OpenMoodle

3.1.1 Overview

The first part we proposed in this thesis is named “OpenMoodle” module. The OpenMoodle module is mainly designed for sharing course content and collaborative teaching. It allows teachers to cooperate with other like-minded instructors. Figure 3-1 depicts the overview of Moodle sites using OpenMoodle module. The educators who are at friendly Moodle site can export their course contents. The instructors who are at ordinary Moodle site can import the course materials that come from other friendly Moodle sites to create a new course or to enrich

Figure 3-1 the overview of Moodle sites using OpenMoodle module

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the content of existing course. The learners can gain more plenteous and integrated resources than traditional way.

3.1.2 Configuration

Before proceeding to exchange content, users need to do some pre-tasks manually including setup the automatic mechanism and access capabilities for OpenMoodle module.

 Cron

OpenMoodle module allows teachers to exchange teaching materials between sites. For some cases, users may want the data synchronization done automatically. In OpenMoodle module, automation is initiated by data exporting-side site. As long as Moodle administrator has set up the cron , the automatic update mechanism can be put into the Moodle’s regularly

scheduled progress. In modole, cron progress runs periodically to assist Moodle’s module to execute task. Since OpenMoodle module has installed, it will check the status of exported module per twelve hours and sync automatically if there is any update.

 Capabilities for OpenMoodle’s user

Interactions between users and Moodle are controlled by capabilities. User should assign the appropriate capabilities for the web service account. They can inherit the standard role: teacher which has the most common permission, or create a new role and assign the essential capabilities which are exhibited in Appendix A. Besides, teacher specifies what kind of protocol he wants to provide for communicating and assign the capabilities to the role.

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3.1.3 OpenMoodle Module

OpenMoodle is a block based module in Moodle. When using OpenMoodle, users must communicate voluntarily with each other by word-of-mouth. We utilize the course communication services that we developed in next section to support OpenMoodle. It consists of three major components: OpenServer List, Importable Curriculum Admin, and Local Curriculum Export. Figure 3-2 shows the component of OpenMoodle module.

 OpenServer List

Before starting exchanging materials of course with other educators, the instructor who is native to local server should configure external servers first. OpenServer List component provides Moodle administrator an interface to enter the web service login account of both local and curriculum exporting-side sites, and to manage the list of Moodle sites which are willing to export their teaching materials.

These accounts are stored at first and used during the period of exchanging data The curriculum importing-side site needs to get metadata information (e.g. available exported

Figure 3-2: the component of OpenMoodle module

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courses list, available exported course content in a course) before importing course materials.

Once a site has imported courses successfully, the curriculum exporting-side site has to record the login information of curriculum importing-side site so that if there is any change occurs, the curriculum exporting-side site will be able to notify these curriculum importing-side sites.

 Importable Curriculum Admin

The Importable Curriculum Admin component is used to manage and import external course content. The available exported curriculums will be listing here. By entering individual course, the resources and activities which are ready to export are shown. The instructor can choose what he wants among these exported Moodle course materials like url, page, lesson, resource…etc. After finishing selecting and clicking the “Import” button, the content of remote course will be delivered to local server right away. Local server will use these data to enrich an existing curriculum or establish a new curriculum.

In addition to import the resource and activity, instructor can set the synchronous option to make system enforce corresponding action when exporting-side site updated the content of curriculum. Three types of synchronous options are defined in the Importable Curriculum Admin component. They are “None”, “Only-inform”, “Auto-sync” synchronous options classified in Table 3-1.

Table 3-1 Options of Synchronization

Option Corresponding Action

None Do nothing

Only-inform Notify instructor of the update message.

Do not sync curriculum data automatically.

Auto-sync Imported curriculum data will be synced automatically.

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The “None” option represents that system does nothing when there is any up-to-date material being published. In this case, instructor can utilize the curriculum data from other educators as sample course without keeping following latest exported resources. If instructor prefers that the curriculum content entirely come from another teacher, he can adopt the

“Auto-sync” option. The imported curriculum data will be sync no matter what things change at exporting-side site. The last option is “Only-inform”. Curriculum importing-side site only receive update message. The instructor can filter out that content and then import profitable and suitable materials.

 Local Curriculum Export

The instructor is able to share resource with other like-minded educators through this component. The system will record the permissible resources and activities list. External educators at other site can view and import the exported curriculum materials as long as they have entered the login information of corresponding exporting-side server.

In order to do so, we should provide an account for other educators to access our curriculum materials. This account is “Web services authentication”-based in Moodle and assigned the corresponding capabilities which are checked during the procedure of course content sharing.

Besides exporting data to outside server, the instructor can improve his teaching materials according to other user’s feedback. We record some statistics which are related to what kinds of materials are selected by other educator’s. We list the information about sites which had imported curriculum materials. Moreover, we also record usage of each exported module.

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