In a not so recent article, it was mentioned that based on a study, online learning tends to be better than the conventional in-person or classroom teaching.  Students in an online learning condition performed better than those receiving in-person instructions. 

Learning Management Systems are widely used in many different countries.  To add to that, the social networking technology also has its share of rapid growth.  These combined allow students to teach each other and share resources online. But according to Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program, "The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways."  "People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom.  But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity.  Learning has to occur in a community."

At Solution Grove,  we are working on creating these communities for both K-5 and older students.  K-5 students take advantage of the useful features and collaborative learning from Sugar.  Older students, on the other hand, may collaborate using MEL (Moodle-Elgg-LAMS).

Read the full article here.  Another related article talks about the same study. Read the post here.

Both these issues are related in a way since the code logic that determines who can take a LAMS activity and the code for who are notified of quiz submissions both rely on checking moodle roles and capabilities.  If you're familiar with moodle, then you'd be aware of the different roles that can be assigned to a user both on the site level and on the course level.  What some people miss is that there are capabilities as well that's assigned to each of these roles.  In order to resolve the issues that the clients raised without modifying the code, I needed to override these role capabilities so that they would behave as to how the client wants them to.

I'll outline here the steps of what you need to do to change the default roles capabilities in case you are faced with a similar problem.

To change the top-level role capabilities:

1. Login as administrator.
2. Locate your Site Administration block and click on these menu items -- "Users -> Permissions -> Define roles".  You will be presented with a screen listing the different roles.
   
   
   
    
3. Click on the role name whose permissions you want to change.
4. You will now be presented with a screen displaying the role details as well as the permissions assigned to the role for the different capabilities.
   
   
   
    
5. Click on "Edit" and adjust the setting for each capability as necessary.  You can set each capability to one of four possible values:
   • Not set - leave permission as is, inherit from parent context
   • Allow - allow this capability for this role, apply this to children as well unless overriden in the child context
   • Prevent - remove permission on this role for this context, can be overriden by a lower context
   • Prohibit - same as Prevent but do not allow override by a lower context
6. Click on "Save changes"

To change the course level capabilities:

1. Login as user with administrator rights to a course.
2. Visit the course page.
3. Click on "Assign roles" under the "Administration" block.
   
   
   
    
4. You will be presented a page where you can assign a role to users along with a tab labeled "Override permissions".  Click on the "Override permissions" tab.
5. You will now be presented with a screen displaying the role names.
   
   
   
    
6. Click on the role name whose permissions you want to change.
7. You will now be presented with a screen displaying permissions assigned to the role for the different capabilities.
8. Adjust the setting for each capability as necessary.  You can set each capability to one of four possible values:
   • Inherit - inherit from parent context
   • Allow - allow this capability for this role, apply this to children as well unless overriden in the child context
   • Prevent - remove permission on this role for this context, can be overriden by a lower context
   • Prohibit - same as Prevent but do not allow override by a lower context
9. Click on "Save changes"

To change capabilities for a lower context (typically activities):

1. Visit the course page using a user with proper rights.
2. Click on "Turn editing on".
3. Click on "Update" icon for the particular activity whose permissions you want to override.
4. Click on "Override permissions" tab.
5. You will now be presented with a screen displaying the role names.
6. Click on the role name whose permissions you want to change.
7. You will now be presented with a screen displaying permissions assigned to the role for the different capabilities.
8. Adjust the setting for each capability as necessary.  You can set each capability to one of four possible values:
   • Inherit - inherit from parent context
   • Allow - allow this capability for this role, apply this to children as well unless overriden in the child context
   • Prevent - remove permission on this role for this context, can be overriden by a lower context
   • Prohibit - same as Prevent but do not allow override by a lower context
9. Click on "Save changes"

Anne Gentle recently announced in her blog the availability of her new book entitled Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation.

The author shares a sample chapter which accounts much about online communities these days and how people are motivated to contribute to documentation.  Regardless of background, training, or education, people who have a sense of belonging in an online community are motivated to contribute information because they feel a sense of freedom in sharing these information to other users.  Much like in Open Source documentation where users of the same interests and goals connect, share, and exchange information.

Below is the free chapter from Anne Gentle's Conversation and Community.

Free Chapter Conversation and Community

Read Anne Gentle's full post here.

We, at Solution Grove, are advocates of Open Source software.  A good use of Open Source is to teach kids how to program.  One such example of Open Source is the Etoys activity from the Squeakland Foundation.  

Etoys, is an educational tool that teaches kids some powerful ideas.  It is a free software program that runs on almost all personal computers.  Using Etoys, children make their own models, stories, and games.  They learn math, science, and language arts the fun and effective way.

