Moodle in English: Moodle for Mobiles Project

Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Don Hinkelman - Friday, 21 October 2005, 5:16 PM

Today was the first Moodle for Mobiles Developers Workshop, held at Sapporo Gakuin University in Hokkaido, Japan. Its aim was to gather four universities working on mobile phone applications via the Moodle open source LMS. Although much of the discussion focused on Japan-specific issus, the strategies mapped out may have wider application and interest around the world. Participants included:

Sapporo Gakuin University: Osami Okuda, Tim Grose, Don Hinkelman, Ishikawa
Kanezawa Gakuin University: Gordon Bateson
Hokusei Gakuen University: Bob Gettings, Narumi Sekiya
Yamaguchi University: Tim Takemoto, Jamie Pratt

Gordon Bateson, as invited speaker, gave the main presentation and his powerpoint file can be downloaded here. He demonstrated several applications he has made already in directly adapting the quiz module, resources, and hot potatoes activities on current mobile phones operating in Japan. Following that presentation (which included Jamie contributing via skype from India), we held a requirments and strategy workshop, facilitated by Don Hinkelman. Here we mapped out current projects, basic requirements, development strategy, needs/applications, priorities and funding, and timeline. Because we had programmers, teachers, and funders all in the same room, we were able in a short time to make key decisions that will bring a number of applications to release in the next six months. Here are the results:

Current Projects

Gordon: iMoodle project--modification of the original Moodle codes especially in: quiz, resource, hotpot
Narumi/Bob: mobile phone email address input field, quick mail block adaptation, mobile phone email confirmation process
Tim/Jamie: parallel scripting system especially implemented for Japan mobile phones:now in quizzes and later in login page, course pages, select adequate activities/blocks for keitai and cut others off (e.g. administrative functions)

Basic Requirements/Development Strategy

target for Moodle versions 1.6 and 2.0 (quiz for version 1.5)
focus on one country now (Japan), later our work may be replicated in others
use a parallel scripting strategy, not direct modification of current Moodle scripts (for versions 1.5, 1.6, 1.7), select key applications only for mobile phones (e.g. keep administration functions in main PC screen-based interface).
adapt this to smarty templates for version 2.0
build parallel script code based on cookie-less sessions
deal with Shift-JIS encoding problems by output buffering to UTF8
focus on a unique mobile phone-human interface rather than modifying a PC screen based interface
solve core mail problems in Moodle (now based on single byte character sets), avoid the multiple patchs currently required for Japanese operation. Move completely to UTF8 in the core mail system.
develop a direct mobile email reply-to-forum/assignment system (not via web browser)

Key Applications/Priorities/FundingAssignments/Programmers

Mobile Phone Application	Funding University	Priority & Timeline	Programming Leader
1. Mail	Hokusei Gakuen	a March	Sekiya
2. Forum	Hokusei Gakuen?	b March	Sekiya
3. Quiz (m/c)	Yamaguchi	a November	Pratt
4. Attendence	Sapporo Gakuin	a March	Sekiya
5. Assignment (LectureFeedback)	Sapporo Gakuin	a March	Sekiya
6. Static images	To be decided	c January?	Pratt
7. Hotpot: pure HTML version	Kanezawa	a December	Bateson
8. Polling	Sapporo Gakuin	b March	Pratt
9. Flash Lite Interface	To be decided	c Next funding cycle (2006-7)	Pratt & Sekiya
10. Upgrade parallel scripts to 1.6	To be decided	b January?	Pratt

Interchange

Share development strategies via moodle.org >> general developers forum
Set up experimental sites at each university
Skype meeting in December
Welcome advice, strategizing, assistance, cheerleading from Moodle developer community

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Don Hinkelman - Friday, 21 October 2005, 5:47 PM

Moodle multiple-choice and fill-in-blank quizzes shown in real-time on Gordon Bateson's mobile phone browser. Regular moodle 1.5 scripts sensed, filtered and reframed for display on many NTT Docomo, Vodaphone, and AU mobile phones. wide eyes

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Julian Ridden - Friday, 21 October 2005, 6:29 PM

This is certainly an ambitious project and I wish you all the best. Sadly I do not have the expertise to help. But certainly consider me a major part of the cheer squad. cool

P.S. Don't picture me with pom poms however. If you do I take no responsibility for the results

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Jens Gammelgaard - Saturday, 22 October 2005, 7:39 PM

Hi Don,

I will be interesting to see the results from that workshop.

There might be som possible improvements to the accessibility of Moodle as Gordon Batesons talk about. But still mobile use of Moodle is possible even with out special themes.

I have today photographed my browsing to your post and if you saw it live you would get a sharp focus:

Here they are 1/3:

I hit the moodle.org frontpage and login and make a search (picture 2/3):

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Jens Gammelgaard - Saturday, 22 October 2005, 7:42 PM

The next photo:

I have today photographed my browsing to your post and if you saw it live you would get a sharp focus:

Here they are I make the search 2/3:

I hit the results and find Don's post and click it (picture 3/3):

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Jens Gammelgaard - Saturday, 22 October 2005, 7:44 PM

The last photo:

I have today photographed my browsing to your post and if you saw it live you would get a sharp focus:

I read the interesting news from Don with scrolling and it works with 2 and 3G devices that runs java applications.

I with this little experiment I have used this free...

Browser: http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/operamini/english.dml

And yes, I am one of them that like to have access to Moodle.org where ever I am. And I hope I have shown the way to do the same for some of you?!!

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Timothy Takemoto - Sunday, 23 October 2005, 8:37 AM

Thanks very much for summarising the information so clearly above, Don.

I am really pleased to hear that discussion advanced even to the point of planning a roadmap. This looks really promising.

There are a couple of phones in Japan with Opera browsers and some of my students may already be accessign the site using them. I think that it will be a two or three years before most can access the site because many phones now on sale do not allow cookies.

On Jamie's test site you can see the results of a simple survey and whether cookies are working or not. I am not sure whether the "unknown" are working or not working, but my guess it is only the "is working!" that would be able to access moodle. Some of the accesses were from computers and an imode html simulator. My phone (number 29 in that last) does not accept cookies. I bought it about 8 months ago.

Timothy

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Jens Gammelgaard - Sunday, 23 October 2005, 4:07 PM

Hi Timothy & Gordon,

In respect of your experience with the Japaniese DoCoMo system, which I thought was the world leading 3G system, then I hope this question can be to your and others assistance:

Does your phone accept Java code? If yes, then it might accept the Opera browser and then the rest will be automated, including javascript, css and cookies.

The phone shown in the photoshoot is older than yours,Timothy, so it might work wink

Or what actually happens when you install the Opera browser?

Good luck.

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Gordon Bateson - Sunday, 23 October 2005, 4:57 PM

Gosh I didn't know it was possible to install a new browser on a mobile phone. Heady stuff surprise

I'll look into it. Thanks Jens

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Jens Gammelgaard - Sunday, 23 October 2005, 8:05 PM

Oh Gordon, great - I look forward to hear about your empiricism that goes beyond this Opera Browser, since flash or flashlite won't play the operabrowser at the moment.

But since Moodle is a lot about the social cognition achieved from the forums, then this browser is rather useful. And it even seems that this thread is a good example of social cognition

Cheers!

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Jamie Pratt - Thursday, 27 October 2005, 3:19 PM

On Jamie's test site you can see the results of a simple survey and whether cookies are working or not. I am not sure whether the "unknown" are working or not working, but my guess it is only the "is working!" that would be able to access moodle

Yes you are right Tim. Unless the table shows 'Is working' cookies are not working in the client that access the test site.

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Nichoune Duong - Thursday, 18 May 2006, 5:07 PM

Hello,

I am a student in IT. I must to do a project with moodle. My subject is use moodle on mobile phone. Can you help me how i can to do it, please. I have tried with wml and i have also tried with HTTP Get but it didn't work correctly.

