Educational Technology

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"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts – for support rather than illumination.”

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External Tool in Moodle 2.2

For all you LMS nerds...

I've been playing around with Moodle 2.2 and found a neat option, IMS LTI or External Tool.

Gavin Hendrick wrote up this nice piece on the specifics of this tool.

The upcoming release of Moodle 2.2 now has the IMS LTI or “External Tool” functionality which is going to be one integration type that I forsee being heavily used.

But what is it? What is IMS LTI and why would you want to use it?

IMS LTI – quick overview

For those who have not heard about it before, IMS LTI is an IMS standard for Learning Tool Interoperability. This means that learning tools now have a set way in which they can seamlessly connect to each other.

In practice while a user is logged into one tool (Moodle for example) they can then connect over to the other tool (a wiki or blog) and be automatically authenticated providing a seamless experience.

This is a link to a 30 minutes video about Basic LTI by Charles Severance which I recommend you watch when you have time!

But let’s get back to Moodle.

How will this work within Moodle?

So one example would be, that a teacher can set up an Activity in the Moodle course for the students which connects them to a blog site(like WordPress). This process automatically authenticates them and enables them to use the external blog. #

This could be used for any standalone learning tool which implements LTI.

Think about the possibilities – someone builds a really cool maths engine and instead of having to make it work inside Moodle, all they do is implement the IMS LTI standard and provide connection details to those who want to use it.

There are a range of tools already enabled such as Learning Objects Campus pack tools and Noteflight.

How to use

The integration in Moodle 2.2 is simple to use, it is just an activity in a course. A teacher turns on editing, and then starts adding the activity External Tool from the dropdown.

The basic integration details that are required are

Launch URL

Consumer key

Consumer secret

This is the information the Learning Tool provider needs to give to the teacher so they can connect. Depending on the tool, it is also possible to pass over some extra custom parameters which can be used to display one particular resource. This would be where the overall connection has a library of activities, but the teacher wants to connect to just one.

External Tool Settings

There are four privacy options which can control how much information the tool gets from Moodle.

Privacy Options

The one that stands out for me is that the tool can pass grades back into Moodle. This has much potential.

An Example – ChemVantage – General Chemistry.

ChemVantage is a free resource for science education which includes grade exercises, homework exercises, practice exams, video lectures and free online textbooks. It was created by ChemVantage LLC which was founded by Prof. Chuck Wight, who has taught General Chemistry at the University of Utah since 1984. The site is powered by the5 Google App Engine.

The below image shows homework exercise on Atoms and Elements embedded into the Moodle webpage. Although the exercise is hosted on ChemVantage.org the LTI enables the teacher to use it in Moodle without having students log in again.

ChemVantage embedded into Moodle with LTI

An Example – WordPress Multi-user

As mentioned, it is also possible with some changes to to an existing web application to make it an LTI provider tool. One example is turning WordPress Multi-user into an activity for Moodle. The below image shows WordPress site embedded within Moodle with the teacher automatically logged in.

Wordpress Multi-user embedded into Moodle 2 with LTI

This was using Dr. Chucks WordPress Multi-User Sandbox.

An Example -Mediawiki

Here is an example screenshot of using the External Tool to embed a Mediawiki site into Moodle. The category it goes to is determined by the course shortname.

Mediawiki embedded into Moodle 2 with LTI

An Example – Musicflight

This is an example of how it can work with a really cool Music tool called Noteflight.

More to come!

I will update this post with other examples too over the coming days.

So that is it, or isn’t it.

What are the benefits of having the tool outside of Moodle?

Learning Tool Producers

Organisations who want to provide their tool into Moodle now don’t need to learn Moodle, they just learn and implement the standard. Where before each system released an integration activity or block for Moodle and other LMS they wanted to support, now this means less cost for them in supporting and maintaining those connections. They can focus on their product – the tool.

Institutions / Teachers

If a teacher, or an institution has an idea for a tool but want to ensure it is usable with Moodle, it won’t matter if they are Perl, Java or Python developers – they don’t need to learn how to program in PHP, nor how any of the APIs in moodle works. All they do is code their tool to the standard.

Training Companies / Content Providers

Where before training companies provided a set of learning objects (usually Scorm or full course backups) which users installed into their LMS, this will provide an alternative strategy.

