Glossary of common terms

Dynamic HTML (DHTML) describes using HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create dynamic content on pages. A menu or other objects on a web page that respond to the user without requiring an additional trip to the server or a plug-in application are examples of DHTML in use.

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by The Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation. Firefox is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, illumos and Solaris operating systems.

(Entry edited by Helen Foster to update the information. Original entry 10 February 2004.)

(n.) A searing e-mail or newsgroup message in which the writer attacks another participant in overly harsh, and often personal, terms. Flames are an unfortunate, but inevitable, element of unmoderated conferences.

(v.) To post a flame.

source

MOO - LambdaMOO Server
"LambdaMOO is a network-accessible, multi-user, programmable, interactive system well-suited to the construction of text-based adventure games, conferencing systems, and other collaborative software."
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lambdamoo/

RSS is a Web content syndication format.
Its name is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.
RSS is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website. Subordinate to the <rss> element is a single <channel> element, which contains information about the channel (metadata) and its contents.

(extracted from http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss)

• Support for database transactions
  
• Strong support for SQL-92 standard
• Native external interfaces for ODBC, JDBC, C, C++, PHP, Perl, TCL, Python and Ruby
• Referential integrity
• Internal functions can be written in C, C++, Java, Perl, TCL, Python, Ruby, PHP and PL/PgSQL
• Insert/Update/Delete Triggers
  
• Inheritance
• Unicode
  
• Extensible data types
• Indexes on functions

This is an add-on or extension for the Firefox browser that adds a variety of tools useful for web developers manipulating HTML and CSS.

It is available from Mozilla Update though the most recent version is usually available from the author's website

Highly recommended.

Any computer on a network that offers services or connectivity to other computers on the network. A host has an IP address associated with it.

• Are very knowledgeable and supportive of the Moodle project
• Provide quality Moodle services such as hosting and consulting
• Support Moodle development directly via royalty payments
• Are often found around moodle.org, helping people for free

This is an abbreviation for 'Thanks in advance'

Often used in usenet but has become increasingly popular in e-mails, text messages, instant messages, chat rooms and forum posts. In fact, you could come across this abbreviation in any modern electronic communication.

Abbreviation for Internet Explorer which is Microsoft's web browser.

Originally provided free to undermine Netscape's browser dominance in the 90's and currently provided bundled as standard with Microsoft's microcomputer operating systems.

Many people are switching from IE to Mozilla's Firefox to avoid the perceived risk of spy-ware and other security risks.

• Federated Administration
• Access Control Based on Attributes
• Active Management of Privacy
• Standards Based
• Framework for Multiple, Scaleable Trust and Policy Sets (Federations)
• Standard Attribute Value Vocabulary

• Access to Moodle can be restricted very accurate (e.g. you allow only students from universities A, B and D to access your Moodle, but not students from universities C and E. Or you allow only medicine students.)
  
• User accounts are created automatically as soon as a user logs in the first time.
• The user profiles are set up automatically (e.g. the users firstname, surname and email address is inserted the first time a user logs in)
• The user profiles can automatically kept up-to date all the time
• So you don't have to care anymore for user management issues because this is basically handled by the Identity Provider of the Shibboleth user (e.g. the home university).
• Once Shibboleth users are authenticated, they can access other Shibboleth-enabled resources without loggin in another time. Due to this single sign-on mechanism, they e.g. can jump from one Moodle installation to another or the can access a Shibboleth-protected library or a web shop, always being authenticated.

• Automatic course enrollment according to Shibboleth attributes.
  

NZ Open Source VLE Project is a New Zealand-based project, hosted at Eduforge.org

It is helping Moodle adoption as part of a greater project of developing OSS e-learning application software for deployment throughout New Zealands education sector. System integration of portal website framework, lcms, content creation tools and modular toolkit.

An acronym for PHP Extension and Application Repository. PEAR is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components.

For more information see http://pear.php.net/.

Postnuke is a free, open source, database driven php website. Many Moodle people use postnuke as a front end page to forums, calendars, guestbook and other non-education specific activities. There are literaly thousands of free themes, and hundreds of open source modules that a postnuke site can use.

However, the administration and permission system UI for postnuke can be daunting for newbies, and often requires some basic knowledge of php coding to implement many tasks.

http://www.postnuke.com/

A great website for educators to start at is the postnuke education forum.

Cron is an Automatic sytem in moodle that sends out messages to the system through.

