Why Moodle?
An overview of free (open
source) e-learning tools
(ICALT 2005 + DMI experiences)
Živana Komlenov
Department of Mathematics and Informatics
Faculty of Science
University of Novi Sad
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Topics:
• Why Moodle?
• Latest Moodle release (1.6)
• Fifth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning
Technologies (ICALT'05)
• 5-8 July 2005, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
– “An Evaluation of Open Source E-Learning Platforms
Stressing Adaptation Issues”
• DMI extensions and customization
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Why Moodle?
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Why Moodle?
• Course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source
software package designed using sound pedagogical
principles, to help educators create effective online
learning communities.
• Can be downloaded and used on any computer (including
web hosts)
• Can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student
University.
• Has been evolving since 1999 (since 2001 with the current
architecture).
• Major improvements in accessibility and display flexibility
developed in version 1.5.
• The current version is 1.6 - released in June 2006.
• Designed to be compatible, flexible and easy to modify.
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Why Moodle?
• Written using the popular and powerful PHP
language, which runs on any computer platform with
a minimum of effort.
• Built in a highly modular fashion and uses common
technologies such as shared libraries, abstraction,
and Cascading Style Sheets to define the interfaces.
• Can be linked to other systems such as mail servers
or student directories.
• Runs without modification on Unix, Linux, FreeBSD,
Windows, Mac OS X, NetWare and any other systems
that support PHP, including most web hosting
providers.
• Data stored in a single database: MySQL and
PostgreSQL are best supported, but it can also be
used with commercial databases, ADO and generic
ODBC database access, since it uses ADOdb.
Martin Dougiamas
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Why Moodle?
• Strong Open Source community
moodle.org (using Moodle to run it)
– large and diverse user community with over 130,000
registered users on the official site alone
– speaking 75 languages in 163 countries
– 15657 registered sites (12 of those from Serbia)
– 177 registered Moodle sites that are larger than 5000 users
– The site with the most users is of course moodle.org with 41
courses and 135248 users.
– The site with the most courses is HSU Moodle (Humboldt
State University, Arcata, CA) with 12288 courses and 42121
users.
• Commercial guidance and extra help
moodle.com (+ partners)
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Why Moodle?
Moodle sites world distribution
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Why Moodle?
Total known Moodle sites
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Why Moodle?
Total moodle.org users
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Why Moodle?
• The real number of current active Moodle installations is
unknown, but Moodle is downloaded over 500 times a day.
• The largest single site has reported over 12,000 courses
and over 40,000 students, and the Open University of the
UK is building a Moodle installation for their 200,000 users.
• Their Learning and Teaching Office has started a new
programme worth nearly £5 million to build a
comprehensive online student learning environment for the
21st century.
• The development, which started in May of 2006, and will be
fully operational for February 2007 courses, will see the
largest use of Moodle in the world.
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Why Moodle?
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Moodle downloads per month
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Why Moodle?
Google Trend history
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Why Moodle?
• Moodle market share according to Alexa Web
Traffic for LMS Suppliers says that:
– Moodle is only below Blackboard, above all
other VLE, including WebCT.
– Alexa’s Traffic Rank for moodle.org is 8,540.
– Speed is average (59% of sites are slower).
– Average load time is 2.5 seconds.
– There are 3,008 other sites that link to this site.
Daily reach according
to Alexa
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Latest Moodle release (1.6)
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Moodle 1.6
• Moodle 1.6 is available for download since Jun 2006.
• Over a year of new features developed by the community
of Moodle developers
• Countless bug fixes and a lot of restructuring under the
hood
• Some of the major highlights include:
– 100% Unicode support - all existing languages are now
compatible and can be mixed wherever you like
– New documentation wiki - a one-stop shop for all
documentation, integrated from within each page of Moodle
itself
– Database module - a new activity module for collaborative
collection and display of arbitrary data
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Moodle 1.6
– Blogs - for ongoing personal reflections, viewable by
course, by group, by individual etc.
– New reports - plug-in reports enable you to create and
share new report types (new statistics reports are also
included)
– Questions - quiz question types are now a centralised
structure so any module will be able to use them in
future
– My Moodle - a new customizable dashboard page with
an overview of all your courses and what is new
– Multiple groups - users can be part of any number of
groups in a course
– IMS content packages - can now be loaded as resources
– Chameleon theme - can be customised in your browser
on the fly
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Moodle 1.6
– Granularised backup - allows you to backup only
selected activities
– Multi Enrolments - use any number of Moodle's
enrolment methods at once, including the new IMS
Enterprise methods
– More comfortable course editing (student view etc.)
– Importing PowerPoint slides into Moodle lessons (only
functional for simple slides, not very successful with
our SE lessons)
NOTE: Moodle 1.6 requires PHP 4.3.0 (or PHP 5.1.0)
and MySQL 4.1.16 (4.1.12 if you use latin languages
only).
