Linking resources between courses

Linking resources between courses

by Leonardo Macrobio -
Number of replies: 2

Hi, everybody!

I'm trying to solve this problem: in my Faculty we have many reference materials that each Teacher puts in his/her own Course directory. Now: what if I would like to link one topic of my course to this material?

I tried to login as administrator, as Course Creator etc, but no way: the only solution is to upload the (same) resource in my own directory/course. But what if my web/server space wouldn't be unlimited?

Briefly: I would like someone to tell me how I could link a resource (such as pdf, doc, html etc) that is not in my own course.

Thank you very much!

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In reply to Leonardo Macrobio

Re: Linking resources between courses

by John Isner -
Unfortunately there is at the moment no single user-friendly solution for sharing resources (not just files) across courses in Moodle. Read MDL-9134 and then vote for it!

If the sharing can be planned in advance (e.g., all the courses in the math department will share) then you can use a metacourse for the shared resources. However if you want sharing to be spontaneous (e.g., a teacher in a math course decides to use a file in a colleague's science course), then the shared file must exist in a publicly-accessible place on the Web. I use Site Files for shared files. Unfortunately, teachers do not typically have write access to Site Files.

Most people use copy as an alternative to sharing. But copying is not sharing. Not only do you use more space, but as soon as you make a copy, you have two versions to maintain.
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In reply to John Isner

Re: Linking resources between courses

by Martin Dougiamas -
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Basically all this will be resolved by the Repository API in Moodle 2.0. I really don't want to hack this into Moodle because it leads to all kinds of other problems.

The idea for the future is that we use a separate repository for all user files (the respository can be all kinds of things from Internet hard drives to specialised document repository software) which Moodle accesses via a plugin to give a nice consistent interface.

This is the first priority after the Bugathon.

In the meantime, even now you can store files externally somewhere and reference them in resources using their URL. It's just more manual and less secure than the repository API will be.
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