Lounge

Hi,
I hope that you bear with me through this, but I think it's important that I provide some background to this post.

Recently I had some interesting challenges in publishing multiple tutorials to CD, Articluate, Presenter, Video etc. CD is not a bad medium for this form of content that doesn't rely on being able to monitor and manage student performance.

My thoughts were 'If only I had a website front end on CD that would to the trick..'

That's where I started the search and I found a handy tool that had the ability to package HTML websites and Content Management Systems into their own localhost server environment. What appealed to me was that the tool was itself easy to use and not that technically biased!

I chose Joomla CMS for the website creation task and after some trial and error managed to produce a reasonable front end website that I published to CD and can also publish to Flash Drive as well as keeping a copy on my PC. It has its own locahost server environment.

The CD has some 46 video tutorials all about setting up your first website with Joomla which gave me another opportunity to include a Joomla example website that the users could actually work with whilst viewing the tutorials. A kind of 'site within a site'.

The whole thing can be copied from CD and installed on a PC within a few minutes.

It occured to me that if I could get a database driven CMS to publish to CD or Flash drive, then why not a Learning Management System?

So again after some more trial and error I did that with Moodle and it works really well.

Hence this post and the question, it's nice to see this happen but where are the real benefits? I can see the ability to reach into regions where there is no or limited internet access, I can see it would be handy to be able to work offline and create courseware and maybe do some experimentation, it might also be a useful way to manage backups.

But is that enough and what other benefits could there be?

Here are the links to free downloads of the packages from mysite:

1. www.sblc.com.au/Moodle_RTG.zip
2. www.sblc.com.au/joom_rtg.zip
3. www.sblc.com.au/Drupal_RTG.zip
4. www.sblc.com.au/Wordpress_RTG.zip

Each may take a few minutes to download and each are already preconfigured, admin logins are provided. This means that once downloaded and unzipped they will typically install within 30 seconds.

There is a video clip on Youtube that shows the 'site within a site' approach,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsViCI_UbjM

I am keen to see this technology advanced if for nothing else than being in the interests of reaching into those regions where there is little or no internet coverage and so any feedback or thoughts will be very welcome.

Best Regards

Gordon