Alex Little

Whilst I was away in Ethiopia I signed up for the MoodleBites for Teachers Course, leading to the Moodle Course Creator Certificate (MCCC). The course was excellent for me to really learn about some of the Moodle features (especially activities) that I’d previously never looked into. Just over a week ago I passed the MCCC exam, so I am now Moodle ‘certified’. To verify that I really did pass, then please visit the Moodle Certification site.

I feel I’ve been a little quiet on here recently, but that’s not because been being lazy. Quite the opposite in fact. The closer I get to my leaving date, the longer my to do list seems to grow. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll get chance to finish everything I’d like.

It’s only in the last week that I realised I’ve not left Mekelle now since the middle of December, when I had a very brief trip down to Addis for the VSO leavers workshop. But, I do now have a trip down to Adama University lined up for next week, a couple of hours drive south of Addis, so will be good to get away for a few days for a change of scenery, even though it’s still work related. The new intake of volunteers arrive this weekend, so whilst I’m in Addis, I’ll get chance to meet them all.

Progress with the Digital Campus project had been a little slow over the last few weeks, but things are now getting back on track. The next full week of training has been arranged for the second week of March, so just before I return to the UK. We’re also now getting many of the technical issues resolved with the servers, such as implementing an LDAP server to ease the user creation process. Later this week I’m running a Moodle admin training course for people in Computer Science and ICT, so at least staff will have an idea of how to maintain the server properly.

This week, I’ve started the Moodle Course Creator Certificate (MCCC), so I’ll be working on that over the next couple of months. Despite having used Moodle a lot in this job and whilst at the OU, most of this has been from a developer point of view, rather than a teacher. So will be good to learn more about how the various activity modules, which I’ve rarely used, really work. Just need to make sure that I can set aside enough time to devote to this.

In a bit of a contradiction, project progress has been fairly slow the last couple of weeks yet I have been as busy as ever. We still have number of issues to resolve for us to be able to move forward. Firstly the course content for the training and workshops. It’s been hard for us to get the time to write the Moodle training course material from scratch, so we’ve now made the decision to buy a license for the MoodleBites for Teachers training course. Purchasing the license means that we can install the materials on our own Moodle server and gives us much more flexibility than paying for individuals to take the course online and in a specified time period.

There are actually far more materials, covering more aspects of Moodle, in more detail, than we really require for giving to our tutors. So we’ll need to spend some time adapting the materials to take out the sections we don’t want or need to cover at the moment. But having all the materials means that those who are interested in learning further have the option to do so. As time is passing very quickly and it won’t be long before I head back to the UK we need to try and make sure that the tutors can follow the training with only remote assistance. I’m a little skeptical that this will work, so am hoping that I can cover as much as possible before I leave.

We’re also still a little disappointed with the amount of materials that have been uploaded by the tutors, to make the project successful we need to demonstrate much more. I’ve been given many reasons as to why people haven’t been able to upload, either they don’t have the materials yet as they’ll write them as they deliver the course next semester, they don’t know what course they’ll be delivering next semester, or simply that they haven’t had time. All of these excuses are a little disappointing as we were very clear when we were giving the introduction and face to face week in October and November that we’d need people to be working on their second semester courses and that they’d need a day per week to commit. The only one that was raised as an issue at then was the time commitment necessary.

Another issue that has been taking up much of my time is getting the user accounts working correctly. Many of the user accounts on the server simply don’t work, and the process of creating new accounts has, in my mind, far too many steps and so is far too error prone. I figured out what the problem was with many accounts, simply the ownership of the home directory was wrong, so these were easy to fix. But there are still a handful of accounts that I just can’t figure out why there is problem. Am hoping that Mike will get chance to look into this in the next few days.

Although we may be having problems with delivering the workshop training materials, if we get the accounts working properly for students then we can start to have an impact. The lab at Arid is now open, Elfu, one of the IT experts in the Engineering College, has moved her desk into the lab, so the lab can be open all during the normal working week and she’s making sure all the terminals are up and running. For the second semester, we’ve had agreement that the students will have responsibility for the key for opening the lab, so they’ll be able to use it as much as they like outside the normal working hours.

On Friday, I finally rebuilt our Moodle server, following the power supply failure of the old server. The site is now running on the same server as the main Mekelle University website and so can be accessed off campus (another big achievement) at:

http://www.mu.edu.et/elearning

Initially, we’ll use this Moodle installation as the place where the Engineering and Health Sciences tutors can upload their courses for the Digital Campus pilot project, but any other college or department is welcome to use this server for hosting their courses.

