Moodle

I see that MDL-9134 is moved here. I actually see this in a bit wider aspect then just a repository. I have courses that are held several times with the same content. The repository would probably solve the sharing of the course content, but I would also like to see what student has taken this course, and when they participated. What I mean is that when I enter the course, the dates it has been held should be listed as links where I can get info about participants.

Will a combination of Metacourse and the new Repository maybe solve it ? I have not been able to make the proper reports with today's metacourse functionality.

I am increasingly finding I have a need to be able to search through the resources linked to various courses. I know I have uploaded and used a resource but often have to look in several courses and several different weeks inorder to find it. Ideally I would like to be able to search for the resources by keyword - this generally necessitates that I attach keywords (e.g. to images, media files - text based documents might be searcheable). I am looking at Document Management systems in Sourceforge at the moment, e.g. one that caught my eye tonight is "Contineo - Document Management, DMS" I think this must be a very general requirement - I expect other users to recognise this requirement.

I agree that the issue of metadata needs to be addressed, i.e. do all potential repositories hold such data, how will it be entered via moodle, and how will it be indexed by global search?

Currently the spec linked to above lists metadata as an optional requirement, which would imply that moodle needs to manage the metadata internally, however, does this mean that the same resource can have different metadata for different instances in different courses, or should it be stored once only? Perhaps we need both?

I would think that the linked repositories should be responsible for the management of metadata and that moodle should send a search request to ask the repository for matching entries when searching for potential resources to import.

In an enterprise repository there would already be an investment in taxonomy and indexing of content. To replicate this would be wasteful.

You have two distinct areas to cover.

If content is imported to the local store then metadata that comes with it should be added to the moodle global search indexing.Then finding content that has already been retrieved from an external repository is open to all moodle users with appropriate course/resource permissions.

Finding content to add as a resource during course construction or for student submission will depend on the permissions of the teacher or student in the the source repository.

Metadata is covered in the File API and we'll make sure that the Repository plugins copy populate local metadata with external metadata when it is available.

Overall, the plan has been meeting with very good feedback from people I've talked to about it at Moodle Moots etc, including the last developer meeting (hackfest) at the San Francisco Moot this month. I think we've managed to integrate all concerns raised in the wiki too.

We're going ahead with development starting this week. Please keep raising issues and comments as we go!

Excellent.

Could I suggest Alfresco as a good choice of repository target for a test case . It is getting a heap of support and already offers a good PHP integration layer. This is a richer interface and may be better than going straight in at the jsr170
layer which is pretty constrained.