I had a result as in a photo

Thanks for your help

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Gordon Bateson - Sunday, 23 October 2005, 5:56 AM

Hi Jens,
Moodle looks great on your mobile. cool

However, Moodle doesn't display on ALL web-enabled mobiles, because not all of them handle cookies and some are fussy about encoding. In particular, many DoCoMo phones require cookieless sessions and the Shift-JIS encoding.

The inital goal of the project is make the core of Moodle accessible to the vast majority of Japanese students by the end of the year, by overcoming these two main obstacles, and the other issues outlined in Don's post

cheers
Gordon

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 27 October 2005, 10:18 AM

Great!

You may not be aware that a complete move to UTF8 is already happening now for Moodle 1.6 (Eloy's started on it), and that patches have already been made in the core distribution for the function that was breaking multibyte (similar to the "Japanese" patch that was floating around). This should fix all the multibyte issues. Tests/help with 1.6 very welcome!

An incoming email gateway is also in 1.6 already (in partial form) so look at that first before starting anything new.

I know I have been bad at integrating some patches in the past year simply because of overload but now I have a staff this situation will improve, so please try to develop these things in nice steps that I can integrate.

Cheers!

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Bob Gettings - Thursday, 27 October 2005, 1:00 PM

Thanks for the good news Martin!

The incoming mail gateway sounds great! I wonder how the outgoing mail will process UTF8 though. Will cell phones be able to read it?

Will there be any changes in the way Moodle sends outgoing mail? In 1.4 it seemed that the code for sending mail was written into each separate module, down to the numbers of "------" that would be printed after the header.

If outgoing mail was handled by just one process it might make it easier to customize it for mobiles.

One problem is that on a cell phone the length, repetition of course names, module names and headers; and poor readability of the information in Moddle mail make Moodle's outgoing mail very difficult to read.

Another problem is that because of the long headders and lots of -------- Moodle outgoing mail looks a bit similar to the sex oriented spam that many of my students get.

Our solution was to register a mail account that students seldom open to be a dumping ground for the usual Moodle messages and to set up a separate mailing system based on QuickMail that allows teachers to communicate with students using their main mail, cell phone mail. It would be great though if Moodle outgoing mail could be changed so that it lost the image of being spam or harrassment mail and students were easily able to recognhize it as bearing legitimate message for communication.

Think of receiving a message that you weren't sure about looking like the following but only being able to see four or five lines at a time. The poor readability acts against communication I think....

Of course, the mail below is all in roman letters so it's somewhat clear. Imagine if the headers and titles were garbled characters....

Let's find a way to cut the -------------------- in Moodle mail!!

From: noreply@moodle.org
Subject: Using Moodle: Re: Mo

odle for Mobiles Project
Date: 2005?10?27? 12:00:02:JST
To: bgettings@mac.com
Reply-To: noreply@moodle.org
----------------------------

------------------------

-------------------------
Moodle » Using Moodle » Forums »

General developer forum » Moodle

for Mobiles Project » Editing

---------------------

------------------

-Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project
by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 27 O

ctober 2005, 11:18 AM

---------------------

------------------

Great!
You may not be awa

re that a complete m

ove to UTF8 is alread

y happening now for

Moodle 1.6 (Eloy's sta

rted on it), and that p

atches have alrea

dy been made in the

core distribution for

the function that was

breaking multibyte (si

milar to the "Japanese" patc

h that was floating aro

und). This should

fix all the multibyte is

sues. Tests/help with

1.6 very welcome!

An incoming email gat

eway is also in 1.6

already (in partial form)

so look at that fir

st before starting anyt

hing new.

I know I have been bad

at integrating some pa

tches in the past year si

mply because of overlo

ad but now I have a staff

this situation will impro

ve, so please try to develop

these things in nice steps

that I can integrate.

Cheers!

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 27 October 2005, 2:27 PM

All the mail does go through one single function email_to_user(), so that part is easy (one could replace all sequences of ---- for example, based on the receiver's profile setting).

The lines in forum posts are added to improve readability in normal text-only mail (which they really do) but I can surely see how they could be a problem in small-screen mail.

