Intranet : Blogs

As part of the further development of Rogō there is a need for an effective integration with VLEs such as Moodle, Sakai etc.  After investigation LTI seemed to be the obvious choice.  After looking through the LTI specifications we realised that the LTI specification is only relevant to authentication (That you are known) and not specific authorisation (What you can do), this is because LTI doesn’t pass a username across, it just passes a list of roles that this user has and you interpret these to provide your control.  This is fine for most uses where a tool is provided for a VLE, as it only needs to know which organisation you belong to and some unique identifier for you (there so when you come back it can recognise you) and if you’re an instructor/student. However, Rogō does not have an ‘instructor’ role. Even if this was mapped to the ‘staff’ role in Rogō, the system still needs to know what teams the user is on to fully handle the internal security. 

We came up with 7 possible solutions (in no particular order):

1. Include additional custom variables into the LTI Request e.g. username
2. Split the username before the @ (Our Moodle installation at Nottingham has the username@nottingham.ac.uk for the username)
3. Us the whole email address and compare it to the database of users in Rogō to get a match
4. Use the supplied Tool Consumer (VLE) unique id as a username in Rogō this would require new usernames being created and then assuming if they had the link to this location then they should be added to that module/course)
5. An LTI service account in Rogō so all access through LTI is treated as this one user
6. Export the list of unique ids from the VLE and import it into Rogō and match them up
7. On the first launch with a new unique ID (from the VLE) request username and password assume this authenticates then tie up the unique ID and the Rogō username and use in future.  This can allow scheduled authentication checks/password syncronisations.

After discussing it we decided upon option number 7 as the most suitable option to implement LTI.

The recording is now available of this week’s E-learning Community seminar on Synchronous Online Communication: running successful Adobe Connect sessions with students

Many thanks to our speakers Jonathan Houdmont (lecturer – including on the MSc in Health and Wellbeing – in the Institute for Work, Health and Organisations) and Sue Cobb (Principal Research Fellow, Faculty of Engineering), both of whom gave an interesting and insightful talk about the use of Adobe Connect in (different types of) tutorials with distance learning students, offering us lots of really practical tips and suggestions.

Recording of seminar  

If you’re interested in helping the Moodle team to create and develop new features for Moodle, we invite you to join The University of Nottingham’s Moodle Extenders and Developers Group (MEAD). Developments may use existing plugins for Moodle or be developed from scratch. Either way MEAD is the community for those interested in contributing to future Moodle developments across the institution, and will provide the necessary process and policies to support innovation in Moodle by the University community. If you are keen to create some kind of tool for use in a School then the MEAD group is a great place to discuss it so that it can be designed and built to integrate with Moodle and probably to be useful to a wider group of users.

The next meeting of MEAD is an update on the process by which we plan to manage the future extensions and developments that the Moodle User Community, and to outline some key dates that we will use to get this process up and running. We’d very much welcome some discussion and feedback on the proposed process. It’s at 2 pm on Wednesday 23rd May. Contact ui-moodle-implementation@nottingham.ac.uk for an invitation to the group.

Meanwhile, do join the mailing list at http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/mead

Ireland’s Learning Innovation Network have a series of webinars on the topic of Moodle. You can see recordings of those already held or register for the ones coming up.

What is Moodle and how can it be used in my classes? Thurs 12th April- 4pm Recording

Using Moodle to Manage your Assignments Wed 18th April – 1pm Recording

Moodle Databases and Glossaries Mon 23rd April – 4pm Recording

Moodle and LTI Thurs May 10th – 4pm Click to Register

Administration Hints & tips Tues May 15th – 4pm

Conditional activities in Moodle Thurs May 17th – 4pm

Tracking  a student’s usage of Moodle Thurs May 24th – 4pm 

More information

Our next E-learning Community lunchtime seminar takes place today Wednesday 9^th May, from 12.30 pm in Sir Clive Granger A48

The theme is Synchronous Online Communication: running successful Adobe Connect sessions with students

Our speakers include Jonathan Houdmont (lecturer – including on the MSc in Health and Wellbeing – in the Institute for Work, Health and Organisations) and Sue Cobb (Principal Research Fellow, Faculty of Engineering)

The E-learning Community is an informal network of academics and learning technologists across the University, which has been going since 2006. Lunchtime events take place approximately monthly – they are normally recorded and the outputs are disseminated to those unable to attend.  They cover an aspect of teaching and learning and/or learning technology and include information and practical case studies from within the University.  Everyone interested in teaching and learning with technology is welcome.

Meanwhile there’s also a Webinar today in the Teaching with Moodle strand.  It’s Assessment week so the subject is Using Turnitin, with guest speaker Andrew Fisher. The webinar is 10.30-11 am and will be recorded. Drop into Moodle and join the Teaching with Moodle course for more information.

A block that provides navigation between sections/topics and one that provides WebCT learning-module-type functionality are just two of the improvements recently made to Nottingham’s Moodle.

Module titles

The full names of modules now appear automatically at the top of the central column on every module front page. This paves the way for the School banners which will appear above that in the next upgrade.

Improvements to the theme

There have been quite a few improvements to the Moodle Nottingham theme, including to the CSS to correct some of the formatting and display errors that were occurring. For example hyperlinks are now properly coloured and underlined to make them more distinguishable. The Moodle theme too will see more improvement and interest as we approach September.

New blocks – Simple Navigation & Section Navigation

A much requested feature, the Simple Navigation block automatically provides links to each Topic or Section via a Section title listing. Clicking on one of these takes the user to the Topic using the condensed format of just the top general block and the Topic. It uses the Section titles that you enter in your module, so choose and enter those titles carefully.

