just a lowly edtech geek, mumble mumble university of calgary
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I’ve been looking for a way to export a Moodle course in a format that can be ingested in another standards-compliant LMS. The obvious choices are SCORM or IMS-CP.
But, neither are supported as export formats from Moodle. Moodle happily ingests those formats, acting to absorb content into what then becomes an inescapable pit of quicksand. [...]
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We’ve been using Moodle to build a bunch of courses for our local health region, and it’s been technically working pretty well. Some of the feedback we’ve received about the UI has been less than stellar. For geeks and techies, it’s not too bad, but non-technical students get lost easily. Much of the complexity can [...]
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Sylvia mentioned this in an email discussion putting some ideas together for the Northern Voice Social Software for Learning Environments session we're wrangling, and I promptly forgot to check it out. Oops.
Anyway, she's coordinating an online seminar through SCoPE titled "Blogging to enhance learning experiences" – it's a moodle community with a fair amount of activity (and many familiar faces). It runs from February 12-25, so it's already under way.
Definitely worth checking out. I'll be mostly lurking, but will try to participate in the buildup to Northern Voice (our session is on the 24th)
To contribute to the discussion on SCoPE, you have to register in that instance of Moodle. After doing that, be sure to tweak your account's email subscription settings (to Digest mode) to prevent getting reams of email duplicating every forum post…
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During this latest sustained spam attack, this blog has been a little less responsive than I’d like. I’m thinking it’s related to Akismet’s need to talk to the mothership to verify each comment. As an experiment, I’ve switched back to Spam.module, disabling Bad Behavior and Akismet. It’s a bit of a risk, switching spam blocking strategies in mid-attack, but whatever. That’s what backups and phpMyAdmin are for.
Already, the site feels slightly less unresponsive. I’ve never been really happy relying on an active network connection to the Akismet Mothership to check each and every comment, and Spam.module is a completely self contained solution. It’s closer to Spam Karma 2 – the best spam blocking plugin for WordPress. Bayesian voodoo checking the content. Link counting, IP checking, etc…
So far, only a few snuck through in the short time between disabling Bad Behavior and Akismet, and enabling and configuring Spam.module.
In poking through the spam log, it looks like one particularly persistant roach just won’t get a clue. None of his crap has gotten through, but he just keeps coming back. Googling a portion of his automatically generated names turns up a list of 818,000 comments this person (or group) have flung onto the blogosphere. Almost a million spam comments. There’s a brand new inner circle of hell opening up for this clown.
Of course, I’m setting myself up here. If Spam.module falls over, I’m wide open to potentially thousands of automated spam comments. This should be interesting. I’m debating requiring comment previews before submission, so Spam.module can kill spammers before anything touches the database, but I’ve never liked making anyone jump through any more hoops than absolutely necessary (no CAPTCHA, no confirmation words, etc…).
Update: Well, it hasn’t been 100% bulletproof, but I only woke up to find 3 comment spams that needed removal. The sustained attack continues, though, so hundreds of other attempts were successfully blocked. Not bad. I may turn Bad Behavior back on to try the combo of BB+Spam.module…
Update 2: The spammers are getting frustrated. It looks like 2 separate attackers. One is using a single IP address, which was easily blocked via .htaccess. The other apparently commands a zombie network with an unknown number of computers from various networks. Hard to block via a simple htaccess deny access directive. But spam.module cleaned it out pretty quickly.
Now, they’ve resorted to simply salting the earth. If their links can’t get onto this blog, they’ll settle for just polluting it with as many garbage nonsense random ascii comment filler as possible. It’s either to vandalize for vengeance, or to confuse the Bayesian magic that filters incoming comments. Either way, I had to spend half an hour manually nuking the garbage that got past the filters. What a waste of time.
The spam.module log database table currently has over 25,000 entries. And it’s only been turned on for just over 24 hours.
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Zack Rosen just posted a comparison of Moodle and Sakai, based on some available online web- and project metrics (not an evaluation of the software itself). The comparison reads like something written by a Moodle supporter, intending to show how viable it is when compared with Sakai. It is viable, but language like “All signs point strongly towards Moodle kicking Sakai’s butt and to the Mellon Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, and Sakai Partners wasting $6.6M” really isn’t productive or conducive to an objective comparison.
Regardless, there is some surprising stuff in there – I didn’t realize Moodle has 8,900 installed copies. I’d guess the majority of that are “tinkering” or “sandbox” copies – I have 2 instances of Moodle running here, but it’s only being used once for students…
A more interesting “deployment” stat would have been number of campuses using each product with students. Number of campuses using each as their sole LMS? Primary? Secondary? Experimental? Average number of students per deployment. Number of administrators or server babysitters required per deployment.
The other interesting item, which should have been obvious in retrospect, is the funding differential. Sakai had a generous $2.2M round of seed funding from the Mellon and Hewlett foundations, with another $4.4M added by the core partners (likely a lot of that “in-kind”). Moodle is run on donations – at $12K/year – plus any time contributed to the open source code (which is likely rather substantial, yet uncounted).
The web metrics are essentially meaningless for comparing the projects, except to say that lots of people know about both.
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I spent about 2 minutes playing with Moodle today, in response to a question from Gord about how to add resources to a course. He started adding a resource yesterday, but wasn’t sure how to finish the process (it was a website link, and he wasn’t sure which fields were mandatory and which were optional). So I log in with the temporarily-shared administrative account, navigate to the course, and open the “add resource” panel.
And it has remembered what Gord was starting yesterday.
So, we just finish entering the resource (just gave it a Title, and set some parameters – open in a new window, etc…). Click Save, and it’s live.
Blackboard would have been a little more cumbersome, and wouldn’t have remembered the half-filled form. It’s the little things…
Overall, Moodle seems much more streamlined and intuitive to use than Blackboard or WebCT, from an administrator’s, instructor’s and student’s perspectives. It seems to do pretty much all that the Big LMSs do, with a much lower cost, and a better experience for all involved.
Or, maybe I’m just a sucker for open source software projects with hotties modeling T-shirts (Moodle, Drupal)…
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Moodle. It’s fun to say, and fun to play around with. I’ve spent a good part of the day playing with Moodle to set it up for use on a project. Well, that’s a lie. I spent maybe 10 minutes to set it up, and the rest of the time messing around with modules, themes, courses, lessons and activities to see what it can do.
In my early experimentation, it seems like an amazing and flexible LMS. Looks like it will be able to do everything we need for this project, and I’d be surprised if it couldn’t be tasked as the campus LMS as well. Lots of institutional and political reasons why that won’t happen any time soon, but the software feels pretty close to ready. I know Athabasca is running their campus on Moodle (and ELGG), and I’m wondering what they’re finding about large-scale deployment of Moodle…
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