Hi
I'm not sure if this is a stupid question or not.
I have recently developed an integration with Drupal and Moodle which (after an enormous amount of tears, sweat, swearing and tantrums) is working well.
Moodle has, from a student's or course teacher's perspective, very good functionality. From a developers perspective though, it's a complete piece of junk.
From my searching, it appears that Drupal currently doesn't have the modules to provide the type of functionality that Moodle has. Is this correct?
The site I have developed will continue to develop further, and this may enable me to begin developing similar functionality as Moodle within Drupal.
Questions:
1. Am I being stupid? Does this functionality already exist?
2. This is a huge amount of work, and working in the open-source community means I'll be doing it in my own time. If this is a project that goes ahead, is anyone else keen?
Thoughts welcomed.
Cheers
Glenn
Comments
Moodle & Drupal
Hi Glenn,
Please have a look at this thread http://groups.drupal.org/node/21559. That's where the action is ;-)
Cheers,
Frank
Frank
My LinkedIn profile
You're not being stupid
Hi Glenn,
I have been using Moodle for over 5 years now and I find it a fantastic platform both for face to face and distance learning. We currently employ it at our computer information systems department here in California. However, I agree with you about the functionality vs. implementation of the Moodle platform. It seems to me that the Moodle code is becoming increasingly unmanageable, especially in the last few iterations. The data model is obtuse and I gave up trying to figure it out in detail. I have written a few in-house extensions but they have (ungracefully) broken on upgrades, so I quit writing anything that extends moodle. Instead, I have contented myself to just use what I am given, which , I must say, is quite a lot, thank you to the Moodle community. I am not faulting anybody in the Moodle community, I just don't think the code base is managed well, it's too, well. . . unmanaged. It's cool that it works well, but it seems brittle to me. I got tired of writing things that would break other modules, not moodle's fault, mine for not being a committed member of the community, and I freely admit that.
Ok, having given an opinion, anybody is free to flame away and show me the errors of my ways, but I don't write anything within the moodle framework anymore.
So what does this have to do with Drupal? I drank the "Drupal Kool-Aid", and now I am developing Drupal modules for some other projects that I need working web apps for. Since I am a software engineer and an educator, I care about LMS's and content delivery systems, especially their architecture. Drupal's architecture is sound and it is well documented. It is very easy to get into the Drupal community and to write Drupal modules. Learning communities are now all the rage, and I think that Drupal is a great platform to build new LMS's and education based CMS's.
What modules in particular do you see in Moodle that are not found in Drupal?
This is what I use mostly as a community college professor:
All of those components are available in Drupal, I am not sure how well they work, but those 5 appear to be core to course delivery. I think what would be good is to document how to put them together to make Drupal do some of the things that Moodle is not doing. I also like the idea of using Drupal to extend Moodle, and so a synthesis may be a better approach rather than a competition.
Regards,
Paul
errata
What modules in particular do you see in Moodle that are not found in Moodle?
should be:
What modules in particular do you see in Moodle that are not found in Drupal?
Hit post too fast.
No you've got it right from
No you've got it right from my limited work with Moodle it's not developer friendly but seems like it does the job for students / teacher interaction / managing a course. Drupal definitely is lacking in terms of modules that replicate the same functionality as Moodle but the focus is different. There are a lot of initiatives to try and give Drupal the functionality of Moodle since it's soooo much more developer friendly and has wider uses.
There's the gradebook module, social media classroom (distribution to augment a classroom), some Moodle integration groups / modules, and the Quiz module that I can think of off the top of my head. I know personally I'm involved in projects like the course manager (CMS like module), Assignment Studio (gradebook + assignment submission and feedback / reports), and a Rubric builder (plugin for assignment studio). All are supposed to be out this year so there's a lot of work to make Drupal a Moodle-lite kind of platform (esp. in my unit).
I think you're on the right track though with your clugy system and then trying to slowly transition over to a Drupal environment over time. I've personally found that the wide variety of modules in Drupal make solving problems a lot easier when it comes to building courses in education. It can also be used to power websites (since that's it's main purpose) and so you don't need to hire people that know Moodle and Drupal in order to get your courses and web presence up and running (one of our resource concerns).
"Plaguing the world with Drupal; One Plone, Moodle, Wordpress, Joomla user at a time since 2005." ~ btopro
http://elearning.psu.edu/
http://elearning.psu.edu/projects/
http://elearning.psu.edu/drupalineducation/
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
want to develop module in moodle , in drupal
there r some 15 + core modules in moodle.. i want to develop similar kind of modules in drupal. is that possible ??
if yes pls specify some steps as how to proceed...
Thanks...