Moodle, as a platform for organizing eLearning and distance learning

When a customer asks to deploy software for eLearning or distance learning, each puts in his words his own meaning:

• Tutors and teachers who are accustomed to the classroom system, most often have in mind webinars - they just want to do the same thing that they are used to only through the Internet.
• Textbook publishers and teachers who do not plan to leave offline, usually dream of electronic textbooks for self-study students or for demonstration in full-time lessons.
• The heads of small universities sometimes imagine a “magic black box” where you can load first-year students and recall them at the graduation ceremony. It is desirable that in the "box" already "lay" all the training materials and algorithms for their use.
• In larger universities, more often they need a centralized system of testing, collecting and reviewing written works with automatic verification of their plagiarism.
• Sometimes eLearning is a silver bullet that solves all the problems of a university. It is necessary to introduce “eLearning” and everything will immediately become as it should: there will be training programs and they are certified by the third generation educational standards, the Bologna system and modular training will be introduced, from where the branch tree of competences will grow and tied to them materials and creative tasks, teachers will no longer take bribes, they will become younger and more modern, students will cease to “pass” and begin to “study”. It is enough to choose the right “eLearning” in a beautiful box, buy and press the “Install” button, and it is better to ask the student “off set” to download for free on the Internet and put it on an old Windows 98 machine in the laboratory.
• Unfortunately, the category of customers who have been allocated money for eLearning is quite common and they need to spend it somehow. Strangely enough, for an IT person, this is one of the most problematic categories, since they often proceed not from expediency, but from their own ideas about the solidity and prestige of various technologies and terms.
• Language school owners want a billing, accounting and control video conferencing system integrated with payment systems. Something similar to tax-agency agencies, only with teachers in a videoconference instead of taxi drivers.
• Personnel services need a tool for storing their professional development history and organizing distance learning and on-the-job certification.
• The new trend is electronic journals and diaries, voluntarily-compulsorily introduced in all schools, represented by several favorites products promoted by commercial companies or regional state institutions, usually centers in the departments of education. They are united by one common feature: they are organized like online tax reporting services - they are filled in manually, without reference to training, in parallel to paper journals. That is, a paper journal online, sometimes erp / crm (resource allocation, communication with the “client”), but the educational function is either not at all, or it is not suitable for use.
• There are also much more exotic options, including training in virtual universes, working with virtual models and laboratories, etc.

In fact, the concept of eLearning is the broadest of all of the above - this is primarily a new model of the educational process, and not just the transfer of familiar practices to online, along with scanned manuals, quick tests and the addition of an online store function.
From an IT point of view, eLearning is primarily an infrastructure that provides basic and additional services:

• user authentication and authorization;
  
  • maintaining a user registry;
  • integration with external databases and learning management systems;
• distribution of powers;
  
  • access control;
  • flexible configuration of roles;
  • the appointment and cancellation of powers, access to materials and functions of the system;
  • integration with external databases and learning management systems;
• platform for displaying materials that support specific types of content:
  
  • texts, web pages, audio and video files and arbitrary files;
  • tests with automatic verification;
  • interactive learning materials interacting with the platform through the API;
  • auto-backlit glossaries;
  • connection of external educational resources according to one of the interaction standards;
• communication between users
  
  • mailing;
  • direct text messages;
  • forums;
  • collecting, recording, checking for plagiarism, reviewing and evaluating student work;
  • polls and questioning;
  • webinars and video conferencing;
  • interaction in virtual universes;
• analysis and storage of learning outcomes;
  
  • logging of user actions in the system;
  • saving estimates and calculating totals;
  • student portfolio management;
  • sharing data from a portfolio with external systems;
  • competency accounting;
  • transfer of learning results to external learning management systems;
  • generating reports, providing API for connecting your own reports;
• interaction with mobile clients.

This list can be supplemented, but I propose to agree that we take the brackets out of the management of the educational process, because here the needs of different organizations differ even more.

Thus, the eLearning architecture emerges: a basic platform with which management databases are integrated, as well as specific services and training materials, such as webinars, interactive laboratories, etc. Based on this, there are requirements for openness, scaling, stability, extensibility, documentation and sustainability of the development of the basic platform.
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Moodle - Modular Object Oriented Distance Learning Environment - fully complies with these requirements. Comparing Moodle with closed and open counterparts is not the topic of this article. Let me just say about internal or customized development: save these resources for truly specific tasks, such as developing good learning resources, simulations, and developing or customizing the learning management system. Inventing your own bike, you still can’t catch up with the full-time development team since 2002: the core of the free software development team of Moodle are full-time employees of the Moodle Foundation in Australia, which is funded by regional partners and grants.

