Keep up with Moodle 2.0!

Follow the Moodle 2.0 Roadmap on Moodle Docs and track the current Moodle 2.0 progress on the planning document. This document is frequently updated and shows the progress of Moodle 2.0. Moodle 2.0 is set to come out mid 2009.

Lately I have been trying to find blogs, web sites and social networking sites that revolve around Moodle. I found a few great blogs like The Moodleman Blog, Taming Moodle, Global Classroom and a Moodle Tutorials Blog. I am also a member of the Ning groups Moodle Meet and Moodlers.

However, considering how popular Moodle is I expect there to be more blogs, sites and communities revolving around Moodle. I would think that Moodle, being an open-source product, would have more communities and sites with resoures because the open-source community is known to be large and very collaborative. I wonder why this is–maybe I am just not looking in the right places or maybe it is because Moodle.org has such great documentation and a great community itself that any other community would just not be as good. Don’t get me wrong Moodle.org has the best, most complete documentation, help and awesome forums to get an answer but where are the communities or social networking sites that focus on things like “Moodle in Elementary Schools”, “Teachers using Moodle in the classroom”? A place where teachers can collaborate and get ideas from other teachers using Moodle.

The two Ning Moodle communities are pretty good but there is not a ton of user action. I guess I just expected there to be more out there about Moodle, whether it’s a web site, blog or community because Moodle is getting very popular.

I would greatly appreciate any suggested Moodle sites, blogs or resources!

Alfresco Software Inc., the leader in open source enterprise content management (ECM), today announced an OEM partnership with Remote-Learner.net, the provider of open source solutions for online learning management, record keeping and learning object storage to corporate, academic and governmental clients. The partnership will deliver solutions to allow learning organizations using Moodle’s open source course management system (CMS) to access Alfresco’s robust open source ECM repository to support content development and reuse. – read more

I take a great interest in this integration because our school district is looking into Alfresco as a possibility for document management. I have no experience with Alfresco but I have heard good things about it. There is a free version and an Enterprise version you can pay for. Learn more at Alfresco.com.

Remote-Learner is a Moodle Partner that hosts Moodle sites and is “a learning company providing technology services”.

Moodle 2.0 is impressing me more and more each day. I feel like there are many improvements (some free, some may be “paid-for” services) in file management and repositories. Glancing at the admin plug-ins section I can already see that they have made it easier for Moodle to integrate with a variety of sites and other software like Alfresco, Box.net, Flickr, Picasa, WebDAV, Wikimedia and YouTube.

Read more:

Alfresco Press Release -Alfresco and Remote-Learner.net Partner to Deliver Moodle eLearning Integration

Moodleman blog post -  Alfresco tie-in in Moodle 2.0

Moodle Docs – Repository API

The Moodleman Blog has recently posted a sneak peak at conditional activities in Moodle 2.0. Before I read the post I was not sure what this even meant but Moodleman writes

“Conditional activities now say that if a student has “completed” an activity/resource (or range of activities/resources) they can then see the newly created one.”

I never really thought of this concept but it makes complete sense and it could make a teacher’s life a lot easier! Moodle.org even has a forum dedicated to this type of thing. In earlier versions you will need a hack but it looks like it will be in the core of Moodle.org (I believe).

For more information take a look at Moodle.org Docs on Conditional Activities. Read more about the feature and watch a video walkthrough on Moodleman’s blog post: Moodle 2.0 Sneak Peak – Conditional Activities.

Realizing this ability in Moodle 2.0 makes me excited to show our users (in the way future..) that this is possible. I believe this will save teachers’ time by allowing them to do more at one time. For instance, instead of having a student complete an activity, then having the teacher go back to unlock or create a quiz and directing the student to complete it–a teacher is able to do everything at once instead of editing the course twice. I think this will also work great with motivating students to complete their work. Knowing they have the power to see or reach the next activity may motivate them–like a game.

I just wonder how easy this feature is to set up in Moodle 2.0. I might focus some attention on this on my dev site and post on it in the future.

Any thoughts?

In my last post I mentioned the new Moodle Porgramming Course you can enroll in for free (hosted on moodle.org). After posting I decided to enroll myself and see what it is all about. I was little hesitant to enroll because I was worried I wouldn’t have enough time to really get into the course but I enrolled and it looks great!

You can go at your own pace, communicate with other Moodlers and really grasp a variety of ideas surrounding Moodle. I am still on the first unit but I already like it so far. You go through the course just like any other online course. You do assignments, post in forums, talk with others and actually get feedback on your assignments.

More to come as I dig deeper into this course. Check out the Moodle Programming course if you have not already!