What I don't understand is why your example is breaking words on non-space boundaries. Is that your phone doing that? My phone never breaks words up and to do so seems like a very strange design choice.

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Bob Gettings - Thursday, 27 October 2005, 4:38 PM

Thanks for the quick response. I want to beg our tech person (and teacher here), Narumi Sekiya, take a look at email_to_user

The ------------- lines do make sense for regular mail and probably increase readabiliity -> facilitate communication but unfortunately the lines and the very long breadcrumb-like text line between the header and message, plus the repeat of the last part of the line again in the message title ("Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project") inhibit communication with cell mail.

The breaking words on non-space boundaries is how most (?) Japanese cell phones deal with roman letters. Japanese doesn't use spaces between words in a text for the most part. Messages in Japanese are easier to understand but the characters are usually garbled by Moodle so. . .

I used to use the journal module (and now assignment) a lot but student complaints about mail got me to stop giving feedback via the module. I still used the module to get a sense of their ideas - it was useful and valuable to me - but I felt I had to respond verbally or by separate email because if I used the module to respond - a message that they couldn't understand - or that they would experience as harrassment - would be automatically sent to them with a link to a journal entry that they couldn't open from cell phones. They didn't really complain as much as come up to me in class after and ask with confused faces - "Why did I get this mail with your name on it? What is it? Have I done something wrong?"

Why use their cell phones? It's partly a cultural thing. 99.99999% of students have cell phones and they use cell phone mail to communicate with each other more often than they make voice calls. Cell phone mail is such a powerful tool of communication here. On the other hand, students have almost completely stopped using other mail - especially their school mail.

So it's a real challenge to try to harness the power of Moodle for communication

here even though Moodle was designed with communication in mind. Cell mail makes it difficult. We were able to use QuickMail for intentional communication between teachers and students but I wonder how long it will be before we can get Moodle hacked enough so that it becomes a tool for student - student communication - for learning that is really integrated into students daily lives - for ordinary Japanese students.

But one way maybe would be to write a function that would strip the ----- and long headers that are imbedded in the code of the forum and all the other modules for sending mail there are too many modules to hack the embedded code in each one but hacking the email_to_user() function would do the trick? And then convert the UTF8 code into the appropriate one for cell phones? Is the mail sent on starting an account, joing a class, etc. also processed there? Can I ask where to find email_to_user()?

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Jamie Pratt - Thursday, 27 October 2005, 7:00 PM

Can I ask where to find email_to_user()?

lib/moodlelib.php

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Bob Gettings - Saturday, 29 October 2005, 7:40 PM

Thanks, Jamie!

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 27 October 2005, 10:28 PM

In that function you can change the word wrap to 20 or something else small, so you can get Moodle to do what Japanese phones can not.

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Don Hinkelman - Thursday, 27 October 2005, 2:53 PM

Yes, Martin, the plan for total UTF8 implementation in 1.6 is absolutely thrilling. tongueout

So many fundamental issues will be handled by this move.

Because of that, we decided to target Moodle for Mobiles to version 1.6, skipping 1.5 except for some immediate needs that Yamaguchi Univ. has with the quiz module. Since you mention Eloy is working on 1.6 UTF8 now, shall we contact him directly about questions we have on his plans?

Also, a question to Sekiya san, Okuda san and others. For Attendence Control and Lecture Feedback modules, should we skip version 1.5 and focus totally on version 1.6 (UTF8)?

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Timothy Takemoto - Thursday, 27 October 2005, 8:11 PM

By the way, Jamie, Don, I hope to use the mobile phone quizes for my classes starting next April. This also coincides with the deadline for my budget. If Moodle 1.6 is going to be ready for April then I am happy that the mobile quiz be built towards that.

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Martin Dougiamas - Thursday, 27 October 2005, 10:20 PM

Don, look here for evolving information about the MigrationToUFT8

Tim, I hope Moodle 1.6 is ready well before April. I'd like it to be ready for start of the school year in Australia (Feb).

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Kathryn Mac Callum - Thursday, 15 February 2007, 5:17 AM

does anyone have a working demo of moodle mobile that is accessable by public?

blank.doc

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Greg Hodgins - Sunday, 30 October 2005, 10:53 PM

Hello all.

