Thanks to David Delgano and Martin Overy, other kind Moodlers I gave a low brow presentation of Moodle this afternoon. It is in Japanese and very un-attractive. I will post it to the Japanese language forum.
Sadly, due to the effects of a virus on our university server, I was unable to connect to my LAMP or the Internet at all, so I was only able to show a powerpoint slide show (using Open Office). This was a real shame. Added to the fact that my competition had a plug in wireless (mobile phone) internet connection to demonstrate his system, I don't think that shew Moodle in such a good light. (Not sure about archaic use of that past participle either).
However, as suspected SCORM is going to be a must.
For one it seems that there are *several* CMS being used or considered at my university alone.
1) Blackboard - I am not sure how come but perhaps one departement in the engineering faculty has a limited licence.
2) The well spring of learning (Manabi-no-izumi) made by a research assistant/ sys-admin who I cannot seem to persuade to take an interest in Moodle alas.
3) Web classroom, again made by members of our staff.
4) DotCampus this is being considered not by a research group within my university but by a research group sponsored by the Japanese government. They have a large "online materials development center" and they are trying to produce online stuff but the have yet to decide on a platform. The are considering dotcampus because it is a-subset-of-SCORM compliant.
5) Webexcercise.
6) And more perhaps
Okay, so which to use? It seems that the one that is standards compliant will be the one chosen. The rational?
1) When there are many systems being used, and there is a question of forcing teachers (that already have content made for one system) to use a single standard, then it is just not diplomatic to say "lets all use this guys standard." It is more diplomatic to say "Lets use this international standard" (which happends to be supported by this guy).
2) "We don't really know or trust this open source stuff," "We don't know if Open source, or Martin, or this community will keep going." "Producing course content is very time consuming." "We need to feel assured that content produced on the platform can be exported to others if the platform goes under. "
3) Number 2 above is magnified , since the people that are choosing the site wide CMS are not content makers but people whose job it is simply to choose. They don't care so much as users about which system is the easiest to use, but they do care a lot about not making a major boob by supporting a soon to be redundant system. Hence, they will choose a standard.
Hence, the chances that *my* university as an establishment supports a CMS that does not support a standard, and probably SCORM, is I would say minimal.
The good news is
1) that "dotcampus" costs 70,000 dollars a year for a licence for our university of 10,000 students.
2) we will have SCORM by the middle of this year!
I suggested that for the $70,000 the university could employ one or two php programmers. And I also suggested that SCORM compliance is something that my university could give to Moodule, and that Martin would probably implement it for about 5000-10,000 dollars. I look forward to a rough quote.
However, when I suggested that we provide SCORM support for Moodle the dotcampus representative and at least one member of the audience laughed at me. I did not present things very well.
The dotcampus thing allowed users to drag and drop course a folders which are themselves the SCORM SCOs. I think that inside the folder there is a overall content definition and power point files (which the system converts to Html itself). The ability to create a lot of webpages out of a ppt seemed to be something that the audience liked. Powerpoint will do this anyway. I think that dotcampus is built using micorsoft .net stuff so I suppose that it uses dlls (?) from the office suite? Perhaps.
Tim
Timothy Takemto