The building of the labs for the Digital Campus project is all coming together at once, the servers and terminals are on their way up from Addis as I write, the tables are almost completed and will be delivered by the end of the week, plus the other networking and electrical work is almost finished. All of this is on top of organising the training week (16th to 20th November) for tutors, followed by week of training for th ICT staff. This training is being run by the Digital Campus project team, with the others arriving from around the world during this week.

Given how busy I’ll be over the coming 2-3 weeks, I’m unlikely to be checking email much or updating my blog, so be prepared for a long catch up post in a month

After a long time of not doing much (ok, any) development on my Moodle online users map block, I’ve finally had chance to return to the code to make the necessary changes for the block to run on Moodle 2.

It was always going to be tricky trying to maintain this block whilst in Ethiopia, not only with the slow internet connection, but the university firewall blocks many ports and this is my normal internet access point. So now that I’m temporarily back in the UK, I thought I’ve got chance to get back up to speed.

In the end only minor changes were needed to get the block running on Moodle 2. If you’re downloading the block from the Moodle modules & plugins pages, then please check you get the right one (v1.9 and earlier or v2) for your Moodle installation.

If you’re getting the code via CVS then HEAD currently contains the version for v2 and the MOODLE_19_STABLE branch has the version for 1.9 and earlier.

I’ve also set up a demonstration Moodle site so you can see the block in action. Just sign up, and you should see yourself marked on the Google map. You may have to wait until the location lookup script has run before you appear on the map, but this should only be a few minutes.

Please let me know if you have any problems with either getting the block to run on Moodle 2 or with the demonstration site.

In the last few years, I’ve got out of the habit of buying computing books, knowing that generally I’ll only make use of small sections and how quickly they become dated, so have tended to rely on using the internet to look up what I need. Even in cases where I’ve needed to learn something from scratch, I’ve again generally relied on online tutorials/examples.

With this in mind, I was recently asked to review a new book from Packt publishing ‘Moodle 1.9 – ELearning Course Development’ (on Amazon). Well, I say recently, but it was actually a little while ago now, and I’ve only just had chance to have a proper read.

Although aimed at “anyone who wants to make the most of Moodle’s features to produce an interactive online learning experience”, it strikes me as more a reference book for Moodle. With an extensive section (around a quarter of the book) devoted just to the installation and initial setup of a Moodle server, including authentication, security, filters, themes etc , I started to think it was aimed mainly at system administrators, but the remainder of the book is devoted to explanations on how to create courses, add resources and activities – the areas most teachers and course creators would want to know.

Extensive coverage is given to how each of the blocks and activity settings can be used, which, whilst very useful as a reference, may come across as a little intimidating, especially for new Moodlers. Explanations are also given on why you might want to use the activity although I found that it lacked real life examples of good and bad practice. I’m sure many teachers would want to know what others have already tried, whether successfully or not.

Given the fast paced change of most software, Moodle is no exception, I would also have liked to have seen some reference (acknowledgment?) of the features coming in Moodle 2. Perhaps this was deliberately left out so as not to confuse readers, or perhaps Moodle 2 wasn’t in a stable enough form at the time of writing, but this book is likely to date quickly, assuming that Moodle 2 is released according to plan in mid 2009.

There are a couple of other books in the same series, ‘Moodle Teaching Techniques’ and ‘Moodle Administration’ and I’d have really like to have read all three alongside each other, to find out where the differences are, any overlaps and if either of these other books plug the gaps I felt were left open by Elearning Course Development.

In summary, an excellent book if you already know what you want to do with Moodle but aren’t sure how to use the settings to achieve your aims. I’m unlikely to be seen reading this book without also having a PC in front of me with Moodle in my browser.

I keep changing my mind as to how appropriate it is to be trying to run an elearning project here in Ethiopia.

On the one hand, I’m running training sessions for staff in how to set up their courses in Moodle, but then very few of the students have access to computers so staff are understandably reluctant to spend time setting up a course that almost no-one can access. To give you some idea of the limited availability I’m talking about, on the Business Campus we have around 3000 students and 6 computing labs. 2 of these labs are open for postgraduate students only (comprising approx 100 students) and 3 of the labs are only for Computer Science students (approx 300 students). This leaves the final ‘DIF’ lab – this is the lab funded by the elearning project I’m working on – and has approx 20 networked PCs, but due to lack of maintenance and supervisory staff it’s not open to students. This leaves a handful of PCs in the library to be used by 2600 students, approx 1 open access PC per 500 students. Even if I manage to get our DIF lab openly available to students, this only increases availability to approx 1 PC per 100 students. Not an ideal situation to be in when trying to promote the creation of online quizzes & discussion forums!