It's been some time since I visited moodle.org. Looks like I resurfaced at just the right time.

We (Go Test Go, http://gtg.mp from your mobile) are looking at adding a mobile interface (wml, xhtml, perhaps chtml) to our Moodle instance in order to extend our J2ME MIDP1.0 quizzes to subscribers of networks that 1) don't tend to offer devices with Java support such as BREW carriers like Verizon; and 2) are prevented from downloading applications outside of the carrier's walled garden, such as Verizon, Nextel, Telus, 3 (in some cases). I thought this might also address our inability to reach Japanese iMode/DoJa users, but read of some new challenges here. As an aside, garden walls are clearly falling - as they should.

I am still concerned that such a solution will only be available in locations that a network signal is present (are there any such places in Japan? ), be subject to network latency, and result in a student usage cost in most cases. However, this is our most cost-effective approach to reach these users (we will not create a BREW app unless contracted to do so), and start on the path toward a networked/social version of our application, with richer content as network availability and capability improves.

I applaud your efforts and look forward to seeing some of the results and offering any assistance I can.

As a bit of a side note, you might be somewhat disappointed to learn that our efforts to develop a mobile interface for Moodle, largely my efforts frankly, would probably be founded on Ruby on Rails. I do not have significant PHP skills. We hacked together some PHP modifications (detailed in previous notes and available on our site) and contribute them to moodle previously, but they were pretty minor. We added question level feedback as an alternative to answer level, text/image attachments/exhibits, and search text for placement when you enter a text exhibit. I've recently been bitten by the Ruby bug. It's pretty powerful. Our gtg.mp mobile browse quizzes interface is written in RoR. If we go down a path of developing a mobile interface I will be using it to build on my RoR's expertise. I truly wish it were different, but for several reasons RoR's will be the way we go.

Again, I wish you all the best in your efforts, and will offer chearleading and advice if you think it might be of value.

I've update my profile with my Skype ID should anyone wish to chat.

All the best!

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Jamie Pratt - Tuesday, 1 November 2005, 3:43 PM

So is your alternative code for a mobile enabled quiz module that you released the code for using a java module on the phone??

I'm hoping to have time to use smarty templating to generate content for the chtml quiz module and course view code. If I do then it would be easy for others to add a wml or small screen xhtml templates as well. Whether I do this or not really depends on whether other sections of the code take longer than I expect.

Do you think go test go would be interested in helping sponsor this project or getting more involved in other ways?

Jamie

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Greg Hodgins - Tuesday, 1 November 2005, 9:58 PM

Hi Jamie.

Go Test Go developed a proprietary Java CLDC/MIDP 1.0 quiz application a little over a year ago. We did not release the client code, but released the changes we made to Moodle to support our mobile quiz client. Initially we had an Access database that we provided to quiz creators, from which we then extracted and formatted the data for the mobile client. However, this became unwieldy quickly. I discovered Moodle at an E-Learning conference last year at which time we decided to use Moodle for our quiz data repository given the web accessible interface, import/export capabilities, open standards, and additional functionality that we might explore in the future.

We added some features to Moodle (concentrating on the input side of things versus the presentation to the students) to align with functionality on our mobile client, and built an extract routine to create data files for our mobile client. Currently our mobile client is entirely a self-assessment based model. We do not report test/quiz results back to Moodle or any other repository. This is something we hope to change in the future. Our client code actually supports reporting the results back to server, but we have disabled it for the time being in order to eliminate the need to deal with phones that are not configured for such communication (Java networking is a seperate config from other functions in some phones) from becoming a support problem for us. We would also need to create server side code for accepting the results from the client, which may be Moode or another system.

I really wish we could afford to sponsor the project in some fashion, however we are a small startup, self-funded, with very limited resources. As mentioned, I also wish I could offer up some php skills, but frankly I don't think mine are worthy of participation.

What is network coverage like in Japan? What about cost (data), speed and latency?