• EMail
• Rss
• Assignement Uploads  (This is normally for the teachers - for notifications that a student has uploaded an assignment).

For more information on Cron check the moodle docs page and your help section in moodle.

Happy Moodleing.

Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a collection of standards and specifications for web-based e-learning. It defines communications between client side content and a host system called the run-time environment (commonly a function of a learning management system). SCORM also defines how content may be packaged into a transferrable ZIP file.
After going through SCORM standards 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2004 first edition, the current latest version is SCORM 2004 2nd edition.

Reusable eLearning Object Authoring & Delivery

Abbreviation for Hope That Helps (or Hope This Helps).

Originally from Usenet, but now appearing in emails and forums, it's sometimes put at the end of a reply which suggests a possible solution to a problem.

• see the amfphp official web site - http://amfphp.org.
• see this Moodle Docs article on using AMFPHP with Moodle.

Established in 2006, Mahara is the result of a collaborative venture funded by New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission's e-learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF), involving Massey University, Auckland University of Technology, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and Victoria University of Wellington.

Released in Feb 2007 Mahara is a fully featured electronic portfolio, weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online communities.

Mahara is designed to provide users with the tools to demonstrate their learning, skills and development over time to selected audiences.

Meaning `think' or `thought' in Te Reo Maori, the name reflects the project's dedication to creating a user-centred life-long learning and development application as well as the belief that technology solutions cannot be developed outside the considerations of pedagogy and policy.

Mahara is provided freely as Open Source software (under the GNU General Public License). In brief, this means that you are allowed to copy, use and modify Mahara provided you agree to; provide the source code to others; not modify or remove the original license and copyrights, and apply this same license to any derivative work.

For further information please see https://eduforge.org/projects/mahara/ and http://mahara.org

Internet Information Services - Microsoft's answer to Apache. This is software, that, when installed on a machine, provides a web service. Just like Apache, IIS listens to port 80 and answers any http requests from client machines.

The front page is the initial page seen by someone reaching a Moodle site. It is the site home page.

See the documentation Front page for more details.

A nickname is a descriptive name given in place of or in addition to the official name of a person, place or thing.

Nickname often denotes the diminutive form of a person's legal first name, or it denotes an alternative for a person's legal first name.

Diminutive: "Ben" for "Benjamin."
Alternative: "ian" for "Choon."

See also, Customised usernames, user profile field, friendly name.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol -

is an application protocol for modifying directory services. It is commonly used for user and computer directories for domains.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) comes virtually unchanged from the ISO 8879 standard SGML for the implementation of markup languages. It is a general purpose specification that aims at representing with simplicity documents with high quality and usability.

Examples of markup languages coming from xml are xhtml, mathml, musicml, graphml and svg. Applications like OpenOffice use the ooxml file format to represent word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and charts. This file format is essentially a zip file containing xml documents.

Although it is very similar to xhtml, the html specification is not a xml markup language.

References

1. XML on Wikipedia
2. The W3C recommendation on XML
   

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a markup language based on XML for representing two-dimensional vector graphics. It allows for both static and dynamic graphics. Vector graphics usually perform better when compared to raster formats like JPEG, PNG or GIF, and can be rescaled arbitrarily without loss of quality, and the rescaling does not imply a larger digital footprint. Thus, for instance, the graphics for printing an entire outdoor picture could fit in just a couple megabytes of disk space (the same as a good cellphone picture) without loosing its quality.

SVG can also be used to represent text where the required fonts are unavailable, by converting each individual character to a set of graphical paths. It can also be used to represent other types of content like mathematical formulas,

Some web browsers have native (but incomplete) support for SVG. The list includes browsers based on the gecko engine (Firefox, Netscape, Camino, Epiphany, and SeaMonkey), browsers based on the webkit engine (Safari, Chrome, OmniWeb), Opera and Amaya. On the other hand, browsers based on the MSHTML engine (Internet Explorer, Wikibrowse, Maxthon, and NetCaptor) do not provide support for SVG.

References

1. The W3C recommendation on SVG.
2. SVG on Wikipedia.
   

Location: Flat file edit settings link in Administration > Courses > Enrolments

A flat file allows enrolment management (enrol or unenrol) of existing users in existing course. The file is read one time by Moodle then erased. The file is located in the moodle file structure as a text file and Cron provides the timing when it is read.

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Flat_file

Short name for Apache HTTP Server Project. This is the web server environment that Moodle was developed in, a freely downloadable Open Source product from Apache Software Foundation.

