Great ideas as always Martin and all. One more vote for sharing activities and resources (Learning Objects tagged with Metadata). I think there would be a lot more participation if users could share activities and resources. There are several sites (including Moodle.org) with course exchanges now, but none have really taken off.
http://moodlelang.org/ is an attempt to share material for teaching languages. It uses the Sharing Cart block, but it would be great if sharing resources/activities/ and/or groups of resources/activities could become a standard functionality of Moodle and Moodle's new community hub.
Thanks for pointing out sharing cart. Having a look at that now.
Glad to see this is progressing Martin. This is a quick response to add another vote for the sharing at the activity/resource level. Its something I get asked for frequently on OpenLearn but because we don't currently store metadata at that level its really hard to make a worthwhile export.
I'll read the spec in more detail later and get back with some more comments.
You may remember that I wrote a course list RSS feed for OpenLearn, but I can't remember if we committed it to 2.0 or not! I've also just released an OAI-PMH service which offers metadata about each course in LOM and Dublin Core.
I'd like to see more Moodle sites doing this to publicise and share their courses with the hub. Interested?
I'll read the spec in more detail later and get back with some more comments.
You may remember that I wrote a course list RSS feed for OpenLearn, but I can't remember if we committed it to 2.0 or not! I've also just released an OAI-PMH service which offers metadata about each course in LOM and Dublin Core.
I'd like to see more Moodle sites doing this to publicise and share their courses with the hub. Interested?
I've read the spec now and mostly I think its looking great. I am left feeling even more strongly that you need some way of harvesting courses from sites registered with a hub. When the hub is registered this should optionally include the RSS feed or OAI service to harvest from, and the hub should regularly check for updates.
My reason for wanting this is that I have 500+ courses that I'd love to see in the community hub(s) but I don't want to have to "publish" each one to the hub individually as that would be too time-consuming.
My reason for wanting this is that I have 500+ courses that I'd love to see in the community hub(s) but I don't want to have to "publish" each one to the hub individually as that would be too time-consuming.
I intentionally avoided having the hubs "pull" from registered sites, preferring to let sites "push" info in as necessary (since it is quite resource intensive to create backups). My feeling is that most admins would prefer to have the control.
However, it shouldn't be too hard to knock together something to push things out to the hub if that's what the admin wants. Not sure about how the feed would work ... do you have any time to flesh out some thoughts on the whole process here?
However, it shouldn't be too hard to knock together something to push things out to the hub if that's what the admin wants. Not sure about how the feed would work ... do you have any time to flesh out some thoughts on the whole process here?
Good point about the resources required to make a backup - I have mine made already as part of our publishing process, so I tend to forget that bit!
Roughly what I'm thinking is that if the admin wanted their site harvested, they'd include the harvester url in their registration form. The hub would then use cron weekly (for example) to call the url and find out what's changed, updating its database and cached backups accordingly.
Where do you want that fleshed out? In a new section in the components section of the RFC?
Roughly what I'm thinking is that if the admin wanted their site harvested, they'd include the harvester url in their registration form. The hub would then use cron weekly (for example) to call the url and find out what's changed, updating its database and cached backups accordingly.
Where do you want that fleshed out? In a new section in the components section of the RFC?
I've started fleshing out my ideas see the new harvest courses section of your RFC
I've not done anything like this for you before so I'm not sure I've got the level of detail quite right - please let me know if you want more or less!
I've not done anything like this for you before so I'm not sure I've got the level of detail quite right - please let me know if you want more or less!
About sharing activity/resources you can already do that with the current spec and the same course format.
ie when backing up the course you simply select which activities you want to include. The "course" metadata then simply applies to the one or more activities in the "courselet" package. You can choose a subset of activities during restore as well.
Note that we store a "course map" numbering how many of each different type of activity the package contains, so that it's easy to see a package that just contains one glossary, for example.
I do think the backup/restore interfaces could use a little bit of polishing/improvement when used for this but it really does work now and it keeps things very simple (one format for all!)
See this discussion from 2004 on courselets. We are finally getting there!
ie when backing up the course you simply select which activities you want to include. The "course" metadata then simply applies to the one or more activities in the "courselet" package. You can choose a subset of activities during restore as well.
Note that we store a "course map" numbering how many of each different type of activity the package contains, so that it's easy to see a package that just contains one glossary, for example.
I do think the backup/restore interfaces could use a little bit of polishing/improvement when used for this but it really does work now and it keeps things very simple (one format for all!)
See this discussion from 2004 on courselets. We are finally getting there!
Although it's possible, it's not very user friendly to have to go through the whole backup process and do it manually. Very time consuming and not a very obvious process for a novice. The sharing cart is amazingly easy to use and I think that it would be a perfect time to look at adding it to core and making it work over the moodle network.