On the other hand, even small steps forward may be useful. Just getting teachers and students used to the idea of online and blended learning and how they may create or participate in online collaborative activities is a good thing in itself. They may currently only have limited computer access, but this situation is bound to improve, or at least I hope it’s bound to improve! Receiving training and having some experience of participating in and creating online courses now may help prepare teachers and students for the future.

At the moment, I’m on the pessimistic whats-the-point side of the fence, but I am writing this on a Friday afternoon and may well have changed my mind again by Monday morning! Also by Monday morning we may have received the timetable for the new semester. The new semester starts on Monday, it’s now Friday just after lunch and no-one (teachers or students) have any idea of their lesson timetable!

Our Moodle server is now up and running, well, it’s available to users on campus (which is a good start) at http://e-learning.mu.edu.et – won’t be available generally on the internet until the domain has been registered on the Ethiopian Telecoms (ETC) servers in Addis. Hopefully this will be fixed up soon.

For those interested, the network problems we were having before were due to an IP address conflict – two servers (including our Moodle one) had been given the same IP address, creating all sorts of odd problems!

Today I feel as if I’ve actually made a little progress and have achieved something. No, I still don’t have my contract signed off and sorted out – so still might not get paid for my first month. But today I managed 2 things…

Firstly I’ve managed to arrange a meeting with Abiot (head of the computer science dept) later this week to go through where the project has got to and for me to present a proposal as to what should happen next. The proposal ought to be straightforward enough to write, as it’s easy to see that the server needs to be put online and made accessible, along with a few pilot courses. The hard part is going to be actually getting any of this put into action and finding teachers willing to invest the time in supporting their students online. As the internet is so unreliable here, we’ll have to concentrate on courses that are offered on campus rather than the distance education courses, and offer the campus based students access via the intranet in the computer labs. Not really an ideal demonstration of elearning and reaching out to those students based in much more rural areas, but about the best I think we’ll be able to manage given the infrastructure.

Secondly, I’ve got our Moodle installation configured and working with Clam anti-virus – so any uploaded files are virus checked and are rejected if found to be infected. The server itself already had over 100 viruses, so they’re now cleaned up. The ClamAV settings in Moodle seemed to be designed for Unix servers, but we’re running on Windows Server 2003 and although you can enter the path to clamscan and the quarantine directory, I still couldn’t get it working. After a little digging around, I found that on Windows, you need to specify the database directory on the path (using –database=E:\ClamWin\db). This can be entered in the Moodle admin settings (though it results in a message saying the path isn’t valid – but that can be ignored). The final step was to comment out the section of code in moodle/lib/upload/lib.php which checks that the clamavpath setting is a valid file and an executable. I’m really pleased to have this fixed given the prevalence of viruses here and the high probability that any files uploaded to the server (e.g. student’s assignments) will contain viruses.

In the rest of today’s news (or whenever I manage to get this uploaded)… we now have a cleaner/maid, who will be doing all our cleaning, washing etc for us. Petrol prices here have gone up nearly 50% in a few days, so there are far fewer bajaj’s on the road. The bajaj’s are basically tut-tuts which follow set routes around the city – this combined with the removal of fuel tax rebates for drivers, means it’s not viable for them to stay on the road. Another consequence is that food prices have gone up already and I guess they’re likely to rise further.

On the agenda for this evening is to take apart one of our 4-way extension leads & surge protectors and attempt to fix without electrocuting myself! It was new a couple of weeks ago (from Addis) and now only 1 of the 4 sockets works reliably

[Update 8-Oct-08: extension lead is working fine and I'm still here!]

It’s been long time coming but now the OpenLearn LabSpace allows users to edit (remix) units online – rather than the rather cumbersome method of downloading a Moodle backup file then re-uploading – or worse, trying to work with the OU XML format in notepad!

To create a new version of a unit, find the unit you’d like to edit then select the ‘make a copy for revising’ option from the ‘Versions’ block. After it’s created the new version you should see it listed (mine is v1.3 in the example image on the right).

On visiting the new unit you should see the ‘Revise this unit’ button in the top right (see highlighted area in image below).

When you click this you’ll get a warning message like the one below (as it’s wiki-like you’re able to edit other users content – they can also change yours!):

Finally you need to click the ‘Turn editing on’ button (this appears in the same place as the revise this button) and you’ll arrive at the standard Moodle unit/course editing page (as below), with all the links etc for adding and editing resources and activities.

Hopefully this new functionality will encourage more people to add their own content and edits (which has been somewhat lacking in the LabSpace so far) and also allow users to create much more interactive content (by adding Moodle activities to the units)… have fun!