How-To Tutorials - Server-Side Web Development

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Animating images and objects Animating your objects is done on the Animations ribbon. Please note that this ribbon is different on PowerPoint 2010 than it is on PowerPoint 2007. Just about everything you do will be the same, however the locations and names of some things may be different. For the purpose of this book, we're going to look at PowerPoint 2010, but we will tell you about the differences. Getting ready To start we'll need a slide with a couple of objects on it. You can copy a slide from an existing presentation, putting it into a new presentation to experiment with. I'm going to use the first slide from our "Mary Had a Little Lamb" presentation. So that we can do anything we want to with this slide, I'm going to add a few buttons and an arrow to it, giving us some more objects to work with. When animating objects, it can be extremely useful to group them. This causes the animation to act on the group of objects as if they are one object. To group two or more objects, select them together, then right-click on one of the objects. Click on the Group button; it will open another fly-out menu, then click on Group. How to do it... Animations can only be done to already existing objects. Often, it is easiest to place all the objects on the slide before beginning the animations. That makes it easier to see how the animations will react with one another. For animating images and objects, perform the following steps: Open up the Selections pane by clicking on the Selection Pane button in the Arrange section of the Format ribbon. This will help you keep track of the various objects on the slide and their order of layering. To rename the objects, click on the name in the Selections pane and type in a new name. The small button to the right-hand side of each object's name is for making the object visible or invisible. Open the Animation pane in the Animations ribbon. For PowerPoint 2010, click on the Animation Pane button in the Advanced Animation section of the ribbon. For PowerPoint 2007, click on the Custom Animation button in the Animations section of the Animations ribbon. Adding an animation to a particular object consists of selecting the object and then selecting the animation for it. On the 2010 ribbon, you can add an animation either by clicking on the animation's icon in the center part of the ribbon, or by clicking on the Add Animation button in the Advanced Animations section of the ribbon. Clicking on this button opens the Animation drop-down menu, as shown in the following screenshot: Select the animation you want by clicking on it. How it works... When you first open the Selection pane, the objects will all appear with names such as Rounded Rectangle 12, TextBox 13, and Picture 14. This numbering will be sequential in the order that the objects have been added to that slide. The order in which the objects appear in the pane is the order in which they are layered in the slide. The top object that is listed is the top one in the order. To change the order, right-click on the object and select Bring to Top or Send to Bottom on the context-sensitive menu. PowerPoint works like a desktop publishing program in the same way that it handles the ordering and layering of the objects. If you were doing the design that you are doing in PowerPoint on paper, gluing blocks of text, pictures, and other objects to the paper would have caused some of them to overlap others. This is the concept of "layering". Every object that you put on a slide is layered even if none of them overlap each other. When they do overlap each other, the objects that were added later overlap the earlier ones. This can be changed by changing the object order, using Bring to Top, Send Forward, Send Backward, and Send to Bottom in the context-sensitive menu. The Animation dropbox itself shows the most popular animations and is divided into four, color-coded sections for the type of animation that is to be added, as follows: The Entrance animations are green The Emphasis animations are yellow or gray The Exit animations are red The Motion Paths animations are multicolored In addition, there are links at the bottom of the dialog box to access more animations than the ones shown in the dropbox. Selecting an animation automatically adds it to the Animations pane, so that you can see it. The animations you have added will be listed in the Animations pane in the order in which they run. There will be an icon of a mouse as well, to show that the animation is intended to run with the click of a mouse. The numbers to the left-hand side of the animation tell you what order they are in. If an animation does not have a number to its left-hand side, it is set to run with the previous one. If it has a clock face to the left-hand side, it is intended to run after the previous animation, as shown in the following screenshot: Even though we're setting the animations to start with a mouse click, that won't actually be happening in the Flash video. Later we'll be sequencing the animations, syncing them with the narration. We will need them to be activated by a mouse click in order to do this. There's more… There are a number of different changes you can make to how your animations are run. Animation timing Articulate offers the capability to precisely time your animations, which is much easier than what PowerPoint offers. This makes it easier to match the timing of the animations with the narration. Perform the following steps: By right-clicking