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Beta Cookieless Sessions for Moodle 1.5 / 1.6

by Jamie Pratt - Friday, 2 December 2005, 8:06 PM

Attached is a patch against the Moodle 1.6 code that allows Moodle to use sessions even when the user has disabled cookies. I've also test it on Moodle 1.5 the patch file fails to make one change for 1.5 so you have to apply one change manually. http://jamiep.org is using this patch on 1.5 so you can log in there without needing cookies.

Apply the patch by uploading the patch to the root of your Moodle site and then logging in and issuing the command patch -p0 < cookieless.patch Your site will continue to operate as before until you put the following in your config.php file :

$CFG->usesid=true;

The phpdoc comments taken from the file lib/cookieless.php explain more :

/**

* Enable cookieless sessions by including $CFG->usesid=true;

* in config.php.

* Based on code from php manual by Richard at postamble.co.uk

* Attempts to use cookies if cookies not present then uses session ids attached to all urls 

* and forms to pass session id from page to page.

* If site is open to google, google is given guest access as usual and there are no sessions.

* No session ids will be attached to urls for googlebot.

* This doesn't require trans_sid to be turned on but this is recommended for better performance

* you should put :

* session.use_trans_sid = 1

* in your php.ini file and make sure that you don't have a line

* like this in your php.ini :

* session.use_only_cookies = 1

* @author Richard at postamble.co.uk and Jamie Pratt

* @license http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html GNU Public License

*/

Hope it is OK to have based by work initially on a code snippet in the php manual and then release under the GPL. I wrote to Richard the original author some time ago but got no response.

Issues :

Doesn't work when user clicks link from within Flash. Flash movies must be rewritten to add session ids to urls.

Flash movie makers who want their movie to work with cookieless sessions will have to add support for adding session ids to urls.

cookieless.patch

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Re: Cookieless Sessions for Moodle 1.5 / 1.6

by Jamie Pratt - Wednesday, 21 December 2005, 8:14 PM

This is now in the main Moodle 1.6 distribution.

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Re: Cookieless Sessions for Moodle 1.5 / 1.6

by Don Hinkelman - Wednesday, 21 December 2005, 9:41 PM

Fantastic, Jamie! Could you tell us all a brief report on everything you have been doing with Moodle for Mobiles? Sorry, I have no report yet from this end. I have to call Bob and Sekiya san who have been incommunicando for two months--they must have something wonderful to show by now. big grin

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Re: Cookieless Sessions for Moodle 1.5 / 1.6; customscripts use in Moodle for Mobiles

by Jamie Pratt - Wednesday, 21 December 2005, 11:12 PM

I've got rather tied up with other work and am just now about to get properly stuck into the Quiz code now. I've set aside the next week to get some real momentum going on this project for me.

I think I have a good plan now that will produce code that can live happily alongside an relatively unpatched Moodle. I've been reading about the new $CFG->customscripts functionality that will be in 1.6 that will be great for Moodle for Mobiles. A new $CFG variable will be settable to tell Moodle to look for custom scripts in a special directory. I plan to set this variable when it is detected that a Japanese mobile phone is accessing the web site so that we can have some custom scripts alongside Moodle that will only generate the content we want to see on the mobile phones and will output content in chtml.

So I'm planning ways to isolate most code changes to config.php and a set of scripts that will live along side a 1.6 Moodle installation. I'm glad we were able to get the cookieless sessions stuff into the 1.6 distribution as this was one of the main pieces of functionality that would be hard to add without modifying core Moodle code.

I've agreed a deadline of Feb 20th with Tim to have the quiz, course view and login pages done as well as having an 'enable this activity for mobile phones' icon added to the editing teacher view of a course for quiz activities. I'm hoping that it will be done well before then.

Jamie

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Re: Cookieless Sessions for Moodle 1.5 / 1.6; customscripts use in Moodle for Mobiles

by Timothy Takemoto - Thursday, 22 December 2005, 12:56 PM

Yippee.

Thanks very much Jamie. Mobile Moodle Quizzes will soon be with us.