Read the full posts here and here about how children as well as adults at the Squeakfest '09 learned Etoys to explore and acquire more knowledge.

Last week I looked into automating web-based user interface tests using Selenium Remote Control. This is a Java based server that listens for HTTP requests containing test commands. These commands are used to drive a web browser with a Javascript adapter. It works with IE, Firefox, or Safari depending on which operating system the Remote Control server is running on.

It was very easy to setup, download the Selenium Remote Control  java code. On Linux you can just type "java -jar selenium-server.jar" and the server starts up, waiting for commands on an HTTP server listening on port 4444.

As a quick test I started up tclsh

<pre>

 tclsh

% source selenium.tcl
% Se start
f6365af82d894c0ebd5d880484de2823
% Se open http://dave.thedesignexperience.org:8000
% Se assertTitle "Main Site"
% Se assertTitle "Wrong"

ERROR: Actual value 'Main Site' did not match 'Wrong'
</pre>

So this is interesting, it is really easy to start using Selenium RC from Tcl. One issue is that any false response to "assertTitle" will result in an error. So you need to wrap all the calls to Se with a catch so your entire test code can run.

My next step was to integrate this into the automated testing framework included in OpenACS. I added an init_class to start up the Selenium RC session at the beginning of a test run. This way all test cases that require Selenium will  reuse the existing session.  This works well. This pattern of test code seems to be easy to use within the acs-automated-testing environment.

<pre>
aa_false "Test Description" [catch {Se assertTitle "Main Title"} errmsg]
aa_log $errmsg 
</pre>

The aa_log of the errmsg is optional, but it helps with debugging.

Finally I decided that writing test be hand was not so much fun, and leaves out a large number of people from contributing to the testing effort. Using Selenium-IDE i created a Tcl-RC based format so tests can be recorded in a browser and the test code can be added to the test scripts in OpenACS.

The code is available in OpenACS CVS

1. As long as the MNET API is implemented on the target software then it is easy to setup.
2. Using MNET, Single Sign-On (SSO) between Moodle and Mahara is flexible enough in the sense that either one of them can be the authoritative server.
3. Exchange is done via keys so it's a lot more secure that passing in plaintext password and encrypted hashes between servers.  Keys are automatically rolled for a predetermined number of days and the public key is propagated to the peers so that is an added layer of security.
4. Using the MNET API, automatic user creation works on Mahara using the Moodle user details.  It's nice that it also includes the profile picture in the propagation.
5. Configuration is very easy.  It's mostly done using a web UI to manage the server details.
6. Mahara supports more than one institution to be integrated to itself. So in theory, one can have a single Mahara install running and integrated with all your Moodle installations.  I haven't tried this yet so I can't comment yet if there are any significant advantages or disadvantages to using this approach.
7. The API is written using XML-RPC transport model so it should be easy to extend.
8. Mahara runs on PostgreSQL and being proponents of OpenACS then this is a plus for us.  And the Mahara developers present a lot of points on why this is the case.

The H1N1 virus effects younger people more then older and already has shut down a number of schools for a week or more.  Some school districts, such as Wausua, WI are preparing to continue to educate children even if schools are closed using Moodle.

 Smart move!

 Our goal is to make it easy and effective day to day as well as in emergencies.

http://www.wausaudailyherald.com/article/20090710/WDH0101/907100642/1981/WDHopinion

Summary Screen

The Summary tab for the Video Recorder allows the Monitor to view learner submissions for the activity as they are recorded and uploaded.  Sequence monitors can also record their own messages for students and delete submissions, where necessary.  Monitors cannot rate or comment on video submissions.

Instructions

In the Authoring Environment, as mentioned in Part 1, Authors can use the Instructions Space to attach support files for a specific activity, or leave comments for the Monitors about how a given activity should be run.

In the Monitoring Environment, here is where these comments and files can be viewed.

Edit Activity

Clicking the Edit Activity tab opens a new screen identical to the 'Basic' tab in the Authoring environment.  This allows monitors to edit or make changes to the content of the activity while the sequence is running.  If a learner has already started the activity, LAMS prompts a warning that one or more learners have accessed the activity and further advices that changing the content will results to learners getting different information.

Statistics

The Video Recorder stastistics screen simply displays a breakdown of the number of learners in each group (or whole lesson) compared with the number of learners who have completed the activity.

More of the other new improvements in this post.

The Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), is the public Spanish Open University. UNED is the second largest university in Spain with more than 180,000 students and since 1997 it has held the UNESCO chair in Distance Education which promotes research, development and documentation in the field of distance education.

UNED is a long time member of the .LRN community and they have just publish an article on their use cases and why they choose .LRN.

http://en.scientificcommons.org/42603031