Does Moodle support decentralized course material placement architecture?
I have a standalone Moodle server at a centralized data center. However, since our users are based in different locations, we want to store the materials of some of our classes on the remote offices, while maintaining a centralized portal on the main server in our data center.
I wonder if Moodle supports such architecture.
I am not sure. I keep all of my course resources on a separate website (which could be anywhere) and then link to them as a URL resource in moodle. I'm not sure if this is what you are asking, however.
Rick, that's what want to do. Can you tell me how you do that or any reference documentation I can follow?
Typically, if you have Moodle you also have a website. For example, my website is in a folder public_html, and then my moodle is down one level ..public_html/moodle. I can have any folders on my website, such as ..public_html/course1, or ..public_html/faculty-jones, etc.
I use Dreamweaver to create all of my "content" webpages. I like the consistency that I get with Dreamweaver and CSS. In your case, you might have each school location have their own folder on your website, and each school location could manage their own "content" webpages. If you don't care for Dreamweaver, use something else, or event a FTP program.
Once files are on your website, display them in any browser, copy the URL, and then create a URL link in Moodle and paste the resource URL into it. That's about it. The only thing that gets a little tricky is when you decide to change then name of the URL... you need to change the link to it in Moodle. But as long as the html filename and location doesn't change, you can edit the files and the changes will show up in the Moodle course.
This method also has the advantage in that you can reference it anywhere, like this, even without logging into any moodle.
For many folks, my method would be too complex. But this is how I do it. There have been times where a school has wanted me to use a different product, like D2L, and it has been easy to link to my content from these other systems.
If you click on my link above, you might notice that the webpage is "responsively" designed, so it can be viewed easily by mobile devices.
