?

Total moodle.org users


Why Moodle?

• The real number of current active Moodle installations is unknown, but Moodle is downloaded over 500 times a day.

• The largest single site has reported over 12,000 courses and over 40,000 students, and the Open University of the UK is building a Moodle installation for their 200,000 users.

• Their Learning and Teaching Office has started a new programme worth nearly £5 million to build a comprehensive online student learning environment for the 21st century.

• The development, which started in May of 2006, and will be fully operational for February 2007 courses, will see the largest use of Moodle in the world.


Why Moodle?

Moodle downloads per month


Why Moodle?

Google Trend history


Why Moodle?• Moodle market share according to Alexa Web

Traffic for LMS Suppliers says that:– Moodle is only below Blackboard, above all

other VLE, including WebCT.– Alexa’s Traffic Rank for moodle.org is 8,540.– Speed is average (59% of sites are slower).– Average load time is 2.5 seconds.– There are 3,008 other sites that link to this site.

Daily reach according to Alexa


Latest Moodle release (1.6)


Moodle 1.6

• Moodle 1.6 is available for download since Jun 2006.

• Over a year of new features developed by the community of Moodle developers

• Countless bug fixes and a lot of restructuring under the hood

• Some of the major highlights include:– 100% Unicode support - all existing languages are now

compatible and can be mixed wherever you like– New documentation wiki - a one-stop shop for all

documentation, integrated from within each page of Moodle itself

– Database module - a new activity module for collaborative collection and display of arbitrary data


Moodle 1.6

– Blogs - for ongoing personal reflections, viewable by course, by group, by individual etc.

– New reports - plug-in reports enable you to create and share new report types (new statistics reports are also included)

– Questions - quiz question types are now a centralised structure so any module will be able to use them in future

– My Moodle - a new customizable dashboard page with an overview of all your courses and what is new

– Multiple groups - users can be part of any number of groups in a course

– IMS content packages - can now be loaded as resources– Chameleon theme - can be customised in your browser

on the fly


Moodle 1.6

– Granularised backup - allows you to backup only selected activities

– Multi Enrolments - use any number of Moodle's enrolment methods at once, including the new IMS Enterprise methods

– More comfortable course editing (student view etc.)– Importing PowerPoint slides into Moodle lessons (only

functional for simple slides, not very successful with our SE lessons)

NOTE: Moodle 1.6 requires PHP 4.3.0 (or PHP 5.1.0) and MySQL 4.1.16 (4.1.12 if you use latin languages only).


Moodle 1.6

• Moodle 1.6.1 was released on July 20th 2006, bringing lots of bug fixes, and some new features, such as:

– Enhanced frontpage settings

– Frontpage can now be different for logged in users, changed category list display

– Improved administration page layout

• Moodle 1.6.2 release (September 12th):

– Fixed a lot of security issues

– And other bugs• Several in Lesson module

• Glossary problems with non-ASCII characters


Moodle 1.7

• Next version of Moodle, 1.7, is expected very soon, and is planned to introduce some interesting features as well:– Roles

• Permissions based on fine-grained capabilities allow all kinds of roles to be created and assigned in all contexts around Moodle.

– XML Database schema • Added support for MS-SQL with more databases to come.

– Unit testing framework• Making it easier for developers to write test code, which

should ultimately lead to a more reliable Moodle.– Improvements to the quiz

• The teacher can configure comments that are displayed to the student at the end of their attempt, with the comment displayed depending on the student's score.

– Improvements to some core question types


Sabine Graf & Beate List“An Evaluation of Open Source E-Learning Platforms Stressing Adaptation Issues”

Women’s Postgraduate College of Internet Technologies

Vienna University of Technology

This research has been funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science, and Culture, and the European Social Fund (ESF) under grant

31.963/46-VII/9/2002


ICALT’05

• An e-learning course should match students’ needs and desires as closely as possible, and adapt during course progression.

• This paper presents an evaluation of open source e-learning platforms with the aim of finding the platform most suitable for extending to an adaptive one.

• The extended platform will be utilized in an operational teaching environment, so the overall functionality of the platform is also very important.

