[sugar] offline moodle

[David Van Assche]

Hi Bryan,

Comments are inline...

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan.berry at gmail.com> wrote:

> That's a great overview David,
>
> We need to get working quickly on developing course materials. Our two
> full-time educators, Kamana and Sunil, currently write out lesson plans
> and activity descriptions in MS Word. Not quite ideal :)
>

Don't you have a local moodle install in the office? that might help in the
very short run...


> I want to get them using Moodle asap. It will improve collaboration b/w
> the developers and educators. Also, we are currently storing
> supplementary materials on the fileserver, which is again a pretty lousy
> way to do it. Kamana and Sunil want to lay out a whole course, i.e.,
> class2 mathematics with descriptions of activities and exercises they
> want developed, and then help the developers build activities that meet
> their ideas. Eventually I want to put the courses on a public server (if
> I had the hosting budget) so volunteers can more easily create
> activities to meet the ideas dreamt up by Sunil and Kamana.
>

yeah, in terms of supplementary materials, I suggest looking at DOOR, which
allows for exporting and importing of such materials to the moodle community
(and other IMS based systems) at large. But the best solution for what you
mention is of course some kind of offline moodle.


>
> >and at the moment only the course material is downloaded (no events, no
> >task
> >manager, etc.)
>
> At the moment, this is enough for us to work w/, just the static
> materials. What was the resource consumption of Jolongo on your eeePC?
>

I've got bad news about Jolongo. At the moment it will not install on the
eeepc, I'm trying to iron out bugs with developers of the Jolongo team, but
it could take some time. In terms of Adobe AIR, that totally kils the XO...
as in, try to install it and the system reboots, and takes the journal with
it. So, I guess that's a no-go for the time being.


>
> Perhaps an interim option as we wait for the offline clients to mature
> is to write a shell script that harvests the static html and embedded
> activities like Flash and Etoys to an .xo bundle.
>

I mentioned there are quite a few moodle plugins that allow for embedded
flash content (not sure about etoys)... but... the import/export function of
Moodle, which is what both offline moodle solutions use to transfer courses
is probably your best bet.

Now for the good news (maybe.) I've managed to get
apache2+php5+mysql5+moodle working great on the asus eeepc. I first tried
installing with an xampp package, which works ok, but then you have to
install moodle manually from source, and put it in the right places. So I
tried the old fashioned way (apt-get install moodle apache2 mysql-server
mysql-client php5 php-mysql php-pear) and voila... it installed everything
necessary and it was just a matter of going to localhost/moodle to do the
rest. With that setup it is very easy to create local courses then export
them to another moodle... a one click  process...  basically... this is the
open university way... and I'm now going to try the same with the XO -
incremental backups which I'm looking into now.

What is surprising is how fast it runs... basically instant gratification...
though maybe flash intensive items might slow it down... If you could give
the course creators eeepcs instead of XOs, the issue would be solved...

Kind Regards,
David
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