Hi all,
It’s been a little while since I’ve posted an update on our small project but over the last week have put
together new versions of our offline moodle project – Shared Portable Moodle –
for the latest Moodle versions, from 3.4 through to the brand new 3.6
The general idea is – although we focus a lot of time on
providing rich and multimodal online learning experiences to students, there
can often be a significant portion of students who may not have reliable
internet access to access these learning materials – this could be due to their
remote location, personal situation, work opportunities, lifestyle, etc. While
many of us are connected all the time, others may not be. Here, we can preload
courses/units personalised to the learner onto a flash drive that can be mailed
out – plugged in – and ready to go. All of the various activities Moodle
offers, in their proper authentic context and including larger files such as
video without worrying about bandwidth and download times, rather than a ‘just
the static PDFs they could save at the time’ approach.
Can check it out, along with instructions and explanations,
over at
http://steve.moodlecloud.com
This time around have also tried my hand at my first
infographic to explain it visually, which I think turned out rather well:
By updating Spoodle to these latest versions, it should allow you to use the same version as your live Moodle and ensure plugins are compatible and familiar, or a chance to try out newer versions and try out some of the newer features that may benefit your learners.
Much like some similar ‘moodle on a stick’ projects in the past, the original goal has focused on supporting these distance learners, but have also been able to adapt this one to quickly work over a local network for an ad hoc internal moodle that can be set up in advance and let multiple learners connect; or for exploring and testing latest moodle versions or plugins – try a plugin out, if it doesn’t work, scrap the whole moodle instance and unzip again to start fresh. Hearing back from a few people it’s definitely seemed to have found a few interesting uses! We even got a small mention in a conference keynote in Tunisia, which is super neat.
If you do find an interesting use for it in your area, feel
free to let me know. I
haven’t kept too close a track, but has been a really interesting chance so far
to hear from people in a range of different contexts. Has also made for some pretty analytics looking at where the site's been accessed from: