I wanted to draw your attention to some of the latest Moodle customisations that my team have been working on for OpenLearn. I'm hoping you'll consider some of these to be of wider interest either as core additions or at least contrib offerings. If so, please add your voice here, so I can arrange things with Martin D.
They're all particularly aimed (no surprises here...) at the open courseware market, and I think would be of direct relevance to the Moodle Community Hub ideas, since they mostly relate to improving the findability of courses and allowing users to make better choices about which courses they want to study.
I attended the Open CourseWare Consortium meeting in Spain in May and spent a great deal of time talking to other Consortium members about these customisations and our use of Moodle in general for Open Content delivery. There was a lot of interest in these customisations, so I hope you'll be interested too.
1. RSS feeds
We're offering an RSS feed of the entire list of units on the site (RSS 2.0), along with sub-set feeds for each course category. You can see these in action on http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/index.php. We're also doing a feed for all courses attached to the same metacourse. The versions block itself is, of course, our own customisation unlikely to be shareable. The feeds are created by cron job and live in the moodledata folders like forum RSS etc. It should be possible to offer an admin opt-in/opt-out for these.
2. Ordering and grouping courses
We've had a lot of user feedback that there are so many units on the site they don't know where to start. Many users want to just see the introductory material, others just the short stuff. Time and Level are extra fields we've added to the course table. The new course/filter.php page allows users to choose how to group the results of listing all courses - by time/level/category/title/release date. See http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/index.php and play with the options at the top. Editing currently still takes place on course/category.php, as it was simpler for us to create the new functionality that way - but it wouldn't be too difficult to integrate into a single page.
3. Advanced course searching
In line with the ordering and grouping work we've added an advanced search form which searches for courses in the normal way but adds filters based on release date/time/level etc. See http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/advancedsearch.php
Looking forward for the next 6 months, one other key customisation that we're planning to make is in adding a "folksonomies" approach to categorising courses. Essentially we'll allow users to tag courses, and show a tag cloud for each course/all courses in a category/all courses in the search results/all courses on the site... Longer term I'd like to extend this to tag individual resources/quizzes etc, and allow searches like "see other people who've tagged with this term" and "see other tags by Fred" but I can't get all that done quickly enough!! All this copies from the blog tagging, and leverages the design behind that to tag other things, but I'll write new blocks rather than overload existing ones. Please let me know if this is an area which interests you, as I'm keen for this to be taken up by the community in due course. I have a spec document I could share with any-one particularly interested, but this is a long enough post, so I won't go into more detail here!
I'm also planning some enhancements to myMoodle to allow it to show user participation in more detail, but that's all a little rough at this point. No doubt I'll pester you about that some other time!
Finally we've written a Related links block. This is a new block which offers links in three groups, 2 of which are controlled by different permissions than the third. This allows us to have admin/teacher controlled links to related OU material, but with a third group for public contributions. The links are individual to a course, names of each group are set in the language pack. You can see them as the "Related Educational Resources" block on any unit home page e.g. http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?name=B680_1. At present we've not opened up the editing interface for the third group, as we've not yet coded appropriate user tracking (in case they change each other's content, and to monitor spammers), but if you're interested at this stage, I'll keep you informed. I realise there are other ways already of doing this, like the database module or a few other contrib blocks, but there weren't any that met our exact need offering user collaboration and links per course rather than across the entire site.
So, I'd be really interested in what you think about all of this. Is any of it useful to some/all of the rest of the Moodle community?
Jenny