Gossip: The original name for Apache Server was "A patchy server", but cooler heads prevailed and named it Apache - didn't matter, it worked so well it celebrated its 15th birthday February 2010 and has been the Web's most popular server environment since April of 1996.

From Apache Friends the Xampp-lite Moodle installation package is a one stop installer for Apache, PHP, MySQL and Moodle. Originally developed for its simplicity of installation, Xampp-lite was designed, essentially, for stand alone computers using Windows, so that courses could be developed offline. It is generally agreed that it is not a suitable environment for a production site.

another PHP Application that can be used to administer your Moodle database. It has an intuitive interface that is actually very basic and it is easy to setup and use.  Is a free tool and is downloadable from the phpMyAdmin site. It has also been bundled with the Xampp-lite/Moodle package.

The term used to describe moving a Moodle site from one server to another.

Proof Of Concept - a prototype created to show that an idea is technically fesible.  While the prototype probably isn't suitable for real-world use, it provides a starting point for discussion and design of a real solution.

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Negative statements made with no real supporting evidence designed to discourage people from taking a particular course of action.  This could be done with malicious intent (e.g. to put potential customers off a competing product), or innocently by passing on received wisdom that is incorrect.

In Moodle, the term "context" may have a specific meaning.

A Moodle context is a place where permissions are assigned to a user (usually through a role).  In Moodle, contexts are layered in a hierachry.  Some examples: a site is the overall context; each course category is a context in the site; each course is a context in it's course category; each topic/section is a context and the resources and activities in a topic/section are contexts.   Blocks, filters and special pages are contexts that are at minimum part of the  site context.    Permissions are passed down automatically. For example, a user who has a teacher role in a course will be assigned that role when a Forum context is created.   Roles for individuals or groups can be changed in a context. This makes it possible for one user to be a teacher in one context and  a student in another. 

A permission is a part of a role which allows or denies a someone to use a feature or function of Moodle.  There are over 450 different permissions settings in any Moodle role.   Each permission has 1 of 4 states that can be assigned to it: "not set", "allow", "prevent", and "prohibit.  Editing or creating new roles on the site level can be complicated. In part because of the hierarchical nature of contexts.  In many contexts, roles or permissions can be overridden, and the permitted user will see a shortened list of permissions appropriate to the context.

An acronym for Automated Manipulation of Strings, Moodle's translation tool located at lang.moodle.org.

Git is a revision control and source code management system used to manage Moodle's code repository.

You can also download Moodle using Git.

Constructionist learning is inspired by the constructivist theory that individual learners construct mental models to understand the world around them. However, constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are also active in making tangible objects in the real world. In this sense, constructionism is connected with experiential learning, and builds on Jean Piaget's epistemological theory of constructivism.

Seymour Papert defined constructionism in a proposal to the National Science Foundation entitled Constructionism: A New Opportunity for Elementary Science Education as follows: "The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education underlying this project. From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product."

Source: Wikipedia.org

The zone of proximal development, often abbreviated ZPD, is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help. It is a concept introduced yet not fully developed by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934) during the last two years of his life. Also, many theorists are still applying to their work today.

Vygotsky stated that a child follows an adult's example and gradually develops the ability to do certain tasks without help. Vygotsky's often-quoted definition of zone of proximal development presents it as...

"...the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers. For example, two 8 yr. old children may be able to complete a task that an average 8 yr. old can do. Next, more difficult tasks are presented with very little assistance from an adult. In the end, both children were able to complete the task. However, the styles methods they chose depended on how far they were willing to stretch their thinking process."

Vygotsky and some educators believe education's role is to give children experiences that were within their zones of proximal development, thereby encouraging and advancing their individual learning.

"The zone of proximal development defines functions that have not matured yet, but are in a process of maturing, that will mature tomorrow, that are currently in an embryonic state; these functions could be called the buds of development, the flowers of development, rather than the fruits of development, that is, what is only just maturing."

Source: Wikipedia.org

Abbreviation for "By The Way".

Standard Operating Procedure.

Good Luck With That One Buddy! - Usually a reference to a reasonable position, view, or situation that is seen as being untenable or unachievable because of the lack of co-operation of others, usually for their own, often non-logical or unreasonable, perceptions. 

Just For The Record

Digital Accessible Information SYstem. DAISY refers to a digital book designed for people with vision impairment difficulties. Just like a SCORM or an EPUB file, a DAISY book consists of different (text, image, audio) digital files.

