Moodle

The Summer of Code application process is underway. Along with some good folks at The Oregon State Open Source Labs, we have put together a proposal to share content between Moodle and Drupal.

In combination with the recently developed functionality to author and export content from Drupal in IMS LOM format, you could author courses in Drupal or Moodle, and use those courses interchangeably in Drupal, Moodle, or any other LMS that imported IMS LOM.

Introductory Notes

These are some thoughts in progress -- I've been thinking these things through for probably the last few years, but things have been getting more interesting of late.

Some of the blog posts that have helped shape my thinking here include:
http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/
http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/brian/archives/044998.php

I'll admit it at the outset: I'm in a bad mood today.

But when I see things like this, and this, and this, all talking about running courses in Facebook, I can't help myself

(Okay, really I can. But in this case, I don't want to).

Read Facebook's terms of service.

The "User Content Posted on the Site" section is particularly relevant here:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

David Wiley recently posted on what some folks are calling Open Educational Resources, or OER's. This post extends my comment left on David's original post.

In his post, David starts by examining the difference between producers and consumers of Open Educational Resources, with an emphasis that Good Things '„¢ start happening when the Consumers become the Producers through the magic of wiki-style group editing.

He suggests that one of the impediments to broader re-use of OER's results from the original R living in a strict context -- ie, the R came into existence because of a specific educational need in a specific educational place, and reusing the R will be difficult in part because no two contexts are alike.

I've been wanting to find the time to write this post for a while, but different things (aka work, life) kept getting in the way.

For those who are interested in getting started in putting the different pieces of OpenAcademic together, here are some of the building blocks.

A Moodle 1.6 OpenID consumer:

This code was written by Kevin Jardine, with the install tested by Kevin and us.

The code is available here: http://code.google.com/p/oamoodleopenid/

We have not tested this code in a shared hosting environment, but we have tested it in a few different LAMP stacks. For those of you who are comfortable working in a Linux environment, the install is pretty straightforward. The one main obstacle we encountered was with miscompiled gmp libraries, and we documented the fix for this in the ReadMe.txt that comes with the download. For the generally curious, you can find out more about gmp here.