Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Sue Somit -
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I've been searching Moodle's site for over an hour and can't find the correct forum for this question, but here goes . . .

I'm charged with putting our distance learning courses--now in multiple wordprocesing programs (WordPerfect, Word, Macintosh WP & Word)--into Moodle Topics (classes). Most of the courses are in PC WordPerfect and a lot contain graphics and special symbols.

Is there a forum that gives procedures/helpful hints for inserting different wp programs into lessons and resources? I will gladly share anything  I've learned after this process is over.

Thanks for any info,

Sue

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回复Sue Somit

Re: Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Bryan Williams -

Hi Sue,

Let's due an ABC on Moodle, and maybe this will help you get started.  Moodle allows you to create a course in one of three formats; Topic, Weekly or Social. Once the format is selected, "activities" can be added. Activities includes things like:

  • Assignments
  • Resources
  • Journals
  • Lessons
  • Quizzes
  • Glossaries and (most importantly)
  • Forums

To add activities to a course, you must select "Turn editing on" while logged in as the teacher or admin. Resources, like those you mention, are typically uploaded by the instructor using the Files feature which is located in the Adminstration "block" of the course homepage. Once you have uploaded your files, you can then add each as needed when creating an activity.  Moodles robust HMTL editor should be familiar to you if you have used a program like FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

Here are a few tips:

  1. Most of the documents you mention should open across platforms in different word processor programs, but special characters and symbols may be a problem.  This process is independent of Moodle and you can test things out on various computers.  For 100% assurance that everyone will be able to open all documents, without loss of special characters, consider converting your resources to Acrobat PDF.
  2. Download and read Matt Riordans excellent Teacher Manual for Moodle, available in the Moodle Documentation Project course.   

Hope this helps you,
Bryan

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回复Bryan Williams

Re: Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Sue Somit -

Dear Bryan and Ger,

Thank you for your information/suggestions. I was thinking that pdf's might be the way to go for the special symbol courses, but I was hoping that Moodle might have a Quick View Plus add-on that would let all students download it to "see" the Word Perfect  files. I will definitely download Matt Riordans Moodle manual.

One more question. If this question is answered in the manual, please disregard.

I uploaded an MSWord file that has math equations (originally done in MathType Equation Editor). I asked a colleague to read it through Moodle on his computer that only has MSWord's Equation Editor. All the equations were visible, but the equation box had light shading in it. Anyone know a way to rid the equation of the shading.

Again, thanks.

Sue

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回复Sue Somit

Re: Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Bryan Williams -

Sue,

Can't answer your question regarding problem with the MSWord Equation Editor, but your colleague might be interested to learn that Moodle has text filters for MathML, TeX and Algebra notations built in.  You can easily create math and science problems within the HTML editor built into Moodle. You might want to cruise on over to the Mathematics Tools forum and rub elbows with one of the smartest moodler around, Zbigniew Fiedorowicz, better known as Zig.  There is also a great Glossary of expressions available which you can download and include on your site.

Bryan

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回复Sue Somit

Re: Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Ger Tielemans -

Or:

  • convert all your documents in PDF
  • store the pdfs in the teacher resource area of each course
  • store ALSO the original docs together with these pdfs in these teacher resource areas (When you want to change the content later..)
  • organise your course in thematic activity sections. (choose week or topic approach, wait with the social approach)
  • link from the sections to these pdf resources

Under a set of resources you could place an activity where they have to use these resources: assignment, forum, workshop, quizz, chat, poll, etc..

You decide to use lessons, if you want to offer them content to read and end each page with a question. Pasting the content in lessons is more work: you can copy and paste text and tables from Word under Windows, but pictures you must (re)link in these texts one by one. (The HTML-editor makes that work a lot easier!!)

Ugly but very easy: write a summary text in the lessons and put links in that text to the longer pdf-resources in that lesson.

Symbols should survive?

Formulas that not survive can you recreate with the new math-functions (algebra or Tex)

I never tried WP or Word o the Mac..

To keep the student in your course, you could choose to show these pdfs as popupscreens without webbrowser menubars: they then can only read the resource, scroll it, and close the document ...and then they are back in the sections.. 

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回复Ger Tielemans

Re: Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Barry McMullin -

Ger writes

Or:

  • convert all your documents in PDF
  • [...]

In a certain pragmatic sense, I agree with this. PDF is a reasonable "lowest-common-denominator", and it may well be the best choice. But I still can't let the suggestion go without qualifying it.

Firstly, PDF's tend to be big. Bigger than common WP formats, and much bigger than HTML (and cousins). Not a problem if you have the luxury of broadband Internet, but a real hassle otherwise.

Secondly, PDF's are ugly ... on screen. They are nice on paper (although even then usually only if you have a nice high resolution, color, printer). Because, in general, text cannot reflow in PDF, display of PDF doesn't normally adapt to the available display area - the positioning is fixed on the basis of what will look good on paper, and is very unpleasant to try to read on screen, with forced horizontal scrolling etc. (IMHO this is one of the reasons many people say they prefer reading hardcopy than on-screen; and they are absolutely right. PDF is much easier to read in hardcopy - that's what it is designed for...) So: if you have any users with lower res screens (anything from an old 640x480 PC monitor, through WebTV, games console, PDA down to mobile phone) then PDF is going to be very unfriendly for them. There are ways around this, but they are even uglier!

Thirdly, PDF does not integrate well with the rest of the web. While PDF can contain hyperlinks, and can be pointed at by hyperlinks, accessing it normally bounces a user into at best a browser plug-in, at worst a completely separate application. "Fluid" hyperlinkage is the very stuff of the web: PDF disrupts this. (And, combining this with the previous point, if we print PDF then hyperlinks are not hyperlinks anymore at all at all...)