One of the many advantages of having Ketai accessible tests is that during the university holidays my students say "I don't have internet access back home" but soon there will be no escape.

But I must set up a 1.6 test the cookie-less-ness.

We could also post to the Japanese moodle forum. I will do that.

Tim

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Re: Beta Cookieless Sessions for Moodle 1.5 / 1.6 and the quiz module

by Jamie Pratt - Thursday, 22 December 2005, 1:09 PM

I posted a feature request to the bug tracker :

http://moodle.org/bugs/bug.php?op=show&bugid=4504&pos=1

Cookieless sessions will be supported in Moodle 1.6 see :
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=33033#164547

In order for it to work in the Quiz module we need to add session ids to urls on buttons which are written by javascript.

I've a patch attached for the simple changes that must be made to the quiz module for cookieless sessions.

It seems that the cookieless code is interfered with by some of the techniques used to prevent people copying and pasting quiz content. This is easily fixed by a small change to the quiz code (and this change doesn't affect anti copying functionality).

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Re: Beta Cookieless Sessions for Moodle 1.5 / 1.6 and the quiz module

by Timothy Takemoto - Thursday, 22 December 2005, 2:28 PM

I voted for the bug.
Tim

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Don Hinkelman - Thursday, 22 December 2005, 4:33 PM

Today, Okuda san, Sekiya san and I had a discussion about putting the Lecture Feedback module on mobile phones (as planned in the roadmap above). We are planning to make attendence a separate mobile phone module and the lecture feedback also separate. The problem we have is whether to use the old Journal module/Feedback module as the base or move to the new Assignment module and make a plugin. Any thoughts on this issue? Some concerns are...

version 1.6 will be unicode, how will this affect our plans?
the Assignment module has an awful interface compared to the easy old Journal one. Are there any plans to return to the old single, scrollable page for feedback?
what are the advantages/disadvantages of making a new, separate module, or making a plugin for the Assignment module
Sekiya san is very familiar with the journal module code and the current lecture feedback module. Moving to the assignment module would take more time and money.

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Timothy Takemoto - Thursday, 22 December 2005, 6:17 PM

In 1.5.3+ the Assignment Module already has a single scrollable page for feedback. It is wider and shorter than Journal module but I think that it is as good, now.

Sadly, with the advances of the Assignment module, I believe it is time to leave the journal.

As has been witnessed till now, keeping a non-standard module up to date means that someone, Sekiya or Thomas Robb, has to upgrade with each moodle upgrade. The advantage of integrating attendance checking features into a standard module are therefore considerable.

A seperate module or block also sound like a good idea. If seperate it would at least not come into competition with advances in other modules (as did the journal). But again it may mean more work to keep it up to date.

A plugin for the assignment module sounds like a good idea. That has a standard API like the quiz.

Would there also be a demand for an unique/attendance-password quiz type?

All IMHO,

Tim

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Don Hinkelman - Thursday, 22 December 2005, 7:25 PM

Hi Tim,
I am glad to hear the single scrollable interface has returned to the Assignment Module.

That was very popular among many teachers.

And maintaining one's own module at each new release is a pain. But wouldn't that continue to be problem in the future with the assignment module? We would have to update the plugin every new release.

Now as for the Attendence Module, are you recommending it be a quiz plugin or an assignment plugin? This is a little confusing for me, so you may have to explain a bit. mixed

There is no need to combine the lecture feedback categorization and the attendence coding as we did before, right? So I assume you are also suggesting that the feedback categorization will be an adapted version of the "Online Text" type of assignment. Is that right?

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Jason Hollowell - Saturday, 3 February 2007, 9:45 AM

Is the Moodle for Mobiles package compatible with 1.7? I was planning to install it and then realized that I hadn't seen anything anywhere indicating that it is or isn't compatible with 1.7. I may have missed it but...

Thanks

Jason

P.S. Ok, sorry, after posting this I did some more searching and found this indicating that it's not compatible yet.

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Mike Finney - Tuesday, 18 September 2007, 9:56 AM

I am working with 1.8. Does Moodle for Mobiles work with this version? I would like to try it so let me know.