Moodle Installation Directory

phpMyAdmin. A tool to manage your Moodle database with, if you have Admin access rights. Used with MySQL and MariaDB database servers. 

Its a combination of server setup for any website/web based application, where Operating platform (Windows), web server (IIS), database servers (MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server) application server (PHP), hence the term WIMP

Other similar combination based on Windows platform can be WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP).

A Bitnami Stack provides a single application LAMP, WAMP or MAMP for Moodle installations. This approach offers a good solution to Users who want a test site on a stand alone computer. The Bitnami Stack also provides a more stable environment for adding additional PHP applications than other, similar solutions.  

In My (Humble|Honest) Opinion

I Am Not A Developer - a response when answering technical question if suggesting an action that may need more input from a Moodle Developer. 

An anti-plagiarism module originally developed by Dan Marsden, but was redeveloped by Turnitin, who now maintain it, as a Third Party Plugin. John McGettrick is the Lead on behalf of Turnitin.   

Plesk is a commercial hosting management program that can be used to manage the account management interface. Plesk can be used for multiple distros of Linux (Ubuntu, Redhat, Cloud Linux, Debian) and Windows Server 2008 and 2012 servers. 

MariaDB is community developed database based on popular database MySQL. MariaDB was forked from MySQL, and maintains many of the same features, APIs and commands used in MySQL. MariaDB can be accessed for administration using PHPMyAdmin, the same tool used for MySQL. 

MariaDB uses the "XtraDB" storage engine which is a drop-in replacement of InnoDB used by MySQL and a new storage engine called Aria. 

Moodle Users Assocation

AMPPS is a WAMP, MAMP and LAMP stack of Apache, MySQL, MongoDB, PHP, Perl, Python & Softaculous. http://www.ampps.com/

One of the database types supported by Moodle's implementation of the database interface layer. There are a large number of implementations of MSSQL, and it would appear that Moodle works with the latest versions.   

Learning Tools Interoperability® (LTI®) is a specification developed by IMS Global Learning Consortium. It establishes a standard way of integrating rich learning applications, called tools (delivered by tool providers) with platforms such as learning management systems, called tool consumers.

Moodle can be a tool consumer or a tool provider. See the documentation LTI and Moodle for further details.

Data centers are repositories (virtual or physical) to house computers and their components (servers, networking systems etc).

Virtual Machine usually called a VM is a self-contained application environment which acts as dedicated hardware.

Vocational Education and Training. 

This is a term used in Australia to refer to programs that are aimed at trades or skills-based vocations. For example, an electrician would undertake a VET course in order to become an electrician and would learn the skills during the process, but a lawyer would not. VET courses can be delivered through schools, universities, TAFEs (Technical and Further Education providers) or RTOs (Registered Training Organisations). 

VET courses can start from Cert I (basic skills) and go all the way up to Advanced Diploma level. (The order goes Cert I, Cert II, Cert III, Cert IV, Diploma, Advanced Diploma) 

Dashboard is a customisable page in Moodle that provides users with links to their courses and activities within them, such as unread forum posts and upcoming assignments.

See the documentation Dashboard for more details.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation by which the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission intend to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU.

In My Not So Humble Opinion - usually reserved for something we are an expert at or an issue we feel strongly supportive, or otherwise, of. 

Quick and Dirty. Usually a reference to a specific kludge or a specific, rapid response to an immediate problem. 

A multiple-choice question (MCQ) is composed of two parts: a stem that identifies the question or problem, and a set of alternatives or possible answers that contain a key that is the best answer to the question, and a number of distractors that are plausible but incorrect answers to the question.

It is one of the core question types in Moodle.

More information:

• https://docs.moodle.org/en/Question_types
  
• https://docs.moodle.org/en/Multiple_Choice_question_type

Useful reading:

• Multiple-Choice Testing in Education: Are the Best Practices for Assessment Also Good for Learning?
  
• MCQs with 1 correct answer & 2 distractors tend to be more valid & reliable
• Top 10 stupid mistakes in design of Multiple Choice questions (external site)

Related Moodle plugins:

• All-or-Nothing Multiple Choice
  
• Matrix question
  
• MTF (ETH)
  
• OU multiple response

Moodle App Plans are functionality levels for the official mobile app. The available plans are Free, Pro and Premium. You can learn more about them at apps.moodle.com and join the discussion in the forum here.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other serializable values). JSON is a language-independent data format. It was derived from JavaScript, but many modern programming languages include code to generate and parse JSON-format data.