Shared Portable Moodle

Taking online learning offline to support disadvantaged students

Stephen Grono, School of Education University of New England, Armidale

sgrono2@une.edu.au @calvinbal

Shared Portable Moodle

Taking online learning offline to support disadvantaged students

Stephen Grono, School of Education University of New England, Armidale

sgrono2@une.edu.au @calvinbal

Online Learning

• More access to information than ever before.

• Constant opportunities to learn on demand.

• Unique, often free, self-paced, interest-driven.

• Formal/informal distance education methods.

• MOOCs, VLEs, social media, learning comms.

Distance Education

• University of New England. Armidale, NSW.

• 22,000+ domestic & international students.

• 200 programs, across 23 discipline areas.

• >80% of these students studying by distance.

Rich, Accessible Learning

• Online learning environments like Moodle provide a rich space for learners to share, regardless of their geographical location.

• Learning materials can readily be provided in increasingly interactive, adaptive, collaborative and multimodal formats.

• Which anyone can access, at any time.

And that’s the assumption we make.

Finding a solution?

• Mailing print materials no longer fits the multimodal, interactive approach

• Sending PDFs, similarly, loses the contextual learning design within the unit

• So a localised copy of Moodle with content!

• Except without any of the setup process

• … because students.

A (very) brief literature review

• A quick Google shows several projects around similar ideas. Many as far back as around 2007. Trouble is, hard to find mention of them beyond these early discussions circa 2007… – Open University UK’s Moodle Client project

– Colin Chambers’ Offline Moodle project

– Jolongo, utilising MS Air

– MAF-LT’s Poodle, using Moodle 1.9

– Nearly Virtual’s 2014 updated Poodle 2.7, by manually upgrading from the above project’s ‘2.1 beta’

A (very) brief literature review II

• Or a few more still in testing, or designed around a particular project. These ones often were looking into syncing & client programs.

• (And the Moodle Mobile App, which is neat)

• The takeaway was we’ve got a solid base to draw from, and a positive future in supporting these students, but not a lot that was current.

• It was also that it needed to be easy to customise, adapt & update.

Shared Portable Moodle (spoodle)

• Runs directly off a flash drive that can be sent out to a student who may not have internet access, or partial/restricted internet.

• Local instance of Moodle launched from the student’s own computer, so can contain theme, settings & plugins from UNE Moodle.

• Shared Portable Moodle, or ‘spoodle’ for short

• Yes, I am about to launch into a bad dog joke…

Some quick math with dogs

2 =

Some quick math with dogs

= +

So its sort of a spoodle

• Not bigger, its just sort of a hybrid version

What it is

• Contains all the activities and learning materials normally found within Moodle

• In the same carefully scaffolded structure and design the modules were intended to be engaged with, and in their intended context

• Locally accessible copies of readings / videos

• Easy, personalised differentiation by plugins

• By copying individual units into customised, blank copy of Moodle, to be send via USB

What it isn’t

• Point-in-time backup and restore from live Moodle to local portable version. There’s no sync magic here.

– This is good for security / data integrity

– But not so good if the lecturer is still designing course materials throughout the trimester

• To prevent students uploading files / posting to the local copy where they’ll never be seen, intentionally disabled submission for students

– Still arrange proper submission case by case

The semi-technical - what we changed

• In many ways base is similar to the official moodle.org packages – XAMPP bundle, forced into Portable mode, with a customised ‘click to start’ exe file for easy launch. Launcher will auto-load homepage in default browser.

• This time though, Moodle is preinstalled, and will adapt to the drive letter (or can be copied into the base C:/ drive for faster running).

The semi-technical - what we changed II

• Can be accessed across network, adapts to IP changes without needing to update mysql

• Removed all email requirements and checks

• Removed weekly wait to clean up temp files

• Disabled messaging. Removed guest access

• Disabled assign submission / forum posting

• Enabled conditional access / activity tracking … and a few other small changes

S for Shared

http://steve.moodlecloud.com

• Versions for Moodle 2.7 – 3.1

• Just add your own branding / plugins and go

• Instructions of which files & Moodle settings have been changed, so you can adapt to suit (and update to latest versions if I go missing)