Sandbox

Hi,

    I'm currently developing an e-learning portal for the college where I teach. I'm using Moodle 1.6 for the class/lesson stuff and I'd like to use Joomla for the front end so that I can write all the college admin into modules or whatever. I was originally going to use elgg because of it's collaborative features, but I could not get it working as I need.

    The way I would like to set up the site is as follows:

1> There are three groups of users, guests, students and tutors.
2> I'd prefer to setup all users un & pw ahead of time, with no choice of changing pw's except maybe for tutors.
3> At login:
  Guests are directed to a course information page. I consider guests as prospective students
  Students are sent to either their own homepage or hit a link to moodle.
  Tutors are sent to an admin "home page" where they can go to either do some admin or hit a link to go on to moodle for course admin.

On the Joomla side for students
1> they should be able to collaborate/ build links etc.
2> I'd like to give them all  a private "homepage", where they can check their grades, view postoral tutorial reports by their tutor, etc.
3> Maybe even have phpbb and/or a chat room for colloboration.
4> Provide some space for uploading documents such as essays (for tutors eyes only) or project research (for all eyes - collaboration)

I know this is possible as I wrote it 5years ago from scratch (except of course the moddle classroom stuff) 5 years ago but it was for just one course, and the students liked it. But now I just haven't the time to rewrite it for multiple courses and hack into moodle - it's due to go live in September. Plus I'd like other tutors to add their stuff, so I'd prefer... let's say a less geeky interface for them (they are after all artist/designer types  )

This is our first step into e-learning so the site will be more of a support for current course, for example many of our HNC students are adults with families/jobs etc and they can only manage to get into college one day a week, and so their retention is not as high as we would like. So next academic year will be a bit of a testing ground for all of us to get e-learning strategies right. then the following academic year we should be able to offer fully e-learning courses.

I have looked at Community Builder for Joomla, but I can't tell if it can do what's needed. I have posted there for advice, but from what I've heard few posts are actually answered so I'm posting here as well.

I would appreciate any thoughts/suggestions, thanks in advance...

I'm doing something similar with Moodle 1.5.4 and Joomla Community Builder with the Joomoodle component.  I haven't been able to get Moodle 1.6 to work because they have changed some of the authentication scripts and the Joomoodle component doesn't seem to like it. 

I had to do a lot of modifications to both Moodle and Joomla on the authentication side to get it to work, though.  The issue is, Joomoodle only uses a user's username and password from the jos_users table of the Joomla database.  All of the other detailed profile information that is being entered into community builder (including nice touches like First name and Last name which Moodle uses but Joomla without CB does not) will not flow over to Moodle without changing the config.html and lib.php files in the moodle/auth/db folder.  It's taken me a while to work out most of the details (newbe at php) and my scripts are a mess right now.

If having all of that profile information move isn't an issue, though, downgrade the Moodle install to 1.5.4 and use the Joomoodle (http://forge.joomla.org/sf/projects/joomoodle) component.  It's also part hack (which is the problem with the Moodle 1.6) but I found that it works a lot better than the Mambo-Moodle component that is on the Moodle site.