Fourthly, PDF is unfriendly to client side assistive technology for users with disabilities. This is sort of a special case of the second point, only with a few extra wrinkles. But basically, optimal access for these users requires that text be carefully marked up for logical structure, and that that logical structure be separately translated for rendering or presentation on a particular device. Non-text things also need to have text equivalents associated with them. This can be done in PDF; but it is really quite difficult. It is cutting against the grain of how PDF was designed. It is a "page description" language - i.e. a language for describing page layout. It doesn't like separating layout from logical structure. By contrast, HTML and CSS are designed precisely to work cleanly with this kind of separation. Of course, if none of your users have disabilities, and you are not constrained by equality legislation, this may not be an issue...

Ger is still "right": PDF is a very quick, clean, and easy way of bringing consistent order to a chaos of multiple incompatible legacy formats. But this is a very Faustian bargain (IMHO)...

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回复Barry McMullin

Re: Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Bryan Williams -

Firstly, PDF's tend to be big. Bigger than common WP formats, and much bigger than HTML (and cousins). Not a problem if you have the luxury of broadband Internet, but a real hassle otherwise.

True if you are using one of the free print driver's floating around to create your PDF, but not necessarily so when you use Acrobat Distiller which is part of Adobe's commercial product. 

Secondly, PDF's are ugly ... on screen.

Again, depends on how the PDF was made.  Adobe's product uses the same compression routine (JPEG) on images as one would use preparing a graphic for the web. You can control the amount of compression (hence quality) if you own the Adobe product.

Thirdly, PDF does not integrate well with the rest of the web. While PDF can contain hyperlinks, and can be pointed at by hyperlinks, accessing it normally bounces a user into at best a browser plug-in, at worst a completely separate application.

This was true, in 1994.  Acrobat was probably the first plug-in that gained ubiquity across browsers and computer platforms, which happened by 1996.  Acrobat documents have opened in all browsers since version 3, allowing full use of Reader tools. Further, Acrobat forms provide a function that cannot be matched unless you are a skilled HTML programmer. The same can be said for several other functions built into the Acrobat authoring environment.  Acrobat has advanced the idea of a paperless environment within many organizations, and helped these organizations to distribute forms that exactly match their paper counterparts. 

By contrast, HTML and CSS are designed precisely to work cleanly.....

True. If you are skilled in using CSS within the HTML environment you can achieve the same level of control over elements one has when  using say PageMaker or Publisher or Word, and then making a PDF. 

But this is a very Faustian bargain (IMHO)...

With built in XML that tag documents for storage, I think many companies would have to disagree with your assessment.  Acrobat as a storage format is growing in use, not shrinking.

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回复Bryan Williams

Re: Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Ger Tielemans -
I agree with Bryan: Moodle should grow in the direction of XML: if it gets more and more flexible PHP-forms that can store the content of the (database)fields in XML structures, already available libraries like Aurigadoc can translate it formats for the screen and pdf for the printer and...
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回复Bryan Williams

Re: Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Sean Keogh -
Using OpenOffice 1.1, I've found that most PDFs come out at about the same size as the originals, and often a lot smaller than when using Acrobat (which we also have).

In the case of Powerpoint slides, OpenOffice is *much* better at making PDFs.

Sean K Beardie
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回复Sean Keogh

Re: Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Tim Williams -
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Openoffice 1.1 also has the capability to export Powerpoint/Impress presentations to Macromedia Shockwave Flash format, which usually comes out smaller than the original and is far superior to PDF for this type of file. Using a little bit of javascript to control the presentation, you can make it all look very nice. There's an example on http://www.autotrain-europe.com/aachen/Automotive_Engineering_I/Lecture_Slides/chapter4.html
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回复Bryan Williams

Re: Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Barry McMullin -

A belated follow up to Bryan - triggered by a site I just happened to visit (nothing to do with Moodle). But before commenting on that site, let me say that I agree with Bryan that PDF can be used effectively; my frustration and dislike of PDF comes from the fact that that is so rare. I should volunteer that I use PDF extensively myself ... but never as a primary online format, and never ever as a source format. I generate it from a primary, structured format (typically LaTeX, but sometimes some XML language, such as docbook-lite), and generally offer it only as an alternative format for those people who particularly want to print something. In this role it works very well.

Anyway, that said, as those of you in Europe will know, we have elections coming up next month to the European Parliament. With that in mind, I was just browsing the sites of some of our local political parties, and came on this page that reminded me of this thread. Three election manifestos, available only in PDF. Sizes ranging from 712kByte to 2MByte. I only bothered downloading the European one (I have the luxury of a recently installed broadband connection - I certainly would have left immediately if I was still on dial up). The text content of this was c. 60kBytes - i.e., about one thirtieth of the PDF size. The PDF had no hyperlinkage - not even internal navigation - and was thus extremely difficult to read on screen. The opportunity to enrich the presentation with external hyperlinks was just ignored.

So, apologies for the original rant against all things PDF ... but please recognise that the problems with PDF deployment on the web are genuine.

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回复Barry McMullin

Re: Multiple Wordprocessing Formats & Platforms

Ger Tielemans -

There is a big gap between you techies and the normal teachers and professors:

  • Latex, isn't that a kind of paint?
  • DocBook Lite? is that a diet cookbook?

There are two reasons to use pdf:

  • to have an easy way to keep pictures in the file
  • to keep control over the layout when students want to print it.

For that you give up:

  • picture quality
  • small size.. so, NO pdf is NOT a zipprogram
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