• The evaluation is based on the qualitative weight and sum approach - a well-established approach for the evaluation of software products.


ICALT’05

• QWS establishes and weights a list of criteria.• There are six qualitative levels of importance for the

weights. Frequently used symbols are:– E = essential– * = extremely valuable– # = very valuable– + = valuable– | = marginally valuable– 0 = not valuable.

• The weight of a criterion determines the range of values that can be used to measure a product’s performance.

• For a criterion weighted # the product can only be judged #, +, |, or 0, but not *:lower-weighted criteria cannot overpower higher-weighted criteria.


ICALT’05

• QWS approach was selected for this evaluation because of the differentiated results, which highlight the strengths and limitations of the platforms.

• It was adapted in a way where the essential criteria are assessed in a pre-evaluation phase.

• These minimum criteria cover three general usage requirements:– an active community– a stable development status– a good documentation of the platform.

• The fourth criterion incorporates the didactical objective and means that the platform’s focus is on the presentation of content instead of communication functionalities.


ICALT’05

• At the beginning of the evaluation, 36 platforms were selected and evaluated according to the minimum criteria.

• Nine platforms (ATutor 1.4.11, Dokeos 1.5.5, dotLRN 2.0.3, based on OpenACS 5.1.0, ILIAS 3.2.4, LON-CAPA 1.1.3, Moodle 1.4.1, OpenUSS 1.4 extended with Freestyle Learning 3.2, Sakai 1.0, and Spaghettilearning 1.1) met the criteria.

• Next, these nine platforms were tested in detail.

• Eight categories were established and weighted: communication tools, learning objects, management of user data, usability, adaptation, technical aspects, administration, and course management.


ICALT’05

• Adaptation Capabilities:

– Adaptability includes all facilities to customize the platform for the educational institution’s needs (e.g. the language or the design).

– Personalization aspects indicate the facilities of each individual user to customize his/her own view of the platform.

– Extensibility is, in principle, possible for all open source products. Nevertheless, there can be big differences. For example, a good programming style or the availability of a documented application programming interfaces (API) are helpful.

– Adaptivity indicates all kinds of automatic adaptation to the individual user’s needs (e.g. personal annotations of learning objects or automatically adapted content).


ICALT’05

• Results of the Adaptation Category:

– The majority of the platforms were estimated as very good with regard to extensibility.

– Adaptivity features are underdeveloped.

– Most of the platforms do not consider adaptivity at all.

– Moodle as the best platform concerning adaptation issues.


ICALT’05

• Moodle provides an adaptive feature called “lesson” where learners can be routed automatically through pages depending on the answer to a question after each page.

• The extensibility is supported very well by a documented API, detailed guidelines, and templates for programming.

• Adaptability and personalization aspects are also included.• Templates for themes are available and can be selected by

the administrator.• Students can choose out of more than 70 languages.• Concerning the overall evaluation results, Moodle

dominates the evaluation by achieving the best value in five categories.

• Its strengths are the realization of communication tools, and the creation and administration of learning objects.

• Additional strengths of Moodle are the comprehensive didactical concepts and also the tracking of data.


ICALT’05


DMI extensions and customization


LO’s contents linked to other LOs

• eCourses developed at the DMI in Novi Sad required more adaptivity concerning navigation through eLessons.

• Course creators wanted more flexibility in their students eLearning experience, in a way that they can explicitly choose different paths through lessons (where available) or can be directed to different parts depending on their answers.

• One of the most useful feature that was developed is the possibility to connect any part of one LO’s contents to another LO.

• There are at least two good purposes for such an extension of Moodle’s navigational features – redirection of learners to other parts of eContents and simple reminders.



• These features have been fully integrated into existing structure of HTML editor used while creating eContents, not only of eLessons, but of other course resources and activities.

• This means that main eContents (represented in eLessons consisting of many LOs) is accessible from any part of the eCourse (quizzes, assignments etc.), or actually every textual part of eContents created by Moodle’s HTML editor.

• Improved navigational features (connecting LOs in an arbitrary way) have been included into editor’s existing option Insert Web Link.



