Edited by Sam Marshall, Monday, 22 Nov 2010, 10:56
Just a quick update here about our Moodle 2 conversion plans (two people have asked already so I thought I'd post here and save effort later). If anyone's using any of the main OU custom modules and wants to know, it's good news! We will be converting these to Moodle 2. Specifically:
ForumNG we'll be converting in-house soon. I'm hoping it will be finished around January. Same applies for the OU search block that provides live full-text search facilities to all these tools.
OU blog and OU wiki we are currently trying to outsource - I wrote some specifications with really detailed test cases... We are hoping to get the code probably a bit later than ForumNG, maybe end January.
In both cases we are hoping to put these in with other code for final integration testing etc for an internal release at the start of March. First real usage (along with some other features) will be with our second-phase release in June, and it's likely students won't use it until July.
So basically, we should have the basic converted modules ready quite soon, but the more reliable 'same code we are using for live students' versions will be later.
I know Moodle 2 is theoretically about to be released very soon, so there might be some people out there thinking 'argh! but i'm about to upgrade and you're telling me I will lose my reliable ForumNG version for another seven months!' - but the version that's coming out now is the first one and in my opinion you'd be very unwise to use it on a live system. I'd recommend you wait at least another three, four months to upgrade live systems, even if you don't use any OU custom modules...
So anyway that was the good news - now for the... wait, it's more good news! Of a sort. We're planning to do a similar public release (with similar timescales) of our OU content module, which provides online content within Moodle based on XML document files, which are basically equivalent to textbooks but can include audio, video, Flash, Java applets, and some interactive thingies, etc. (By the way, this is also the same XML format we use to produce most of our actual printed textbooks, although the 'print' part is done in a separate system and won't be included in this release.) Example of current 1.9 version on OpenLearn
However, there might not be sufficient documentation etc. for anyone to actually use it as we have quite enough trouble supporting this system in-house without supporting other people too. It will definitely be an 'if you're stuck, better start looking at the code' type system. Still if you're interested, that's something to look forward to; I will post in this blog when it's available.
Also, I'm not quite sure this blog post can withstand yet more lashings of good news, but we're trying to make our entire Moodle 2 code repository public, which will mean that even if we don't officially 'release' and support something that is used in-house, anyone can come and get almost anything we do. Alternatively it will be a great resource for those who just want to point and laugh at our code quality, or count the number of customisations in core code, etc...
However, it's not me doing the public repository, and I don't know how it is going, so this part is a bit less sure than the other parts. Just thought I'd mention it since it seemed to fit in with the topic.
Moodle 2 conversion
Just a quick update here about our Moodle 2 conversion plans (two people have asked already so I thought I'd post here and save effort later). If anyone's using any of the main OU custom modules and wants to know, it's good news! We will be converting these to Moodle 2. Specifically:
In both cases we are hoping to put these in with other code for final integration testing etc for an internal release at the start of March. First real usage (along with some other features) will be with our second-phase release in June, and it's likely students won't use it until July.
So basically, we should have the basic converted modules ready quite soon, but the more reliable 'same code we are using for live students' versions will be later.
I know Moodle 2 is theoretically about to be released very soon, so there might be some people out there thinking 'argh! but i'm about to upgrade and you're telling me I will lose my reliable ForumNG version for another seven months!' - but the version that's coming out now is the first one and in my opinion you'd be very unwise to use it on a live system. I'd recommend you wait at least another three, four months to upgrade live systems, even if you don't use any OU custom modules...
So anyway that was the good news - now for the... wait, it's more good news! Of a sort. We're planning to do a similar public release (with similar timescales) of our OU content module, which provides online content within Moodle based on XML document files, which are basically equivalent to textbooks but can include audio, video, Flash, Java applets, and some interactive thingies, etc. (By the way, this is also the same XML format we use to produce most of our actual printed textbooks, although the 'print' part is done in a separate system and won't be included in this release.) Example of current 1.9 version on OpenLearn
However, there might not be sufficient documentation etc. for anyone to actually use it as we have quite enough trouble supporting this system in-house without supporting other people too. It will definitely be an 'if you're stuck, better start looking at the code' type system. Still if you're interested, that's something to look forward to; I will post in this blog when it's available.
Also, I'm not quite sure this blog post can withstand yet more lashings of good news, but we're trying to make our entire Moodle 2 code repository public, which will mean that even if we don't officially 'release' and support something that is used in-house, anyone can come and get almost anything we do. Alternatively it will be a great resource for those who just want to point and laugh at our code quality, or count the number of customisations in core code, etc...
However, it's not me doing the public repository, and I don't know how it is going, so this part is a bit less sure than the other parts.
Just thought I'd mention it since it seemed to fit in with the topic.