I have been working on a new theme for Moodle. I got most of the CSS tweaks done and I added several graphics and what not to the Moodle home page to make it more interesting and easier to navigate. I know I am heading in the right direction with the theme because I caught a student comment in moodle saying, “doesn’t ilearn look cool now”. I also have worked out several issues with Mahara. One issue that we have is that you cannot login directly with Mahara. You must first login to moodle and then access mahara. I think in the future we will need to allow people to login at both sites, but to start off with the service, we are considering it an add-on to moodle and not seperate from moodle. Students will surely let us know what works best for them.
Our online learning platform is now taking shape. We are putting all the pieces together: Mahara, Moodle, and DimDim. With these 3 pieces of software, we will have:
- Moodle – Structured learning similar to a classroom
- Mahara – Communication, social interactions, personal learning spaces
- DimDim – Video/Audio Communication, interactive whiteboard, screen sharing, and recording tool.
The three of these will definetly make your head spin with all that you can do. Social bookmarking, wikis, blogging, social groups, web conferencing, desktop sharing, quizzes, file storage, social networking, video tutorials, pre-recorded instruction and presentation playback, and surveys to name a few.
We are waiting for DimDim ver4 to be released because in this version they will offer recording of the meetings. Once that is out, I think our eLearning Platform will be near complete… and then comes the trianing!