Shared Portable Moodle
Taking online learning offline to support disadvantaged students
Stephen Grono, School of Education University of New England, Armidale
[email protected] @calvinbal
Shared Portable Moodle
Taking online learning offline to support disadvantaged students
Stephen Grono, School of Education University of New England, Armidale
[email protected] @calvinbal
Online Learning
• More access to information than ever before.
• Constant opportunities to learn on demand.
• Unique, often free, self-paced, interest-driven.
• Formal/informal distance education methods.
• MOOCs, VLEs, social media, learning comms.
Distance Education
• University of New England. Armidale, NSW.
• 22,000+ domestic & international students.
• 200 programs, across 23 discipline areas.
• >80% of these students studying by distance.
Rich, Accessible Learning
• Online learning environments like Moodle provide a rich space for learners to share, regardless of their geographical location.
• Learning materials can readily be provided in increasingly interactive, adaptive, collaborative and multimodal formats.
• Which anyone can access, at any time.
And that’s the assumption we make.
Finding a solution?
• Mailing print materials no longer fits the multimodal, interactive approach
• Sending PDFs, similarly, loses the contextual learning design within the unit
• So a localised copy of Moodle with content!
• Except without any of the setup process
• … because students.
A (very) brief literature review
• A quick Google shows several projects around similar ideas. Many as far back as around 2007. Trouble is, hard to find mention of them beyond these early discussions circa 2007… – Open University UK’s Moodle Client project
– Colin Chambers’ Offline Moodle project
– Jolongo, utilising MS Air
– MAF-LT’s Poodle, using Moodle 1.9
– Nearly Virtual’s 2014 updated Poodle 2.7, by manually upgrading from the above project’s ‘2.1 beta’
A (very) brief literature review II
• Or a few more still in testing, or designed around a particular project. These ones often were looking into syncing & client programs.
• (And the Moodle Mobile App, which is neat)
• The takeaway was we’ve got a solid base to draw from, and a positive future in supporting these students, but not a lot that was current.
• It was also that it needed to be easy to customise, adapt & update.
Shared Portable Moodle (spoodle)
• Runs directly off a flash drive that can be sent out to a student who may not have internet access, or partial/restricted internet.
• Local instance of Moodle launched from the student’s own computer, so can contain theme, settings & plugins from UNE Moodle.
• Shared Portable Moodle, or ‘spoodle’ for short
• Yes, I am about to launch into a bad dog joke…
Some quick math with dogs
2 =
Some quick math with dogs
= +
So its sort of a spoodle
• Not bigger, its just sort of a hybrid version
What it is
• Contains all the activities and learning materials normally found within Moodle
• In the same carefully scaffolded structure and design the modules were intended to be engaged with, and in their intended context
• Locally accessible copies of readings / videos
• Easy, personalised differentiation by plugins
• By copying individual units into customised, blank copy of Moodle, to be send via USB
What it isn’t
• Point-in-time backup and restore from live Moodle to local portable version. There’s no sync magic here.
– This is good for security / data integrity
– But not so good if the lecturer is still designing course materials throughout the trimester
• To prevent students uploading files / posting to the local copy where they’ll never be seen, intentionally disabled submission for students
– Still arrange proper submission case by case
The semi-technical - what we changed
• In many ways base is similar to the official moodle.org packages – XAMPP bundle, forced into Portable mode, with a customised ‘click to start’ exe file for easy launch. Launcher will auto-load homepage in default browser.
• This time though, Moodle is preinstalled, and will adapt to the drive letter (or can be copied into the base C:/ drive for faster running).
The semi-technical - what we changed II
• Can be accessed across network, adapts to IP changes without needing to update mysql
• Removed all email requirements and checks
• Removed weekly wait to clean up temp files
• Disabled messaging. Removed guest access
• Disabled assign submission / forum posting
• Enabled conditional access / activity tracking … and a few other small changes
S for Shared
http://steve.moodlecloud.com
• Versions for Moodle 2.7 – 3.1
• Just add your own branding / plugins and go
• Instructions of which files & Moodle settings have been changed, so you can adapt to suit (and update to latest versions if I go missing)