Gavin Henrick has a useful blog that publishes information about the ongoing development of Moodle 2. I was particularly interested in how Moodle will handle sharing files with consumer web apps like Google Docs and Flickr. Lucky for me, Gavin has a couple of screencasts covering the topic. Here’s some info about importing docs from external repositories:
It’s a pretty intuitive UI that borrows heavily from desktop file picking interfaces. Moodle 2 integrates with an impressive list of external repositories:
- YouTube
- Alfresco
- Box.net
- Flickr
- Google Docs
- Mahara
- MERLOT
- Picasa
- Remote Moodle installations
- Amazon S3
- WebDAV repositories
- Wikimedia servers
- File systems
The repository API supports plugins for other repositories, so this list should grow over time.
Moodle 2 also supports export to repositories in either HTML or LEAP2A format:
This is also nicely done, but it doesn’t go far enough, in my view. A fundamental flaw in LMS design is that the course, rather than the student, owns course documents. While it’s great that Moodle makes it easy to export course contributions to places where students can hold onto them after the course gets archived, this mechanism relies on students making specific efforts to save their work. I would prefer to see a system in which the canonical copies of student-created course documents (or faculty-created course documents, for that matter) live in the users’ private file storage space and the course instance is granted permission to access them. By default, students hold onto all of their contributions after the course is archived.
At any rate, if this is representative of the kind of improvement that is going into Moodle 2, it is likely to be an impressive release.
Seems like LMSs could learn from DVCS and with promiscuous copying and revisioning everyone could own a copy – e.g. the user owns the original copy, which gets branched to the course, professor provides feedback/edits, merged back into the users private copy – then everyone owns different snapshots of the document/work depending on when it was released, and as it evolves.
Jason. The Chalk & Wire ePortfolio does a similar workflow to what you describe. We are an assessment ePortfolio so key tasks get submitted through our interface. Once a task is submitted it is versioned, as is any feedback or re-submissions. At not time are pages locked down. We currently have a Moodle integration, although it looks like there will be options to expand this with Moodle 2.0….very cool stuff.
Yeah, it’s funny, but in a lot of regards, PLE models our elearn 1.0 workflow – email the prof a word doc, since I keep my own copy. I guess in a lot of scenarios the question is how to get back that personal ownership and multiple versioned workflow – since it’s not like we’re on 1.2MB floppies anymore.
It does make me wonder – in terms of content creation whether LMSs should be less focused on enabling content, and more focused on archiving content created elsewhere and comment/discussion/grading workflows around it – which sounds an awful lot like an ePortfolio 😉