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.
Moodle User Group Meeting
As usual I shall be attending the regional JISC Moodle user/admin group meeting. Hopefully I’ll be presenting something on iPhone development, MoodleMoot 09, and Moodle Detective.
The event will be held at
Askham Bryan College, York Campus, York, North Yorkshire
on the 1st May 2009
Hope to see many of you there.
This years MoodleMoot 09 was great. The keynote by Martin (above) was very interesting. The future of Moodle looks solid, and the addition of proposed Moodle API’s will lead to so much more interactivity.
Imagine an iPhone app, an Adobe AIR app and seamless integration with other API’s such as Twitter and Facebook. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
Having found the user search on Moodle very cumbersome I decided it was time to create an AJAX driven user search. Every time I used the old search and entered a filter I was prompted to remove it before performing a new search.
By using my new AJAX search, results are displayed as I type, this allows me to find users much faster. I have added links next to the results so I can quickly go to the user profile pages, messages or Moodle detective.