Building elearning modules using Joomla

[Brendan]

Here at the United Nations University in Tokyo, we just switched our online learning website to Joomla and we are really happy with how it is going.

In fact, we have started thinking that maybe we could start building elearning modules using Joomla as well. For instance, last year we built something called an e-case study dealing with water pollution in Western Mexico - http://www.onlinelearning.unu.edu/ayuqu ... tml.  It is pretty well put together and so far we have received lots of positive comments.

This past month, however, we started thinking we could do the follow up modules (we have seven planned) in Joomla. There is one big issue however. We provide these modules to universities in the developing world, where Internet connectivity is not that good! So, we may have to send them via CD-ROM. Our challenge would be to export the Joomla sites to a static version for dissemination via CD.

I have done some research and found two options:

http://www.indigostar.com/microweb.htm
But I understand that this costs around US$300 and will only run on a Windows PC.

http://www.httrack.com/
It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. And its free!

Would this work with Joomla? I am wondering if there are other ways of doing this as well?

[AmyStephen]

First of all, I looked through YOUR BEAUTIFUL eLearning website.  I work at a University, too, and have been talking to my CIO about us getting more front and center with Joomla. I book-marked your site for later. Maybe we can help out with your very important mission.

Check out this thread: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,43782.0.html and see if the ideas offered by the community might help you.

I am going to ask "ChiefGoFor" to move this thread to the University area and see if he might have ideas, too.

Sometimes you have to "bump" a post to get attention -- there is SO MUCH going on.  This one was TOO IMPORTANT to ignore.

WAY-TO-GO!!!!!!

[ChiefGoFor]

Hi Amy!
  Per your request...
      Moving thread to "Schools and Universities" board.

[Brendan]

Hi Amy,

Thanks for suggesting that my post be moved to the education. I think it fits better here and hope that more people will look at it and perhaps what we are doing in Tokyo and give us some friendly advice.

Brendan
UNU Media Studio

[AmyStephen]

I am trying to see who all is out there in higher ed to see if we can get talking. So, I think I was being selfish moving your message here. Since you were just in "General", I thought you might not mind. And, since you are doing such great distance ed stuff, you surely have lots to contribute here. Now, we just need to round up the others! ttyl...Amy

[jbrice]

I am trying to see who all is out there in higher ed to see if we can get talking.

Hi Amy. It's good to see the emergence of a group of people who are working in higher education. I work for an academic school (www.english.ex.ac.uk) in the University of Exeter in the UK, and it's really encouraging to see what other peole like Brendan are doing.
I have been using Mambo and Joomla for just over a year. So far it's been for small scale sites for academic groups (e.g. www.centres.ex.ac.uk/cvs) and a staff intranet, but am now looking at using Joomla for a complete academic school web site (300+ content pages). Hopefully Joomla will be able to cope!

[AmyStephen]

It's really encouraging to see what other peole like Brendan are doing.

It really is, isn't it? I couldn't agree more.

I have been using Mambo and Joomla for just over a year. So far it's been for small scale sites for academic groups (e.g. www.centres.ex.ac.uk/cvs) and a staff intranet, but am now looking at using Joomla for a complete academic school web site (300+ content pages).

Fantastic!!! I was looking around your site a bit.

I am very interested in hearing more about your project. There are some enhancements that would (I believe) make Joomla easier to use in a higher education market.

It seems (at least in the US) that colleges and departments within an institution want autonomy -- and yet there is a push, and acceptance, that the website must have a common "look and feel" for the students. Your site is a perfect example of this -- the Centers link is for an area within your University -- but integrates perfectly with the rest of the institutions site.

I also think changes to the ACL would be helpful, too, to broadly cover the institution. For example, some type of hierarchical structure from the campus - college - department - staff/faculty to show who can update what.

Other things, as well, like a backup environment and how to restore articles, categories, sections that have accidentally been removed; or integration with moodle, or some type of CMS.

There is a bunch of considerations and exciting work to do, here.  I would like to see a group of us work on defining such enhancements that make Joomla fit a University environment.

