Dear Zbigniew,
I tried to install the code crosslisting code, Thank you!
but I had two problems.
1) I realised part of the way through that not only do I need two 1.5 moodles. I only have 1.5 Moodle, the others are still only 1.4.1, and when I tried to bring those three files up to date I hit sesskey() errors. More hacking would be required.
2) I realised that students would have to be enrolled onto both Moodles. I am looking for a way of allowing students to enrol onto only their own moodle installation and their forum posts to be piped to another moodle without their being the need to enroll in the "other" Moodle. This is essential. The cross-site security would have to be left to the cross-site password.
I think that you have covered the reasons for cross-lising courses. I agree. It is mainly a university politics thing, but I can see reasons why moodle's proliferate within an institution even if it were better if there were only one.
As for Cross Site listiing of "2p2" Forums
I am excited about the possibility of having forums on mulitple moodles, because I would like to give my students the chance to communicate with students in other classes in other countries. This is useful in both language classes, where Japanese and Finns might speak to each other in English, perhaps, and in content classes, where Japanese and Americans might speak to each other about views of the atomic bombings perhaps.
A p2p moodle-to-moodle interconnectivity would be useful because:
1) Login Method. I use my university's IMAP server to log in. This is important. I find that there are always problems with manual registration of students. Visitor students cannot use my university's IMAP sever, and our university's IMAP server will not be connected to another university.
2) Personal Information Security. I don't want to allow other students to log in to our university's server because of personal information concerns. I would want to limit "outside" user access to a part of the site, such as one or two forums.
3) Grade Administration. Particularly, I want to be able to grade my own students for their contributions to the forum, and presumably the other teacher would want to do the same, without the other teacher having access to the grades I have given my students and vice versa. Ideally the grades button would be appear only below students from my moodle. Also if the visitors were to take tests on my moodle then I would have the problem of sorting their grades from the gradebook.
4) Copyright. Sometimes I use copyright images and words on my moodle sites, on what i see as being a basis of fair use, within the classroom. If there are students from other classrooms joining in it becomes more difficult to argue that the moodle homepage is within the classroom, and more difficult to ensure that the copyright materials are not copied and used elsewhere.
5) Disciplining. It is difficult to foresee what can go wrong with a participants behaviour on a moodle course site but if they are ones own students then one can discipline/control/administer them quite easily. It would be more of a headache if those students were from another country.
6) Language. My moodles are generally set in Japanese (recently UTF-8) to make them easy for my students to use. There are Japanese course names and Japanese labels. The latter at least would be gibberish to any visitors. Additionally, I send posts to my students in Japanese. If the visitors were enrolled on my moodle then either they would be recieving gibberish (as far as they are concerned) or I would not be able to post to my students in japanese, or I would have to enrol them in another course to communicate.
Perhaps I will be able to pay Jamie to make improvements to your cross site listing to allow students to post without being logged in.
Timothy