Moodle in English: Webdav, ipads, and provisioning dropboxes.

Webdav, ipads, and provisioning dropboxes.

by david millians - Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 12:15 AM

Good morning. I've got a system that is going to be rolling out ipads to students very soon now, and is looking at LMS. They're also looking at StudyWiz.

(FWIW, they also have the ipad issue with the disappearing HTML editing tools.)

Anyways, the workflow with studywiz works like this.

1. Edit documents in pages, etc. Use webdav and upload it to a personal dropbox.
2. Go into studywiz, go to the dropbox.
3. Move paper from dropbox into assignment dropbox.

All good. Here's where I stand with Moodle. I can make a webdav repository that's shared, upload a pages file, and then move it from there into an assignment. Yay! (Using xampp to test, it was a case of playing whack-a-mole with problems one by one. Fun!) But I can't figure out how to provision webdav repositories individually, for each user.

It would be one thing to provision webdav repositories for courses. That's a bit of a pain, but it's doable. Setting up 600+ individual repositories is just not feasible.

I am working on it now, and trying to figure it out, but I thought somebody perhaps had done this, or could point me to the right docs page. Can't find it so far.

This situation I've just described is only get to get more common. WebDav is going to be a defacto requirement in schools as more ipads come in. I prefer laptops and netbooks, but they're just not as cool...

Re: Webdav, ipads, and provisioning dropboxes.

by david millians - Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 4:51 AM

I think I've got the webdav portion of things on the path to goodness. A combo of UserDir, LDAP, and WebDav in Apache should allow us to provision user folders for private dropboxes with webdav.

I have looked at the moodle tables- particularly mdl_repository_instances and mdl_repository_instance_config- and can see clearly where it's adding in the information.

What I can't see is how it's being tied to the particular user. It's a private user instance;is contextid being munged, somehow, to list what user it is? Back to the code...

Regardless, I am so reluctant to manually (or scriptwise) insert values into a moodle table, you can't believe it. I'll do it if I have to avoid typing something 600 times.

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Re: Webdav, ipads, and provisioning dropboxes.

by Richard Jones - Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 5:57 AM

Hi David

Have you considered using Dropbox as a repository with Moodle as you seem to be proposing for Studywiz?

It works fine for us.

Also the MoodleEZ app for iPad has some file management features. If you are able to pair iPads and local machines on the wireless network there a any number of file transfer apps that would work for you.

Cheers
Richard

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Re: Webdav, ipads, and provisioning dropboxes.

by david millians - Tuesday, November 15, 2011, 9:24 PM

I have thought about using dropbox (and that other website that functions as a webdav shim) but I'd still have to manually make the private repositories. Also, I'm not sure if either of those will do LDAP back to us. If they do, that's surely a pay feature, or else it's making 600 dropbox and 600 shim accounts and 600 repositories.

The MoodleEZ has some file management features- but here's what you have to do with it, and a pages document:

1. Mail the document to yourself.
2. Open the mail system within MoodleEZ.
3. Save the document in moodleEZ
4. Upload the document.

I'd prefer to avoid using mail. That's cumbersome.

At this point, I've got to make it as simple as possible for the students, and if that means 600 repositories by hand, yick.

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Re: Webdav, ipads, and provisioning dropboxes.

by Richard Jones - Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 10:12 AM

Not at all, you get an API key from Dropbox, put it in the Moodle repo settings and everyone then logs in to their own Dropbox account, which is remembered. Works like a charm on the iPad.

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Re: Webdav, ipads, and provisioning dropboxes.

by david millians - Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 9:07 PM

^{I'll discuss that one with the school- there might be policy issues with that, but it does have its good points...}

But you still have to make the private repositories, though, right? By hand per user? (Or the user has to, of course.)

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Re: Webdav, ipads, and provisioning dropboxes.

by Kellye Self - Tuesday, September 18, 2012, 6:28 AM

Did you get an answer to this? We just went to a 1:1 iPad program and I can't get kids work uploaded without purchasing the App. Our mrooms people aren't finding a solution for me very quickly, so I'm trying to do the research myself.....my email is flooded with work and I'm drowning quickly! Thanks.

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Re: Webdav, ipads, and provisioning dropboxes.

by Rob Johnson - Tuesday, September 18, 2012, 10:28 AM

I have found the iPad is poor when it comes to what we expect a device to do using an LMS. Using the Dropbox repository has worked best, but it will still have limits on the types of files a user can upload there. The iPad is supposed to be easy to use, but it seems to be the opposite to me. I have found Android tablets much more friendly.

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Webdav, ipads, and provisioning dropboxes.