The ideal setup from my point of view would be to drag and drop activities into the sharing cart in the remote course and then drag and drop them out again when I get back to my own site.
Alternatively, perhaps a repository plugin could be writen so that the remote site could be browsed like any other repository.
The potential with an interface this simple is enormous and it would have a huge impact on worldwide collaboration if it worked well. I absolutely love the community hub idea, but this function would be the number one use case for me and it would be terrible if it emerged as a clunky and long winded process that will be difficult to explain to people, as would be the case if backups had to be done manually just to get a single resource.
I can see massive potential for each specification (e.g. AQA Psychology) to have a master course where resources can be shared, discussed, modified etc, allowing all teachers in every school to collaborate and save huge amounts of time.
The ideal setup from my point of view would be to drag and drop activities into the sharing cart in the remote course and then drag and drop them out again when I get back to my own site.
Alternatively, perhaps a repository plugin could be writen so that the remote site could be browsed like any other repository.
The potential with an interface this simple is enormous and it would have a huge impact on worldwide collaboration if it worked well. I absolutely love the community hub idea, but this function would be the number one use case for me and it would be terrible if it emerged as a clunky and long winded process that will be difficult to explain to people, as would be the case if backups had to be done manually just to get a single resource.
I can see massive potential for each specification (e.g. AQA Psychology) to have a master course where resources can be shared, discussed, modified etc, allowing all teachers in every school to collaborate and save huge amounts of time.
I've made a tracker item for adding the sharing cart to core and integrating it with the community hub. Votes please 
MDL-19721
MDL-19721
I agree that a two-click, sharing cart concept is ideal for the community hub project. Teachers love the simple duplication and moving of items. We are testing a repository/hub strategy now in 1.9 by connecting the sharing cart block to a Moodle-internal repository. Some of these ideas might be useful for a 2.0 Community Hub. Current features include:
- All standard Moodle activities and resources can be stored
- Dublin Core metadata, domain-specific metadata, user tags
- Preview of resources via iPaper (openoffice, MSoffice, pdf, etc.)
- Preview of activities directly in a Moodle window
- Inter-site exchange of Moodle activities directly (no Backup/Restore)
- Advanced search on all metadata
- Reviewing and rating by users and moderators
- Points system and other community-building features to encourage contributions
Another thought that occurred to me - if courses (e.g. my ones) include a mixture of home-made resources suitable for sharing, and copyrighted material from commercial sources, it will make it impossible for the course to be opened up for sharing without breaching copyright laws.
What's needed is a flag on each activity or resource which marks it as share/don't share and will prevent outsiders (or mnet authenticated users) from viewing or downloading them.
I imagine that a lot of courses will have copyrighted material and it would be a real process-killer if the only way to share your work was to constantly restore a custom version of your courses with the commercial material carefully removed.
What's needed is a flag on each activity or resource which marks it as share/don't share and will prevent outsiders (or mnet authenticated users) from viewing or downloading them.
I imagine that a lot of courses will have copyrighted material and it would be a real process-killer if the only way to share your work was to constantly restore a custom version of your courses with the commercial material carefully removed.
The OpenShare plug-in will do that for you, then you'd just need to extend the backup process to ignore closed resources.
Yes, this backing up of "open" activities/resources has been on my To Do list for the OpenShare "block" for nearly a year, but not much demand to motivate me to do it. So if this is something someone would really value, I'll enhance the priority.
Hi Jenny,
we are looking around integrating such OAI-PMH and were reviewing Heinrich Stamerjohanns' solution from Oldenburg,
Obviously you were sooner on the way. Is there somewhere your local/oai package available so we could get an eye on wether it fits all our needs ?
My start path was to allow each integrator to choose some record source internally or using OAI sets, and using a default set that might be attached to global search results.
For our needs in Intel's TAO project we need focusing OAI exposure to a non standard additional taoresource plugin and consider integration on an 1.9.x basis.
Global search knows eveything about pseudo documents stored in Moodle, and had the implementation to be access aware on each (might be a bit hungry by the way).
Cheers.
Great Job.
we are looking around integrating such OAI-PMH and were reviewing Heinrich Stamerjohanns' solution from Oldenburg,
Obviously you were sooner on the way. Is there somewhere your local/oai package available so we could get an eye on wether it fits all our needs ?
My start path was to allow each integrator to choose some record source internally or using OAI sets, and using a default set that might be attached to global search results.
For our needs in Intel's TAO project we need focusing OAI exposure to a non standard additional taoresource plugin and consider integration on an 1.9.x basis.
Global search knows eveything about pseudo documents stored in Moodle, and had the implementation to be access aware on each (might be a bit hungry by the way).
Cheers.
Great Job.