Unless you are sat in front of your Moodle installation 24 hours a day, how will you know if the site goes down? Wouldn’t it be nice to receive an email or a text if Moodle stops responding? I happened to stumble upon the website below:
This tool is still very much in beta but I thought I’d write about it’s developments.
I often refer to my Online Users page to see who’s on Moodle but this doesn’t tell me where the activity is. I wanted a tool like TweetDeck that would display all the activity on Moodle and show me where people are so I can guage what goes on at certain times of the day.
Courtesy of Packt Publishing
Recently I was asked by Packt Publishing to read and review the Moodle Administration book by Alex Buchner. So here goes…
There are literally dozens of open source content management systems available to download, plus many commercial ones, not to mention Microsoft Sharepoint, so why would anyone consider using a VLE as an intranet tool.
Well in short, we did.
Moodle has some great interactive tools (activities) and some unique ways of displaying information (resources). And we felt that these tools could be used effectively in an intranet environment.
In order to maintain compatibility standards we use FLV files for all of our videos in Moodle. This then uses JPlayer to stream the video. However, JPlayer is a flash tool and therefore videos do not work on the iPhone.
To get around this I have embedded my iPhone detection script into mod/file resource on Moodle. I then upload an .mp4 version of the same file, in the same folder as the .flv version.
The new code released by Microsoft allows users to log in using their LIVE ID and integrate their calendar events and email in Moodle. As Martin Dougiamas noted, LIVE uses the same API’s as Exchange Server so integrating into a private college exchange server should be fairly straight forward.
My online users page is proving to be very popular amongst our students, the page receives almost 4800 visits each week.
Based on this popularity I decided to improve the page and add even more functionality.
Moodle captures the last ip address of each user and this is how we determine their campus location.
Last week our production server (windows 2003 Server, Apache, PHP) decided to start acting rather strangely. The instability was tracked down to a conflict with eAccelerator and the php Oracle drivers.
After updating the Oracle drivers we were left with a new problem. Occasionally Apache would crash and report the following error message:
winnt_accept: Asynchronous AcceptEx failed.
After spending some time on Google I managed to find a fix.
Simply make these changes to the Apache httpd.conf file:
The RSC JISC Moodle User group on Friday 1st May 2009 was once again very well attended – and there were some new faces too. There has been lots of Moodle theme improvements by many of the member colleges.
Leeds College of Music have been using the ‘Page Module’ to good effect and Steve Dale from Education Bradford was on hand once again to show us some rather exciting content generation resources.