Thanks.....

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Gordon Bateson - Tuesday, 18 September 2007, 12:38 PM

> 1.8. Does Moodle for Mobiles work with this version?

I don't think so. But it could easily be made to if we band together and find some funding, to encourage someone - hopefully Jamie P. approve

to do the work.

Can you help with the fund-raising, Mike?

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Jamie Pratt - Saturday, 21 January 2006, 8:16 PM

I saw this interesting round up on wwwtools with lots of e-learning on mobiles related links. The article won't be available for free for long (they charge to access older articles) so get over there quick to take a look.

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Zied ALAYA - Thursday, 11 February 2010, 5:01 PM

We are looking to add this feature in our Moodle (mobile access).
I found this project: Moodle for Mobile (mfm) with this documentation page:
docs.moodle.org/en/Moodle_for_Mobiles
but we found also this one: MoMo (Mobile Moodle): www.mobilemoodle.org

are they the same project ?
if not, wich one do you think work better ?

thank you very much

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Joseph Thibault - Thursday, 11 February 2010, 11:59 PM

Hi Zied, I'm really interested in seeing Moodle work for Mobile, even with just a theme. I tried to check out MoMo in the past and have read the docs for mfm but my sense is that the former doesn't work (or works for older phones) where as the latter isn't yet done (and the aim is for 2.0+).

If you find out anything, keep in touch.

Best,
Joe

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Frank Ralf - Tuesday, 16 February 2010, 5:14 AM

Mobile Learning using Moodle at a school in Hamburg

http://www.bs-uferstrasse.hamburg.de/index.php/article/detail/2672 (in German, but also video available http://www.bs-uferstrasse.hamburg.de/index.php/file/download/2568 ).

Frank

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Zied ALAYA - Thursday, 18 February 2010, 12:36 AM

very nice Frank.
this is what we hope to do in our school and may be add more features.
I did not see the link in depth but can we know how this was done and if the code is open source ?

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Frank Ralf - Thursday, 18 February 2010, 1:40 AM

Actually I wasn't directly involved in that project. But I will forward your request to someone who was

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Frank Ralf - Thursday, 18 February 2010, 6:33 PM

I would suggest closing this rather long and old (outdated?) thread and instead use the new one

Moodle for mobile browsers.

It would also be great if some of the new projects mentioned in the forums found their way into Moodle Docs, e.g. at Moodle for Mobiles.

tia
Frank

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Zied ALAYA - Tuesday, 16 February 2010, 5:05 PM

thx for the advice Joseph.
I find that MoMo and MfM are two different projects (there is more projects listed here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=104599#p614569 )

the main difference is : MoMo is using a java client but MfM is a browser only solution.

for MoMo, they say it's an open source project, I can download the server plugin, but no download is available for the client side (the java code) !!

Until here, I prefer the second (more simple for users), but I think it doesn't work for a WAP access (I did'nt test this yet).

is this what you mean ? or there is more wide eyes

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Re: Moodle for Mobiles Project

by Jason Haag - Wednesday, 2 June 2010, 6:12 AM

Hi Moodle 4 Mobiles Community,

I'm looking for use cases where organizations or vendors have implemented SCORM as part of the mobile learning strategy. If you have a use case please contact me. I'm interested in real success stories and I would like to add you to the list. If you are using SCORM, I could send a few questions if you are interested or set up a time to chat.

We will be sharing the results of this research and I will also briefly cover this during my session at the upcoming mLearnCon event (http://www.mlearncon.com ).

So far I have already heard of several use cases where organizations are using SCORM as part of their mobile learning initiative. I'm interested in mobile learning as part of either training or performance-support scenarios. I'm also interested in hearing from mobile vendors about their technical approach to their SCORM implementation. I'm tracking this and communicating with the community on twitter using the hashtag #MobileSCORM
( http://www.twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/MobileSCORM ).

Please contact me if you know of a mobile application or mobile learning situation that supports SCORM. I would love to hear from you!

+1-850-266-7100
Email: jason.haag.ctr@adlnet[dot]gov

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