They will now be able to keep all the content centrally, and provide LTI access to it. This offers the training company and the end users many benefits. These benefits include:

Any fixed or small changes can be done centrally, and benefit everyone without having to distribute a new copy of the learning object

Any improvements can again be applied centrally

The ability to provide test access is much improved, and does not compromise the security of the content, so it will be easier to get to test something out without having to install it locally.

Moodle administrators / Teachers

Up to now, if you wanted to add a tool into Moodle you usually went through a vetting process with IT – which could include many technical, functional and security type tests such as

Is the code written in a secure way

Is the code maintained

Does it work with our version of Moodle?

Now it will be easier to test and check out the tools (when they implement the LTI connection) without having to worry so much on the technical side.

Summary

This seamless integration will open the doors for many cool learning tools and activities to further extend the learning eco-system beyond the LMS.

This work by Gavin Henrick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Institutions are clinging to the command & control philosophy, which is going to be a challenge.

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The ability to work well with data is understood to be an increasingly crucial skill as universities aim to preserve, sort and discover information that emerges from research.

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Integrating Street View with the Google Earth Diorama

Source: Google News Tags: google

A few weeks ago we showed you the Google Earth Diorama , a powerful tool that Paul van Dinther created to help website owners more easily integrate powerful visualizations using the Google Earth Plug-in

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How do I cite a tweet?

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

Great, I can begin my Twitterature Review now!

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What we’re seeing isn’t a tablet market defined by iPad and its close siblings, but a forking, heterogeneous, post-PC tablet and media player ecosystem that’s moving toward the kind of diversity we take for granted with more traditional portable PCs.

[bairdwhelan]

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As social media become almost inescapable on college campuses, a pair of recently published studies supports what many professors already have concluded: Students using Facebook or text messaging during a lecture tend to do worse when quizzed later.

But wait: Faculty who build Twitter into...

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Vodafone was too slow to react to changes in the market because it was based on an outdated command and control way of doing business. This organisational straitjacket also meant it was too inward-looking, and not responsive enough to customers, while simultaneously alienating the new wave of talent entering the workforce.

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Moodle XML Builder

GET THE PROGRAM APPLICATION http://www.nashcc.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=657

HELP FILE A help file for MoodleXMLBuilder is included when you install the program.

Overview

MoodleXMLBuilder is a Java desktop application developed by the Engineering & Manufacturing Technologies Department at Nash Community College in Rocky Mount, NC. MoodleXMLBuilder was developed to assist instructors in converting to the Moodle course management system, and to better utilize instructor resources provided by textbook publishers. MoodleXMLBuilder converts commonly-used test generator output into the Moodle extensible markup language (XML) format. MoodleXMLBuilder currently supports output from ExamView®, TestGen®, and EZTest®. Unfortunately, these test generators do not currently support exporting tests and question banks directly to a Moodle format. MoodleXMLBuilder provides a secondary process that converts exports from these test generators to Moodle XML. Additionally, MoodleXMLBuilder can convert test and question pools exported directly from Blackboard® to Moodle XML. 

MoodleXMLBuilder fully supports images within all question fields where images are allowed within the Moodle quiz module. MoodleXMLBuilder converts images to a base64 format and embeds the images directly into the Moodle XML file. With the images embedded, there is only one file to upload into Moodle and all the images links will remain fully intact.

MoodleXMLBuilder currently supports Moodle version 2.1.2 and lower.

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How the Tyranny of the Majority obscures accuracy. Has Wikipedia become mainstream media?

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A little accessibility love for the masses

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Use Flickr (preferred!) Upload images to your Flickr Account under a Creative Commons license that allows us to use it. Don't forget to add a good description or title saying where and when you took it. Then shoot us an email at [email protected] to let us know the URL. If we use your shot, we'll link back to your collection.

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So Say We All!

Higher Ed is undergoing a tectonic shift, fitting into a new paradigm of self directed knowledge creation.

The market for free online courses is growing every week, with new companies emerging to offer open courses to anyone who wants them. Some of them have forgone the support of traditional institutions to try the for-profit waters instead. For anyone who might be struggling to keep track of the ever-growing field—the companies’ names can sound similar or stretch the bounds of the dictionary—below are four recently created start-ups challenging the traditional degree model with their free online courses.

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Nice detail from FusionFinds (author @jgarton) on developing and using PlanBookEdu.