How is your scope going to increase? Are you going to expand into a department or college or the entire institution?  What do you guys use for your Course Management System? Your Student Information System?

THANKS for sharing!!! Much appreciated!!!

[jbrice]

I am very interested in hearing more about your project. There are some enhancements that would (I believe) make Joomla easier to use in a higher education market.
It seems (at least in the US) that colleges and departments within an institution want autonomy -- and yet there is a push, and acceptance, that the website must have a common "look and feel" for the students. Your site is a perfect example of this -- the Centers link is for an area within your University -- but integrates perfectly with the rest of the institutions site.

Much the same in my situation. The University adopted web technology in a piecemeal fashion, and it's only over the last year that a management initiative started imposing 'a common "look and feel". Before that the various departmental web sites all looked very different and the technical quality was - shall we say - variable.
The thing that has not been addressed by our University is the technology for delivering web conten apart from campuswide standard for a VLE in the form of WebCT (UGH!  ) and general support for DreamWeaver as a tool. The big difficulty is getting content ownership and editing down to the grassroots - and DreamWeaver is just not up to the job of maintaining large and continuously changing sites like www.english.ex.ac.uk.

The project I mentioned is summed up in a placeholder page at www.sall.ex.ac.uk, and the Joomla site at www.projects.ex.ac.uk/soe/multisite is the test site where I am trying out some ideas for implementing the web sites for the School and its departments as one Joomla installation.

How is your scope going to increase? Are you going to expand into a department or college or the entire institution?  What do you guys use for your Course Management System? Your Student Information System?

There are already institution-wide systems for Course Management and Student Information - but nothing adequate for web content delivery. The has been a working group looking at CMS technology for several years, but no discernable progress towards selecting and adopting a product. Since my need is here and now, I started using Mambo and then Joomla.

There has been a lot of interest in what we are doing with Joomla from other departments, and I'm only too pleased to encourage that. The more people that use and understand it, the better the backup and support will be for my department and, who knows, it may become a de-facto campus standard.

[ot2sen]

Hi Brendan,

Noticed your need for creating CD static versions of your site and perhaps you should have a look at:

Joomla Demo CD by Brian
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,40077.0.html
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,42245.0.html

[pointri]

I'm excited in the fact that this conversation is being brought up again.  It's relevant to a project I'm about to get started on (finally).

A while back on the forums, a developer of Claroline, an PHP/mySQL open source counterpart of Blackboard and WebCT, made first contact with Joomla and started on developing a user bridge between the two, at least:

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,3648.0.html

Wonderful for course management and administration, but I had been hard-pressed to find anything suitable for a framework that models emerging practices in K-16 curriculum development (in the U.S. anyway...with standards alignment, i.e. curriculum development that merges instructional design with the accountability factor.)

Looks like there's another OS project in the works that could fit those particular needs quite well:

http://www.schooltool.org/

Browsed through their object model slide shows and it looks very promising.

[AmyStephen]

NOW WE ARE COOKING!!!

pointri - I have been recently talking with Tom Hoffman of SchoolTool. Also been looking at Moodle. Want to see those three environments start to converge.

jbrice - what you are doing is VERY important. That needs to be folded in, as well.

Brendan - your distance ed video and multimedia stuff is very important.

We need to form a group to work on these things together. See how our institutions can join together. I would like to see some EduCause presentations come out of this.

Anyone else out there in the University world who wants to collaborate?

So exciting!!!

[Brendan]

Perhaps we can explore how to link in these open source software tools to the open content/open educational resources movement. There is certainly a lot that the OER movement can learn from the OSS movement. I am currently participating in a debate organised by UNESCO on how to promote OERs - there are about 500 people on the mailing list and you can find out how to join here -

http://www.unesco.org/iiep/virtualuniversity/forums.php

The end result is that you get skill building and sharing going on at the same time! If it can all be done to the highest quality standards - then we really are onto something.

That is why I really like what is happening around Joomla. The entire system is really being put together with quality in mind, and yet it is amazingly cost effective. Lots of universities in the developing world ought to be adopting Joomla wholesale.

Brendan

[AmyStephen]

I signed up and also signed my CIO up, as well. Thanks, Brendan. It's going to be quite a learning experience knowing you! I appreciate that.

