Catalyst IT from Wellington have announced the release of a new Moodle resource type that allows teachers to provide their students with links to resources indexed by Digital NZ

DigitalNZ is an initiative that aims to make New Zealand digital content easy to find, share and use. This includes content from government departments, publicly funded organisations, the private sector, and community groups.

DigitialNZ test and develop approaches that increase the amount of New Zealand content flowing through the Digital Content Life Cycle. New Zealand is a small place with big ideas, and we need to create and digitise more New Zealand content so we can stay digitally connected to our own stories, creations, knowledge and culture.

This resource type can be used via the External Search block which allows teachers to add easy access to external search engines (currently Google, Education Sector Federated Search and Digital NZ) with the results page still inside Moodle.

For further information and installation instructions, please see External Search block and Digital NZ resource type.

Google Apps Education Edition is coming to a Moodle near you! Google Apps comprises email, calendar, document-creation, website-creation and messaging tools, provided free-of-charge for educational institutions. Moodle, of course, is the most widely-used (and Open Source) e-learning platform.

Through the integration, users loaded into Moodle will be automatically loaded into Google Apps Education Edition, "providing users with Web-based e-mail, document authoring, spreadsheets, presentations and sites, all integrated with their online learning platform," explained Moodlerooms' West Coast Managing Director Michael Penney.

"From a teacher's perspective, this provides an easy way to assign students to collaborative tasks without having to worry about the students having different operating systems or incompatible software or being unable to access an online system. From an IT staffer or CIO's perspective, this provides an integration tested with large-scale data loads and built on industry standard SAML 2.0 and OAuth protocols for secure single sign on and information transfer."

The Moodle community is to handle the coding of the integration, with Google taking responsibility for 'funding, direction and guidelines'.

Google is a high-profile supporter of Open Source Software (OSS), with an Open Source at Google blog, free hosting for OSS via Google Code, and paid-for internships relating to OSS with the Google Summer of Code.

Alfresco is the Open Source Alternative for Enterprise Content Management (ECM), featuring Document Repository, Collaboration Tools, and Web Content Management.

The new Alfresco features some interesting open-source product integrations, most notably involving Joomla!, MediaWiki, Moodle, and OpenOffice.org.

Alfresco has always used OO.o on the back end in headless mode as a file-format transcoder and renditioning aid, but the news this time is that Moodle users now have direct, in-product access to Alfresco repository services.

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Strategic Direction

Since July 2007, Richard Wyles from Flexible Learning Network has guided the development of Mahara with open source software specialists – Catalyst IT as the maintainers of the core code.

A first guiding principle with the development of the Mahara ePortfolio system is that it is learner centred – a form of Personal Learning Environment. This is in contrast to the more institution-centric Learning Management System (LMS).

Mahara is a stand-alone system that can be integrated into a wider virtual learning framework. Unlike some pundits, we believe the Learning Management System remains a highly useful application for delivering learning. We also believe the overall environment can be enhanced and complemented by a learner-centred personal learning environment such as Mahara. Pan-institutional learner communities can also be encouraged using Mahara.

Mahara’s architecture is inspired by the modular, extensible architecture of Moodle. The Mahara team has also been heavily involved in the Moodle community, with recent work mostly focused on Moodle Networks. Similarly, Mahara systems can be networked together as well having single sign-on with Moodle 1.9. In a sense, we see Mahara as a ‘sister’ application although the two systems are not required to go together.

Going forward, Mahara will continue to evolve as a ‘pluggable’, modular ePortfolio system designed to leverage Web 2.0 web services and built with interoperability in mind.
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Moodle Selected as New Learning Management System for Canterbury University

Announcement from Dr Jan Cameron, Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Academic) November 25, 2008.

I wish to advise that the University is to adopt the Moodle open-source platform as its learning management system. It will replace the current Blackboard and StudentNet systems.

This 15-month project involved members from across the university community, including over 70 staff and a large number of students who were involved in trials and rated the Moodle system highly.

The system is used by a number of the world’s leading universities; there is also a developing community of users in New Zealand.

A timeline for implementation has been developed to facilitate phased introduction of Moodle during 2009. It is intended that the system will be fully operational at the start of 2010. UCTL will provide support for staff throughout the change process.

Details of the implementation plan and timeline for introduction of Moodle, along with the project's full report, can be found at http://www.uctl.canterbury.ac.nz/moodle.

Dr Jan Cameron
Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Academic)

Moodle Selected as New Learning Management System for Massey University

Massey University is adopting Moodle as its new learning management system, part of a drive to provide the best possible learning environment for students, says Vice-Chancellor Steve Maharey.

Read all about it here ...

Moodle Repository Create, Upload, Tag and Embed (MR-CUTE)

The core version of Moodle has a repository which does not have functionality for uploading and tagging resources. It is also not searchable. MrCute was initially designed to develop a repository module for Moodle to allow uploading, tagging, sharing and searching. As Moodle is fast becoming the most popular VLE in the FE sector as well as being increasingly used in the HE sector it was believed this will have a significant impact in promoting sharing of resources in many institutions.

The original MrCute was delivered as a “patch” to Moodle and disseminated as required by 31^st March 2008. However, a continuing overview and development site remained open and it became clear that although MrCute answered many needs, and was widely taken up, there were further improvements which could be made.

For more details click here.

This year New Zealand Moodle Moot will be hosted at the Eastern Institute of Technology in Hawkes Bay.

8th-10th October 2008

For more details please visit click here.

Moodle 1.9.1 has been released, the first maintenance update since the 1.9 launch in March. The new version includes a number of minor fixes, as well as performance improvements and some new functionality.

The new release addresses nearly 400 issues, improves performance in the areas of forums and backup/restore, adds captcha support for e-mail self registration,as well as improvements in:

• Gradebook issues, including performance;
• PostgreSQL compatibility fixes;
• Language pack issues;
• Improvements to participants list;
• Forum tracking and group modes; and
• Issues with PDF files in Internet Explorer.

The new release also includes Uzbek and Welsh language packs.

Version 1.9.1 can be downloaded from the Moodle download page here.

PageOne, the UK’s leading messaging technology company, today announces it has launched an open source Moodle module to allow Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) users access to its JANET txt messaging service.

PageOne have developed the new plug-in called ‘MoodleMobile,’ in conjunction with Kidderminster College. It allows users to send and receive text messages directly within Moodle, using PageOne’s JANET txt messaging service. JANET txt is a low cost suite of secure SMS-based messaging services provided by PageOne on behalf of JANET (UK), one of the world’s leading network infrastructures dedicated to the needs of the education and research communities in the UK.

Those working within the education sector can download the new MoodleMobile plug-in on PageOne’s website, and give their feedback on the service. (http://www.pageonejanettxt.com).

Click here to read more.