The Section Navigation (or Topic Navigation) block provides a functionality we hope will help with migration of WebCT Learning Modules. It provides navigation through the items in a particular section and can be added to the page for each item.

A demo of both of these blocks is given in the following video:

Medical School  & Business School

We have a new course format that is based on the Medical School’s timetable. This is designed to support the move from the NLE.

There’s also a new Participate block, designed for the Business School but probably of interest elsewhere in the University – it provides for all students who are Observers in a category to go into a module and have a look at it and then choose to “participate” – i.e. to be fully enrolled in it in Moodle (leaving only the usual registration steps via the School and student records system).

We’ve also added one or two more “behind the scenes” admin features that will make it easier to enrol and to manage users.

The Xenith Project is developing an HTML5 delivery system for Xerte Online Toolkits. Content is increasingly being consumed on a wider range of devices with varying screen sizes and operating systems, and there is a need to reduce our dependence on the Flash Player in the delivery of learning materials.

The Xenith Project is funded by the JISC and is part of the OER Rapid Innovation Programme.

We’re a good way into the work on the Xenith Project now, and time for an update. The project is progressing really well, and we’ve achieved an awful lot in a  very short space of time, setting the project up nicely and answering a lot of the initial questions we had about approaching the HTML5 delivery.

We met with Alistair McNaught from Jisc TechDis to talk about accessibility requirements, and how best to maintain the high levels of native accessibility we built into the Xerte runtime engine. In theory this ought be a lot more straightforward, for example, we can use the browsers’ native controls to change the size and colours of text and the screen size, and we will end up with a much simpler and cleaner user interface as a result. Many thanks to Alistair for his input.

Fay is working on handling the various classes of device we aim to support: desktop PCs, tablets and phones, and allowing the layout to adapt to the different screen sizes and orientations. There is a prototype available here that you can play around with: http://ltdev.nottingham.ac.uk/toolkits/play.html. This is changing frequently as the code develops.

We’ve settled on the technology we want to use, deciding to avoid any server-side languages. One of the features a lot users of Xerte Online Toolkits really like is the ability to export content and have it move easily between different systems. This portability would be difficult if we relied on server-side support in those different environments, so have elected to keep all the processing on the client side in JavaScript.

We thought JQuery would be a good candidate to help with some of the heavy lifting, and so it has proved. We’ve also looked at JQueryUI and Twitter’s Bootstrap libraries which both provide a good set of components that we’d find useful when we get into developing the various templates.

Ben Butchart and Niall Munro from EDINA visited for a couple of days last week: many thanks to Ben and Niall for a really enjoyable and useful workshop. We gleaned some very useful insight into coping with the various media formats, and found the discussions over the two days very reassuring with respect to the approaches we are taking. We worked through a couple of templates together, and reviewed all of the current templates in the suite – and didn’t find anything that looked too be too challenging to recreate in HTML that we currently do in Flash.

Over the next month we anticipate finalising the interface design: we’ll publish a link to the prototype, then we can start working on supporting the various templates.

The IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) specification can make life tricky as it describes items logically not physically. Systems refer to physical question types such as an ‘MCQ’, however, in QTI this would be logically specified as an item with 5 options, one of which is correct. This divide between physical question types and logical descriptions requires ‘translation’ when importing and exporting QTI. This can sometimes result in bizarre results depending on what questions a particular system can handle. An MCQ is usually an MCQ in most systems, but ‘jumbled sentence’ in WebCT needs to translate into ‘extended matching’ in Rogō.  Also, the WebCT true/false question originally translated to a MCQ with true and false answers but Rogō now supports a true false question that improves users’ familiarity.

Some question types, such as ‘image hotspot’ and ‘labelling’ have no easy ways to represent in QTI currently. It is possible to extend the QTI specification to represent propriety or unsupported question types but it is a potentially chicken and egg situation. Why go to all the effort to extend QTI when the tool is the only one using the data format, versus if QTI is not extended then it will not be possible for other tools to handle the data format. It will be an interesting situation to monitor if there is convergence on key question types in the future as the whole e-assessment arena matures.

‘Teaching with Moodle’ is a new online course offered by the Learning Technology Section. It’s an exciting new format – as it’s an 8-week rolling online course that also forms a growing resource about all things Moodle.

Each week there’s a particular topic with activities and resources, as well as a weekly webinar in Adobe Connect providing the opportunity to find out more, listen to a guest speaker or ask questions from your desk – all you need is a headset (with microphone if possible, though that’s not essential). There are lots of opportunities to ask questions and discuss with colleagues.

You can join the course at any time and stay for 8 weeks.

OR

Pop in for the week(s) about the topics you’re most interested in.

OR

Pop in any time and browse the resources for particular topics as you need them.

OR

Attend the weekly webinars as and when you are interested

It’s intended as a follow-up to basic training as you will need some familiarity with basic Moodle operations.

Each “week” starts on a Wednesday. This week our subject is: Managing People

We will be looking at managing people – how to add staff and students, how to track student activity and how to contact participants in different ways.

Future weeks run as follows

etc. on into the autumn

This week’s webinar is at 12 noon on  Friday 4th May and the topic is Moodle roles & self enrolment . It’s an opportunity to find out more about managing colleagues and students in your module and ask questions, the roles in Moodle and how Moodle self-enrolment will solve the problem in those tricky first couple of weeks of the semester when students are choosing their modules. Times for the webinars will vary from week to week to enable staff from all campuses to join us at convenient times.  Why not join us?

Staff who are already familiar with Moodle or who have been on the introductory training are invited to join ‘Teaching with Moodle’ – if you don’t already see it in your “Course Overview” just contact us at learning-team-support@nottingham.ac.uk