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Moodle 1.6
• Moodle 1.6.1 was released on July 20th 2006, bringing lots
of bug fixes, and some new features, such as:
– Enhanced frontpage settings
– Frontpage can now be different for logged in users,
changed category list display
– Improved administration page layout
• Moodle 1.6.2 release (September 12th):
– Fixed a lot of security issues
– And other bugs
• Several in Lesson module
• Glossary problems with non-ASCII characters
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Moodle 1.7
• Next version of Moodle, 1.7, is expected very soon, and is
planned to introduce some interesting features as well:
– Roles
• Permissions based on fine-grained capabilities allow all
kinds of roles to be created and assigned in all contexts
around Moodle.
– XML Database schema
• Added support for MS-SQL with more databases to come.
– Unit testing framework
• Making it easier for developers to write test code, which
should ultimately lead to a more reliable Moodle.
– Improvements to the quiz
• The teacher can configure comments that are displayed to
the student at the end of their attempt, with the comment
displayed depending on the student's score.
– Improvements to some core question types
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Sabine Graf & Beate List
“An Evaluation of Open Source E-Learning
Platforms Stressing Adaptation Issues”
Women’s Postgraduate College of
Internet Technologies
Vienna University of Technology
This research has been funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education,
Science, and Culture, and the European Social Fund (ESF) under grant 31.963/46VII/9/2002
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ICALT’05
• An e-learning course should match students’ needs and
desires as closely as possible, and adapt during course
progression.
• This paper presents an evaluation of open source elearning platforms with the aim of finding the platform
most suitable for extending to an adaptive one.
• The extended platform will be utilized in an operational
teaching environment, so the overall functionality of the
platform is also very important.
• The evaluation is based on the qualitative weight and sum
approach - a well-established approach for the evaluation
of software products.
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ICALT’05
• QWS establishes and weights a list of criteria.
• There are six qualitative levels of importance for the
weights. Frequently used symbols are:
–
–
–
–
–
–
E = essential
* = extremely valuable
# = very valuable
+ = valuable
| = marginally valuable
0 = not valuable.
• The weight of a criterion determines the range of values
that can be used to measure a product’s performance.
• For a criterion weighted # the product can only be judged
#, +, |, or 0, but not *:lower-weighted criteria cannot
overpower higher-weighted criteria.
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ICALT’05
• QWS approach was selected for this evaluation because of
the differentiated results, which highlight the strengths and
limitations of the platforms.
• It was adapted in a way where the essential criteria are
assessed in a pre-evaluation phase.
• These minimum criteria cover three general usage
requirements:
– an active community
– a stable development status
– a good documentation of the platform.
• The fourth criterion incorporates the didactical objective
and means that the platform’s focus is on the presentation
of content instead of communication functionalities.
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ICALT’05
• At the beginning of the evaluation, 36 platforms were
selected and evaluated according to the minimum criteria.
• Nine platforms (ATutor 1.4.11, Dokeos 1.5.5, dotLRN 2.0.3,
based on OpenACS 5.1.0, ILIAS 3.2.4, LON-CAPA 1.1.3,
Moodle 1.4.1, OpenUSS 1.4 extended with Freestyle
Learning 3.2, Sakai 1.0, and Spaghettilearning 1.1) met the
criteria.
• Next, these nine platforms were tested in detail.
• Eight categories were established and weighted:
communication tools, learning objects, management of
user data, usability, adaptation, technical aspects,
administration, and course management.
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ICALT’05
• Adaptation Capabilities:
– Adaptability includes all facilities to customize the platform
for the educational institution’s needs (e.g. the language or
the design).
– Personalization aspects indicate the facilities of each
individual user to customize his/her own view of the platform.
– Extensibility is, in principle, possible for all open source
products. Nevertheless, there can be big differences. For
example, a good programming style or the availability of a
documented application programming interfaces (API) are
helpful.
– Adaptivity indicates all kinds of automatic adaptation to the
individual user’s needs (e.g. personal annotations of learning
objects or automatically adapted content).
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ICALT’05
• Results of the Adaptation
Category:
– The majority of the
platforms were estimated
as very good with regard
to extensibility.
– Adaptivity features are
underdeveloped.
– Most of the platforms do
not consider adaptivity
at all.
– Moodle as the best
platform concerning
adaptation issues.
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ICALT’05
• Moodle provides an adaptive feature called “lesson” where
learners can be routed automatically through pages
depending on the answer to a question after each page.
• The extensibility is supported very well by a documented
API, detailed guidelines, and templates for programming.
• Adaptability and personalization aspects are also included.
• Templates for themes are available and can be selected by
the administrator.
• Students can choose out of more than 70 languages.
• Concerning the overall evaluation results, Moodle
dominates the evaluation by achieving the best value in
five categories.
• Its strengths are the realization of communication tools,
and the creation and administration of learning objects.
• Additional strengths of Moodle are the comprehensive
didactical concepts and also the tracking of data.
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ICALT’05
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DMI extensions and
customization
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LO’s contents linked to other LOs
• eCourses developed at the DMI in Novi Sad required more
adaptivity concerning navigation through eLessons.
• Course creators wanted more flexibility in their students
eLearning experience, in a way that they can explicitly
choose different paths through lessons (where available)
or can be directed to different parts depending on their
answers.
• One of the most useful feature that was developed is the
possibility to connect any part of one LO’s contents to
another LO.
