General developer forum

Hi Lindy,

That's a great project you're doing.  What OS are they planning on? I've been working on getting computer labs to the developing world too and kind of settled on Linux K12LTSP. I'm new at Linux so I don't know if that is necessarily the best version but it has a lot of built in education software. The LTSP part works really well and I've gotten many corroborating success stories about it.  One good thing about the thin clients is that they don't need any administration. Everything runs from the server.  Regarding conditions out in the field there are a few different infrastructure situations to consider. There are many places that are within walking distance to Cybercafes but don't have phones or Internet access.  And even if they do have phones they may charge for it by the minute which would make it very expensive for them to use Moodle online as we do. So I think in some situations that they will need an offline Moodle with its own server (as you all are doing). The new version of Moodle that everyone is currently working on will include, I believe, an email "switch" that will enable managing when and how the emails are sent. Hopefully the mail could be copied to a "mail carrier" floppy which would then be brought to a cybercafe or other connected computer. New lessons might need to be burned to cds and mailed in if the course resources contain large files. It might be worth considering developing an easier way for them to load new courses into Moodle.
     There's a lot of excellent programmers, developers, teachers, etc here in the forums. You and the other students will learn a lot from them so be sure to encourage them to join the forums. I'm looking forward to hearing about the projects progress.

Lindy -- great project!

Have you seen what the Skolelinux/Debian-edu project is doing? They have a super-simple to deploy appserver/thinclient setup for deployment on schools with legacy machines (386 with 16MB even) and one or two more reasonable machines. With this setup, all the software runs on the app servers, making things easy to maintain and upgrade.

http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/

Hello again,

This site may interest you www.cfsk.org. It's about a good sized computer project in Kenya.

My name is Jason and I am also in the class with Lindy and I am currently working on making the process of signing up for an account with our lite moodle a bit more straight forward.  Also, I am adding some functionality to allow demographic information on user signup to be stored in one column in the database.  My question is: Should I add another table to moodle or should add a column to the existing user table that moodle has.  I thought adding a column to the table would allow for the moodle code to automatically insert the information I needed into the table.  If I add a table, I may not be able to use the existing moodle functionality to add to the database as slickly as with another column.  I was wondering what other moodle developers thought about this.

Thank-you

Let me to introduce my self,
My name is adityo ananta, a fourth year Computer Science student from University of Indonesia. Currently I'm working on a project that also making a some kind of light-weight moodle to be used by student from remote places with limited internet connection, our project goal is to make a light moodle with fast response and taking the course data from the CD, and synchronization with XML for the dinamic data like forum data.

So far we have made the moodle package smaller from 30M to about 12M, and making some by-pass in order to eliminate the login part.

Could you share what you have done with the project in your team, we will appreciate more info about your light-weight project.

Hello,

I was wondering how the Moodle Lite project was progressing.