on any of the animations, you can access a context-sensitive menu, which allows you to select the animations to run on a mouse click, concurrent with the previous animation or after the previous animation. This can be done using options such as Start On Click, Start With Previous, and Start After Previous, as shown in the following screenshot: For some animations you can change other settings, such as the direction that the object enters the slide from. This is done by clicking on Effect Options... in the context-sensitive menu. When the dialog box opens, you can set Direction or any other setting particular to that animation in the upper part of the dialog box. You can add sound effects to the animation using the Sound drop-down menu in the lower part of the dialog box. Clicking on Timing in the context-sensitive menu opens a dialog box that allows you to change the speed with which the animations run, as shown in the following screenshot: There are five settings available in the Speed drop-down menu, from very slow to very fast. As you can see from the preceding screenshot, the program tells you how long the animation will run for at each speed. Using the Repeat drop-down menu, you can set the animation to repeat itself a set number of times until the slide ends or until the next mouse click. The context-sensitive menu also allows you to open an advanced timeline by clicking on Show Advanced Timeline, which will allow you to further fine-tune your animation and its timing, including adding a delay between it and the previous animation. The timeline view allows you to see how the overlap and running of your animations will come out in terms of seconds. You never want to have the first animation in the slide run automatically; you only want to have it run on the mouse click. Setting it to Start With Previous or Start After Previous is not compatible with Flash animation. Multiple animations Multiple animations can be used for a single object. You can bring the item in with an entrance animation, have a second animation performed on it for emphasis, and then have it exit with an exit animation. These can either be one after the other, or with other things happening in between them. These additional animations are added in the same way that the first animation was added in the main part of this recipe. Additional animations will show up in the list in the order in which they were added. They will also play in this order. Checking your animations To check your animation, you can click on the Play button at the top of the Animation pane. If you would like to run it as a slide slow, you will need to click on the Slide Show icon, which is located in the information bar at the bottom of the PowerPoint window, as shown in the following screenshot: A word about style Your viewers are not going to be impressed by presentations filled with too many animations that are all too common. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to use animations with discretion. They are a great way to add additional objects to a slide, if they can do so without being a distraction. Adding audio narration to your slides Articulate Presenter allows the use of two different types of audio in your presentation. The first is the audio track, which provides background music for your presentation. The second is narration. This program automatically adjusts the volume of your background music whenever there is narration, avoiding competition between the two. There are two ways of creating your narration in Articulate Presenter, either by recording the narration right into the presentation, or by having your narration recorded professionally and importing it into your presentation. In this section, we will look at how both of these methods are accomplished. Getting ready To record narration directly into your presentation, you will need a microphone connected to your computer. It is worthwhile buying a good quality microphone, especially if you are going to be doing a large number of presentations. The sound quality that you can get off a good quality microphone is better than a cheap one. You don't want to use the microphone that's in your webcam. Not only is this not a high-quality microphone, but the distance between you and the microphone will make you sound like you're speaking from inside a tunnel. Ideally, a microphone should be between three to six inches from your mouth, pointed directly at your mouth. Avoid moving your head from side to side as you speak, as this will make your volume level go up and down. The following are some of the key points to look at before you add an audio narration to your slide: A windscreen on your microphone is a good investment as it will help prevent the noise from your breathing on it. You may also want to consider a desktop mic stand so that you don't have to hold it in your hand. Before recording your narration, it's a good idea to have it written out. Many people think that they can do it off the cuff, but when they get in front of the mic, they forget everything that they were going to say. A great place to write out your script is in the notes area at the bottom of the PowerPoint screen. How to do it... We are going to record the narration directly into the presentation using Articulate Presenter's built-in recording function. Perform the following steps to do so: Before recording your narration, you need to ensure that your presentation is ready to receive your recording. To do this, open the Presentation Options dialog box from the Articulate ribbon. On the Other