Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning/Profiles/moodletab
Technical analysis
This project aims to complete some default Moodle behaviors, and act as an intermediate layer to improve user interaction.
Moodle still does not have Web 2.0 features. Specifically, it does not make full use of AJAX technology.
Mockup's
Blueprint description
The project initial code name will be MoodleTab.
The main goal is to (complement) some missing features with the power of Jetpack integration. Among those we propose:
- Individual follow-up of forum threads. Subscriptions in Moodle forums are done on a forum basis. This means that you can't avoid receiving emails from threads that are not interesting for you. This can be solved by filtering threads either using subject or the "id" of the discussion. Both alternatives will be explored during the development stage.
- Recovery of lost branching information. In a typical Moodle forum, one thread is started with an initial message. Replies can be done to any of the following messages. However, email sending of those individual posts do not include information about which message is being replied. This kind of information can be recovered, and this should be done in order to avoid losing pedagogical information.
- Cross-calendar interaction. This feature would be expressed as a single gadget where you could get the intersection of Moodle's calendar information and your own calendar events.Own's calendar could include Google's Calendar, for instance.
- Course updates information. Every time a teacher changes a course module, Moodle registers this action. MoodleTab's feature would extract this information and show it to the user in a usable format, describing what changes has been done (i.e. addition of a resource) altogether with a link to get to that modified module.
- RSS centralization. Moodle courses have the capability to generate RSS sources for many of its resources. Calendar and Forum are examples of this. It would be interesting to be able to centralize RSS sources from many course (or even different campuses) in a single gadget.
- Assignment information. Assignment module is Moodle's tool for handling student's production processing. Students would send their finished work on a subject and teachers can grade them, or even answer with their work commented. The Assignment Gadget would show information such as remaining days to final upload date, comments and grade received, etc.
Team Profile
Ana Marotias:has a degree in Communication Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), a postdegree in Cultural Management and Communication and and is doing her Magister in Social Sciences oriented on Education at the Latinoamerican University of Social Sciences (FLACSO) and her Doctorate in Social Sciences at the (UBA). As part of the leader team of FLACSO Virtual, the online education branch of FLACSO Argentina, she's in charge of management, development and edition of educational contents for the virtual campus, support and training of professors in the pedagogical uses of Moodle. She's also commited with Free Software in her academical activities: as a researcher at the Instituto de investigaciones Gino Germani is involved in the study of the cultural and social transformations related with the Technologies of Information and Comunication and she usually participates of conferences about this topics. Is a professor in the Sociologist career at the UBA.
Federico Botti:At the moment he is finishing his degree in Information Systems Engineering at the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional in Argentina.
He is the Lead Developer of the virtual campus at Flacso Argentina (http://www.flacso.org.ar/ and http://virtual.flacso.org.ar/). He is in charge of the maintenance phase of this wonderful e-learning tool(VLE), and because of the dynamism of the institution and because of the high standards of education he tries to be at the technological vanguardism regarding to on-line Education. He is also part of the Moodle Community, contributing to the development phase of the product being used to work and interact with different and heterogeneous web technology.
Laura Marotias: has a degree in Sociology of the University of Buenos Aires, a postdegree in Education and New Technologies and is doing her Magister in Social Sciences oriented on Education. As part of the leader team of FLACSO Virtual, the online education branch of FLACSO Argentina, she's in charge of management, development andediting of educational contents for th e virtual campus, support and training of professors in the pedagogical uses of Moodle. She's also commited with Free Software in her academical activities: as a researcher at the Instituto de investigaciones Gino Germani she is involved in the study of the cultural and social transformations related with the Technologies of Information and Comunication and she usually participates of conferences about the subject.
Pablo Etcheverry holds a post-degree in Education and New Technologies and a degree in Electronics Engineering. He is Director of IT in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, a 20k student Faculty part of the National University of Buenos Aires. Being a member of this public institution, he became a strong advocate of the Free Software movement, specially regarding Public and State usages.
