[OSGeo-Edu] Moodle/Content Management System discussion

[Venkatesh Raghavan]

maria.brovelli at diiar-topo.polimi.it wrote:
> Ciao!
> I agree with you, Charlie, we need courses but also metadata to find 
> information about courses (at least if, in an optimistic view, we have a 
> lot of courses). But unfortunately I don't have any idea about the 
> functionalities of moodle in that sense. People with experience in that 
> platform (like for instance Arnulf) may probably help.
> A nice sunday. maria

I read something in the Moodle page about
defining LOM (Learning Object Metadata)
for Moodle courses.
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Metadata:MoodleCore

At a more simpler level, Moodle has a Course
search function.

However, I do not think we need to worry about
metadata at a stage when we do not even have a
single "OSGeo-Edu Approved" course. And looking
a the Edu ML discussion, I get the feeling that
we may not have one by the time we are likely to
have our next BOF during FOSS4G2008.

I think we should focus our target on bringing
out two courses

Course 1) Introduction to OSGeo Desktop GIS Software
Course 2) Introduction to OSGeo Webmapping software

The purpose if the Education Repository is
that has been set-up recently
(http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Educational_Content_Inventory)
is to find out what all of us have at hand and
how much of it could be used  in the Course 1 and
2 above. We need to discuss the course outline before
we can decide the reusability of what existing.

For Course Management, we could think of using Moodle,
Claroline, Atutor are whatever all of us are
comfortable with
( Also See 
http://www.unesco.org/iiep/virtualuniversity/forumsfiche.php?queryforumspages_id=9)

Another aspect that we need to discuss finalize is
about the "Free GIS Book". The way we work on a
*Book* and *Course* will be quite different. The
software that we will be using for the *Book* will
also be different from what we use for the *Course*,
I think.

I am sure that there must be some good software for
collaboratively writing a *Book*. But once we decide
the structure of the book and people who are going to
take responsibility for the chapters, we can even think
of a simple solution of asking people to submit chapters
as Open Office Document (I am not good at Latex)

About the book, I would like to repeat that I agree with
most of the views that Victor put forth about the book
in this ML.

Regards

Venka