HTMArea Editor


Redirection to other parts of eContents

Insert Link

• To allow students to wander through eLessons in several ways, showing them paths they could follow and supplying them with various meaningful links from each LO to the others.• Directly connecting contents of LOs.



Choosing target LO

• Next step is choosing the target LO.

• All available LOs are retrieved from the database and their titles are displayed to the user.



Generating URL of the chosen LO

• Moodle then generates URL of the chosen LO (internal generic URL based on chosen items from database).



• URL and Title fields are automatically filled, and user can specify the value of Target field.• After final changes, click on the OK button creates the desired link.

Final Changes



• When the page is saved and later redisplayed the LO link will be available.

Testing link to another LO


Reminders

• It is often useful to make it possible to students to just take a look at other LOs (even from different eLessons – i.e. reuse the existing material without duplicating it), without disturbing their learning path.

• Option Contents only activated.

Reminder creation


Reminders

• URL of the page containing only basic contents of the selected LO (without questions and navigational options) is automatically generated, Title field filled, Target field set to New window.

• When students follow the link, they get a pop-up window reminding them of the pure contents of another LO.

Reminder being created in a pop-up window


Extended jumps

• Extended choice of target LOs, so all LOs from currently existing eLessons belonging to the eCourse are now available as target LOs at any time and from contents of any LO.

Linking LOs from different eLessons


Extended jumps

• Another version of “extended” jumps is proposed through slight changes in lesson module itself, offering the possibility of creating jump links (for example while creating Question Pages) to LOs from any eLesson that belongs to the eCourse.

• All these additions make connecting and combining contents of all eLessons in any imaginable way quite easy to accomplish.

• Therefore eCourses can be complex structures consisting of numerous interconnected eLessons, with improved reusability of learning material and extended flexibility for both teachers creating the course and learners following various learning paths at their own pace.


Extended jumps

Extended jump


Serbian language packs

• Moodle has been designed for internationalisation.• Each 'string' or 'page' of text that is displayed as part of the

interface is drawn from a set of language files (a language pack).

• There are currently 65 Moodle 1.6 UTF-8 language packs available for download: http://download.moodle.org/lang16/

• Older language packs for versions up to 1.5 (73 of them) are still available as well: http://download.moodle.org/lang/

• To install these languages one should simply download the zip file to their moodle/lang directory and unzip it there.

• For Moodle 1.6 upwards these must be put into the moodledata/lang directory.

• Moodle 1.6 language packs can also be installed directly from the admin/lang menu in any Moodle installation.

http://download.moodle.org/lang16/

http://download.moodle.org/lang/



• Serbian language packs (two of them – Latin and Cyrillic, but the translation is basically identical) have been developed.

• We started with detailed analysis of previously existing Serbian (actually a dialect spoken in parts of Bosnia), official Bosnian and Croatian packs, as well as Serbian packs for Moodle 1.5 developed by Miloš Bajčetić and his students at medical School of Belgrade.

• All those translations were rather incomplete and done for previous Moodle versions.

• Nevertheless, they were compared and reused to a reasonable extent.

• The aim of this first step was to collect different ideas on translating certain expressions.



• After that, the core of the new translation was completed (all strings) and transformed into full Moodle 1.6 UTF-8 packs.

• They have been accepted as the official Serbian Moodle translation and made available for download at moodle.org.

• They are now regularly maintained, according to further Moodle development, as well as conclusions reached in discussion with other Moodlers from Serbia interested in using the best possible Moodle translation.

• There is a special course for Serbian Moodlers - a place for discussion, sharing learning materials etc. http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=53

http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=53



• Further efforts are being made by this community in order to provide complete documentation and help for Serbian speaking users.

• This is supported by Reticulum project www.reticulum.org, an informal organization of Serbian Moodlers.

• It takes part in eEducation at Serbian Universities and provides lectures and workshops for all interested parties, works closely to Research Centre Petnica and is an important member of WUS eLearning initiative.

• Since Serbian differs quite a lot over the different regions it is spoken, the previous official translation was kept available for Serbian speakers in Bosnia, with hope that its author will work towards its completion and further maintenance.

http://www.reticulum.org/

why moodle? an overview of free (open source) e-learning tools (icalt 2005 + dmi experiences)

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