• There are at least two good purposes for such an
extension of Moodle’s navigational features – redirection of
learners to other parts of eContents and simple reminders.
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LO’s contents linked to other LOs
• These features have been fully integrated into existing
structure of HTML editor used while creating eContents,
not only of eLessons, but of other course resources and
activities.
• This means that main eContents (represented in eLessons
consisting of many LOs) is accessible from any part of the
eCourse (quizzes, assignments etc.), or actually every
textual part of eContents created by Moodle’s HTML editor.
• Improved navigational features (connecting LOs in an
arbitrary way) have been included into editor’s existing
option Insert Web Link.
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LO’s contents linked to other LOs
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HTMArea Editor
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Redirection to other parts of eContents
Insert Link
• To allow students to wander through eLessons in several
ways, showing them paths they could follow and supplying
them with various meaningful links from each LO to the others.
• Directly connecting contents of LOs.
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Redirection to other parts of eContents
Choosing target LO
• Next step is choosing
the target LO.
• All available LOs are
retrieved from the
database and their
titles are displayed to
the user.
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Redirection to other parts of eContents
Generating URL of
the chosen LO
• Moodle then generates URL of the chosen
LO (internal generic URL based on chosen
items from database).
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Redirection to other parts of eContents
Final Changes
• URL and Title fields are automatically filled, and user can
specify the value of Target field.
• After final changes, click on the OK button creates the
desired link.
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Redirection to other parts of eContents
• When the page is saved and later redisplayed
the LO link will be available.
Testing link to another LO
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Reminders
Reminder creation
• It is often useful to make it possible to students to just
take a look at other LOs (even from different eLessons –
i.e. reuse the existing material without duplicating it),
without disturbing their learning path.
• Option Contents only activated.
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Reminders
Reminder being
created in a pop-up
window
• URL of the page containing only basic contents of the
selected LO (without questions and navigational options)
is automatically generated, Title field filled, Target field set
to New window.
• When students follow the link, they get a pop-up window
reminding them of the pure contents of another LO.
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Extended jumps
Linking LOs from
different eLessons
• Extended choice of
target LOs, so all LOs
from currently existing
eLessons belonging
to the eCourse are
now available as
target LOs at any time
and from contents of
any LO.
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Extended jumps
• Another version of “extended” jumps is proposed through
slight changes in lesson module itself, offering the
possibility of creating jump links (for example while
creating Question Pages) to LOs from any eLesson that
belongs to the eCourse.
• All these additions make connecting and combining
contents of all eLessons in any imaginable way quite easy
to accomplish.
• Therefore eCourses can be complex structures consisting
of numerous interconnected eLessons, with improved
reusability of learning material and extended flexibility for
both teachers creating the course and learners following
various learning paths at their own pace.
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Extended jumps
Extended jump
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Serbian language packs
• Moodle has been designed for internationalisation.
• Each 'string' or 'page' of text that is displayed as part of the
interface is drawn from a set of language files (a language
pack).
• There are currently 65 Moodle 1.6 UTF-8 language packs
available for download: http://download.moodle.org/lang16/
• Older language packs for versions up to 1.5 (73 of them)
are still available as well: http://download.moodle.org/lang/
• To install these languages one should simply download the
zip file to their moodle/lang directory and unzip it there.
• For Moodle 1.6 upwards these must be put into the
moodledata/lang directory.
• Moodle 1.6 language packs can also be installed directly
from the admin/lang menu in any Moodle installation.
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Serbian language packs
• Serbian language packs (two of them – Latin and Cyrillic,
but the translation is basically identical) have been
developed.
• We started with detailed analysis of previously existing
Serbian (actually a dialect spoken in parts of Bosnia),
official Bosnian and Croatian packs, as well as Serbian
packs for Moodle 1.5 developed by Miloš Bajčetić and his
students at medical School of Belgrade.
• All those translations were rather incomplete and done for
previous Moodle versions.
• Nevertheless, they were compared and reused to a
reasonable extent.
• The aim of this first step was to collect different ideas on
translating certain expressions.
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Serbian language packs
• After that, the core of the new translation was completed
(all strings) and transformed into full Moodle 1.6 UTF-8
packs.
• They have been accepted as the official Serbian Moodle
translation and made available for download at moodle.org.
• They are now regularly maintained, according to further
Moodle development, as well as conclusions reached in
discussion with other Moodlers from Serbia interested in
using the best possible Moodle translation.
• There is a special course for Serbian Moodlers - a place for
discussion, sharing learning materials etc.
http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=53
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Serbian language packs
• Further efforts are being made by this community in order
to provide complete documentation and help for Serbian
speaking users.
• This is supported by Reticulum project www.reticulum.org,
an informal organization of Serbian Moodlers.
• It takes part in eEducation at Serbian Universities and
provides lectures and workshops for all interested parties,
works closely to Research Centre Petnica and is an
important member of WUS eLearning initiative.
• Since Serbian differs quite a lot over the different regions it
is spoken, the previous official translation was kept
available for Serbian speakers in Bosnia, with hope that its
author will work towards its completion and further
maintenance.
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