Alex Little

Today I’ve also set up a test LAMS server, and installed the LAMS-Moodle module to integrate LAMS sequences into Moodle courses. The LAMS server is on a separate machine to our Moodle server, just to demonstrate these things working on separate machine, and it’s all been pretty straightforward to set up. I’ve noticed a couple of ‘odd’ things though (that I don’t think I’m actually going to worry about too much!), firstly that occasionally error messages appear in Moodle saying something along the lines of ‘warning, no such file or directory… \mod\lams\lib.php’, but it all seems to work fine anyway. Secondly, when I’m trying to add a LAMS sequence to Moodle, it doesn’t always seem to show all the sequences I’ve made in LAMS – this could be because I’ve put them in the ‘wrong’ place on LAMS though.

My plans for next week are to get to grips with the IMS Enterprise SDK and try to create a sample student records system to integrate with, so then we’ll have a web service for our Moodle Grouping Module and Grouping UI to call. I am going to make this very lightweight, as it will simply be a demo.

Sourceforge have now confirmed the registration of our JoinIn project, the link to it is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/joinin, but obviously there’s nothing there yet. I’ve been having more discussions on our team to sort out various issues, for example which database formats we are going to support, which versions of Moodle etc we’ll be using. I’ve also received further clarification from Ernie about how the Moodle/LAMS link up will work, regarding the groups. So I’m just updating our document and will post it up shortly (as I keep saying!!). Juliette as also been looking up on the Moodle forums queries and problems from real users regarding groups, to see how our toolkit can help address them. However, we do need to remember that we’re doing a toolkit which could be used for any VLE, we’re not just doing Moodle development, though we happen to be using Moodle as our first VLE to test the toolkit architecture on.

Have also had an email from Sam at JISC regarding which version of IMS Enterprise and the SDK we’ll be using. At the moment it looks like we’ll have to start off  using Scotts SDK (which uses v1.0 of Enterprise), as it’s likely that a newer version won’t be available for a few months. Depending on the timing of the release of the new version, and how much the API and outputs have changed to the current version, we’ll try and use the more recent version in our toolkit.

Had almost an all day meeting with Ernie from LAMS today which was very productive, and I now have a much clearer idea as to what we are doing within the scope of this project, especially for the coding that we need to do, the architecture, the APIs etc. I need to get the notes from this meeting written up into a proper document and include the whiteboard diagrams (scrawls?!) we came up with. Once I’ve got this written I’ll post a link up so everyone can have a look.

These are some of the areas we should be able to get started on next week:

• Sorting out which IMS Enterprise Service to use – need to contact Sam Easterby-Smith about this
• Set up a project on Sourceforge to store our code for the Moodle Group Module
• Find out more about how to create modules with Moodle
• Install the LAMS module for Moodle so we can have a play with this
• Define more use cases
• Start thinking about how the user interface for setting up the groups would look
• Contact the MINTED group (another JISC funded project under the demonstrator strand) at Sussex Uni, as they are looking at doing very similar work, and we don’t want to duplicate effort.

Spent most of this week working on our internal project planning database, which is all going well – it’s moving forward much quicker than I thought it would take – so that’s always good!!

Had really good meeting today with Ernie from the LAMS team about our JoinIn project, and I’ll post up more information about that on the JoinIn blog/webpage

First step in this project is for me to read through the bid and remember exactly what it was we said we were going to do!! I also need to be in touch with the LAMS team so that we can properly sort out how we’ll divide up the development work.

This afternoon I’m hoping to install Moodle on one of our development servers, and I’ll also look at installing LAMS too – but I need to check first with the LAMS team which version we’ll be developing for. I’m assuming it will be for LAMS v1.1 as this is the version they are currently developing, though it’s not actually released yet.

Been up to a few different things in the last week or so…. firstly, had news from JISC that we’ve received funding for our JoinIn project (working with the LAMS team to create a grouping tool to move groups between the LAMs and Moodle VLEs). We’ve also been looking at submitting a bid in the new JISC Design for Learning programme.

I’ve also been playing a bit with various bits and pieces, I’ve been trying to redesign my website (this one!) so that it uses CSS instead of tables for layout – that seems to be going ok so far, and I should be able to make it live soon. Just found it a bit fiddly, especially with the differences between IE and firefox, and there appears to be a lot of options to achieve the same result, so trying to figure out which is the ‘best’. I’ve also added an RSS feed for this blog and my learning design one, so you should see the link at the bottom of the page, or, if you are using firefox, you should get the ‘live bookmarks’ option.

Finally, also been having a go with del.icio.us (see http://del.icio.us/dextral ), which is interesting, but could end up spending way too much time looking at other links people have bookmarked!

Attended the recent Unfold meeting (Communities of Practice for Learning Design) which was very worthwhile. Had some interesting discussions and got to share thoughts and ideas with developers from both LAMS and Moodle. The main things we were discussing was how to make both of these VLEs Learning Design compliant, so they could both import and export LD XML. We found that especially for Moodle, the export to learning design would/should be relatively straightforward, though an import would be harder – due to the fact that Moodle wouldn’t currently cope with the complex activity structures that can be created in LD – so some ‘flattening’ of a deeply nested activity structure might be necessary.

The other problem we discussed for both LAMS and Moodle was how to describe and export the tools and services which are in both of these products, but the LD spec doesn’t allow for. The way we are thinking of working is to create a common description of each of these tools/services (eg forum, noticeboard, voting tool etc) which could then be exported into the LD package as resource file – so this resource file would be an xml file which describes the characteristics of the tool. Theres much to be done here, but I think we’ve got a plan of what needs to be looked at and a way of achieving this now, it will also tie in well with some of the work being done in the OKI/SAKAI projects.

Finally (!), I’ve been asked to present the progress of our 2 learning design projects at the next Unfold meeting which will be in Glasgow in October (more details)