General help

Hi, Following Martin D's announcement at Moodlemoot re the Community Hub and reading  the developer forum discussion going on at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50247, I'm starting this thread so as to have a more general discussion going on this topic, which I naturally hope will also feed into the development of it .

I was delighted to hear about the Community Hub development because one of my summer tasks just happens to be to write up a proposal for a four-school Moodle community.

Background:
The group is made up of three village colleges (VCs) and another school (all in Cambridgeshire, UK).
All schools in the UK must provide a Learning Platform for their students to use by 2007.

• The VC's are loosely linked by our use of the same IT Support company who are currently building a portal solution (MS based - - a different story) to try to provide a centralised application, storage and email solution for these schools. (BTW: they have to develop a single sign-on to include  Moodle for their portal - at a cost to us.)
• All the four schools have a moodle installation of one sort or another.
  • One school is using it more or less across the curriculum
    
  • One is on internal network as an installation for the ICT Department but is also being used by other teachers from other departments
    
  • One is in use by ICT dept only
  • One is just one part of a very large ICT arsenal (- hey Andy that's you) and it's creeping out across the whole school.
    

The draft Proposal (with my current questions/notes/thoughts):

1. That all teachers (in the group) will have unhindered access to each school's resources.

• How will they find what they are looking for without opening, downloading etc each file? (This is the metadata issue isn't it?)
  
• How do we know what's good?
  

That all teachers will be able to look through courses (complete or work-in-progress).

• I used to have no guest access and I would rather not have guest access because I think that makes it safer for the kids (correct me if I'm wrong). I realise I can override site setting in each course, but now that I've got ???? courses I'd rather not go into each one, if you know what I mean?
  

That each school will devote resources (staff/time/money) to undertake to complete at least one subject/department worth of KS3/KS4 courses i.e. Math, French, English each year. That each schools ensures that no copyright material is included in backups to be shared in this way.

• This is particularly tricky because of the way many teachers first start using moodle installations. They just load up everything and anything.

All the schools undertake to make these courses under a suitable open content licence.

• Creative Commons
• Share-Alike
• How do we teach all the contributors about this?
• wishlist: a button on a backup-for-hub-distribution link that would attach a whichever-licence flag (or whatever is appropriate) to each course.

That all the schools agree that these completed courses may be shared with, further distributed to, the wider Moodle community.

• would this be done with the same old backup/upload/restore method?

That all schools (in the group) will be able to restore courses (or import them) that the other schools have made.

• how should we mark a course as complete?
• where should these courses be stored?

that schools can offer courses to eachother online - moving into e-learning

• so if my school offers a course at GCSE unavailable at another school, this can be offered to students at the other school.
• This would involve really investing time in teaching teachers about online learning.

that schools can offer access to live x-school extra-curricular activities - like cc4g, flash workshops, podcasting radio station etc.
Okay my office is now so hot I can feel my brain boil. So I'm signing off for now.

My final question is

1. Do I wait for Martin Langhoff's solution to be ready for testing (with 1.6?) on 1st November of an unspecified year ?
2. Can I set up an interim solution?
   1. If so, what should this be like to enable a smooth transition to ML's community hub?
      

Thanks for reading this and I'm looking forward to reading your thoughts.
cheers
Mandy