tab, make sure that the Show notes pane on narration window and Record narration for one slide at a time checkboxes under the Recording section are both checked, as shown in the following screenshot: Open the recording screen by clicking on the Record Narration button in the Narration section of the Articulate ribbon. If you have not yet saved your presentation, you will be asked to do so before the Record Narration screen opens. Your PowerPoint screen will seem to disappear when you open the recording screen. Don't worry, you haven't lost it; when you finish recording your narration, it will appear again. If you are using multiple monitors for your computer, the Narration recording screen will always appear on the far right monitor. So if you have something there that you will need to access, you may want to move it before entering the record mode. To begin recording, click on the START RECORDING button on the Articulate ribbon. While you are recording, the START RECORDING button changes to STOP RECORDING. When you have finished recording the narration for the slide, click on the STOP RECORDING button. If you click on the START RECORDING button again after you've stopped recording, it will start the recording again, overwriting what you just recorded. As you are recording, the length of the recording you are making will show in the yellow message bar and will be broken down into hours, minutes, seconds, and tenths of a second. You can check your recording using the Play and Stop buttons to the right-hand side of the START RECORDING button. These buttons are identified with the standard graphical symbols for play and record. Now that you have recorded the narration for the first slide, you can move to the next slide using the right and left arrow buttons to the right-hand side of the Record and Play buttons. You can also select which slide to edit using the drop-down menu located below these buttons. To the right-hand side of the Play and Record buttons, there is an area for selecting the slide that you want to record the narration for. To verify which slides you have already recorded, click on the small arrow pointing downwards below the slide number in the ribbon. This will open a dropbox with a list of all the slides and thumbnails. All the slides that have a narration recorded will show a small icon of a microphone. Above this, they will tell you the duration of the narration that you have recorded, as shown in the following screenshot: To exit the narration recorder and return to PowerPoint, click on the Save & Close button on the ribbon. How it works... Your narrations will be saved in a new file, which has the same name as you gave your presentation, with the .ppta filename extension. The file will be automatically created at this time, if the program has not already created it. If you have to move your presentation for any reason, be sure to move this file along with the .ppta file, which is the presentation. Otherwise you will lose your narrations. There's more... Not only can you record narrations, but you can also import them into the presentation. You may choose to do this using professional "voice" for a specific voice style or for a more professional presentation. Importing narrations into your presentation If you decide to use professionally recorded narrations using professional talent, you will probably not be able to record them with Articulate's recorder. This isn't a problem, as you can very easily import those recordings into your presentation. There are some technical requirements for your recordings. They must be recorded in either the .wav or .mp3 format. Between the two, you are better off using the .wav format files as they are not compressed like the .mp3 files. This means that your finished presentation will be a bigger file, but it will provide a better sound quality for editing. They must be recorded at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, 16-bit resolution, and either stereo or mono. Many recording studios and artists prefer to use a resolution of 32 bits, however if you attempt to import 32- bit files into an Articulate presentation, all you will hear is a screech. Perform the following steps for importing narrations: To import these files, click on the Import Audio button in the Narration section of the Articulate ribbon. This will open the Import Audio dialog box. This dialog box contains a simple chart showing the slide numbers, the slide names, and the audio track for the narration. If you have recorded a narration for a slide, it will state the existing narration; if you have no narration, this column will be empty. Select the slide that you wish to import an audio file to by clicking on it. Then click on the Browse... button at the bottom of the screen. This will open a standard, Windows open file dialog box, where you can search for and select your audio file for that particular narration. You can select multiple narration files to be imported at once. Simply select the first file you need in the Windows open file dialog box, then hold down the Shift key and select the last. If the files are not sequentially located in the folder, you can hold down the Ctrl key, select each file individually, and then import them all together. When you do this, a new dialog box will open, allowing you to put the audio files in their correct order. The list of files will be shown in the central part of the dialog box. To change the order, select the file you wish to move, and use the Up, Down, Top, Bottom, and Reverse buttons on the right-hand side of the dialog box to move them as you need to. If you do not get the order of your narration files correct in the dialog box, you will need to individually change the audio files associated with the slides, as there is no way of moving them around in the Import Audio dialog box. Summary This article covered the basics of creating a simple course using Presenter by itself. It taught us the basics of inserting media elements and assets. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Python Multimedia: Video Format Conversion, Manipulations and Effects [Article] Using Web Pages in UPK 3.5 [Article] Adding Flash to your WordPress Theme [Article]