[AmyStephen]

Brendan - did you see ot2sen's post, above? I came here to post the same thing for you - then I saw his post. Looks like brian is doing what you were looking for!

Hi Brendan,

Noticed your need for creating CD static versions of your site and perhaps you should have a look at:

Joomla Demo CD by Brian
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,40077.0.html
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,42245.0.html

[brian]

Please note that neither the windows or linux versions of my cd's are static versions of your joomla site. They are just as dynamic as your  current site.

[AmyStephen]

Brian - what Brendan was looking for was a distribution method for a Joomla website loaded with multimedia pieces. He aims to deliver this United Nations Educational content to remote areas where bandwidth is an issue. Would your distribution cd be appropriate for that purpose? Amy

[brian]

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,49684.msg266614.html#new

[Brendan]

Hi Brian and Amy,

Sorry I was out of circulation for a while - enjoying the Cherry Blossoms here in Tokyo!!! Nobody works in Japan at this time of year.

I have shared the link to Brian's CD demos with other members of the team here in the Media Studio. This looks really exciting and I hope we can put something together.

In addition, we have been looking at the product from http://stunnix.com/
They describe it as follows:
"Stunnix Advanced Web Server 1.2 - an advanced webserver that uses Apache code base for use with browser-based applications and for use on readonly media like CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs that can be run on any major desktop platform (currently Windows, Linux, MacOS X)."

Brian, would this work for Joomla? I know it is not open source and the licence is a bit pricey - but once you pay the initial fee, the you could burn CDs and DVDs to your heart's content also the Stunnix option includes a Mac OSX version (ok, I know that there are not that many OSX users out there!). Are there any opensource tools that can do the same thing?

The main issue, I guess, is to have a simple approach that allows people to share content when they are occassionally connected to the Internet. It is the simple but free part that we try to promote at the UN University.

Brendan

[Slingshot]

Hi Folks

Well, this is a healthy forum, isn't it?

I am about to start an elementary Joomla Users module, split over two terms (totalling 6 months).

Check out http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic ... cseen.html

I would love to collaborate - is there a potential project leader here for a Joomla education / training /learning group?

Watch this space.

Later.

[AmyStephen]

Slingshot -

I have looked at your post in documentation earlier and logged on (as guest) to your moodle site. It is awesome what you are doing. There really is not a good organization, yet, to the educational area in Joomla!. I think it would be excellent to better organize. Right now, until v 1.5 is out, I think it's best to wait. But, following the release and a bit of time to get people up and running, I would very much like to see a higher ed group and K-12 group form. We could benefit from the collaboration and interaction.

You and Brendan are doing great things; don't stop!
Amy

[brian]

Stunnix does work but in my tests it was pretty slow. Also because of the way it is done using perl rather than a true apache webserver you may find somethings that dont work properly. to be perfectly honest with you the speed, or lack of it, was mre of an issue for me.

I m working on doing a mac version but that will probably not be for a month or so.

Brian

[cecgodoy]

Your website is very interesting!

Congratulations!

Here at the United Nations University in Tokyo, we just switched our online learning website to Joomla and we are really happy with how it is going.

In fact, we have started thinking that maybe we could start building elearning modules using Joomla as well. For instance, last year we built something called an e-case study dealing with water pollution in Western Mexico - http://www.onlinelearning.unu.edu/ayuqu ... tml.  It is pretty well put together and so far we have received lots of positive comments. 

[jbaker]

I tend to agree with Amy that it would be better to build an integrated learning system on Joomla 1.5 rather than 1.0.x.  With the announcement of OpenAcademic, I would hope that we might be able to get a group together and look for ways of producing an open source Joomla-based system that integrates Joomla, Moodle, and other relevant products like MediaWiki, etc.

Jason

P.S. FWIW, I'm a university professor who specializes in educational technology and online learning.

[AmyStephen]

Cool! Let's keep pointing people to this thread - I believe they are getting ready (?) to release beta v 1.5 - it will of course be a few months, then, but things are moving! Thanks Jason! Amy