Moodle is good as an integration platform: it is stable enough if you do not install experimental versions (more than 60 thousand installations reveal most of the problems before you notice them), are scalable (there are installations with more than 1 million users), and modularity and support for open integration protocols from the very beginning were the priority of the developers. In addition, it has a high enough level of support for all types of educational activity, which could be implemented on the technologies used. Unfortunately, webinars require a streaming server that does not live on LAMP hosting, but most open or commercial products in this category already have ready-made Moodle integration modules.

The installation process is as automated as possible: the step-by-step wizard performs most of the work, from server diagnostics to creating a database structure. The main thing is not misleading - it is better to do this work for an experienced webmaster who understands how the Internet works, how Apache works, how to manage access rights in Linux, what Cron is, how mail flows from a web application and how to reduce the likelihood of it getting. in spam. It is possible to install Moodle without it, in the end, there is Denver, only I would not vouch for the further fate of such an implementation and stability of work. If there is no such specialist, it is cheaper and more reliable to attract third-party than to take to the state and teach your own: for one full day of work on servicing Moodle from one system will not be gained, and congestion with diverse tasks reduces quality and motivation.

After these simple manipulations, we get a clean system, and further to the forefront is the organization of business processes, on which the success of the project depends:

• Registration, update and deletion of users: who will do it and when, how reliable the data is, whether or not graduates and academicians will be deleted, how to avoid littering the user registry, if the data is entered into several systems - which one will be primary and what will integration mechanism.
• Assignment and cancellation of authorities, including subscription and cancellation of courses: the problems are approximately the same as during registration. It is important to have a well-thought-out security policy, and to follow it clearly, in its absence, there are trends towards uncontrollable accumulation and empowerment of all users, in the end all users will be administrators and you will not recognize your system. It is especially difficult to deal with this if authority is required by top management. Try renaming the administrator role as a “floor cleaner in the server”, and the administrator name the role with rights to view and edit content, maybe a list of users, but without the rights to configure the system and roles.
• Filling with educational materials is the most important question on which it depends whether you will have eLearning or just an advanced communication platform. Three things need to be known about this process: it is very difficult, very expensive and very long. It is necessary to understand, accept and act in accordance with this. There is no free content filling. Good study materials that can be looked at without tears are not written with enthusiasm, on library day, etc. Maximum teachers will lay out scanned manuals with plagiarism from other people's books and links to Wikipedia. Content must either be bought for “real money”, it’s not a fact that it will be of high quality and will be suitable, but this is fast. Or to organize the process of its development, which, as in book publishing, in addition to the authors involves the involvement of proofreaders, stylistic and scientific editors, illustrators. The development of multimedia content requires the same specialists as making a movie or developing a video game. Fearfully? That's why everyone loves webinars so much - put the “speaking head of Professor Dowell” in the monitor and now “eLearning” is ready.
• The rules of communication between the participants: what works should be surrendered through the system, when the teacher should check them, whether she should write a review and what she should include. In what form teachers advise students in the system, how soon and how much detail they should answer. This is a magic wand, which allows you to start using the system almost immediately in the learning process if there is no money to develop or purchase training materials. Long-term construction is dangerous fast extinction enthusiastic leadership, so you need to strive for the system to become mandatory to use in some aspects as soon as possible.
• Work assessment policies: scales, criteria, rules for calculating totals, uploading assessments to external systems, their status and use (for self-control, for the information of the teacher, the final assessment).
• Training course developers and tutors to work with the system. Introductory training for students is needed, mainly, if the contingent cannot use at least VKontakte, but in order to avoid complaints, at least a screencast or just instructions with screenshots should be done.
• Technical user support. With a large number of them, it is better to divide into the first line - answers to sample questions can be entrusted to any technician, and the second line, most often, questions related to the subtleties of Moodle work and possible mistakes, redirect to your own or attracted Moodle expert.
• I will not dwell on the maintenance of the system, the criteria and procedures are the same everywhere - monitoring, backing up, timely updating of versions.

If you plan your own improvements, it is important from the outset to put a strict condition - no changes in the kernel, no patches and hacks, only modules that work through the API provided by the developers. This will save you from a lot of problems, the most terrible of which is the loss of ease of updating and compatibility with the basic version, and as a result, forced adoption of the entire Moodle code for support, and not just a few small plug-ins.

PS In the next article, I plan to write an overview of the types of plug-ins and open interfaces Moodle. A detailed description of the installation process, in my opinion, is not a topic for the Habr audience, but if you are interested, write.