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) 1 — Eloquent relationships ActiveRecord is a design pattern that describes an object-oriented way of interacting with your database. For example, your database's users table contains rows and each of these rows represents a single user of your site. Your User model is a class that extends the Eloquent Model class. When you query a record from your database, an instantiation of your User model class is created and populated with the information from the database. A distinct advantage of ActiveRecord is that your data and the business logic that is related to the data are housed within the same object. For example, it's typical to store the user's password in your model as a hash, to prevent it from being stored as plaintext. It's also typical to store the method, which creates this password hash within your User class. Another powerful aspect of the ActiveRecord pattern is the ability to define relationships between models. Imagine that you're building a blog site and your users are authors who must be able to post their writings. Using an ActiveRecord implementation, you are able to define the parameters of the relationship. The task of maintaining this relationship is then simplified dramatically. Simple code is the easy code to change. Difficult to understand code is the easy code to break. As a PHP developer, you're probably already familiar with the concept of database normalization. If you're not, normalization is the process of designing databases so that there is little redundancy in the stored data. For example, you wouldn't want to have both a users table which contains the user's name and a table of blog posts which also contains the author's name. Instead, your blog post record would refer to the user using their user ID. In this way we avoid synchronization problems and a lot of extra work! There are a number of ways in which relationships can be established in normalized database schemas. One-to-one relationship When a relationship connects two records in a way that doesn't allow for more records to be related, it is a one-to-one relationship. For example, a user record might have a one-to-one relationship with a passport record. In this example, a user record is not permitted to be linked to more than one passport record. Similarly, it is not permitted for a passport record to relate to more than one user record. How would the database look? Your users table contains information about each user in your database. Your passports table contains passport numbers and a link to the user which owns the passport. In this example, each user has no more than one passport and each passport must have an owner. The passports table contains its own id column which it uses as a primary key. It also contains the column user_id, which contains the ID of the user to whom the passport belongs. Last but not least, the passports table contains a column for the passport number. First, let's model this relationship in the User class: class User extends Eloquent { public function passport() { return $this->has_one('Passport'); } } We created a method named passport() that returns a relationship. It might seem strange to return relationships at first. But, you'll soon come to love it for the flexibility it offers. You'll notice that we're using the has_one() method and passing the name of the model as a parameter. In this case, a user has one passport. So, the parameter is the name of the passport model class. This is enough information for Eloquent to understand how to acquire the correct passport record for each user. Now, let's look at the Passport class: class Passport extends Eloquent { public function users() { return $this->belongs_to('User'); } } We're defining the passport's relationship differently. In the User class, we used the has_one() method. In the Passport class we used belongs_to(). It's vital to identify the difference early so that understanding the rest of the relationships is more simple. When a database table contains a foreign key, it is said that it belongs to a record in another table. In this example, our passports table refers to records in the users table through the foreign key user_id. Consequently, we would say that a passport belongs to a user. Since this is a one-to-one relationship the user has one (has_one()) passport. Let's say that we want to view the passport number of the user with the id of 1. $user = User::find(1); If(is_null($user)) { echo "No user found."; return; } If($user->passport) { echo "The user's passport number is " . $user->passport->number; } else { echo "This user has no passport."; } In this example, we're dutifully checking to make sure that our user object was returned as expected. This is a necessary step that should not be overlooked. Then, we check whether or not the user has a passport record associated with it. If a passport record for this user exists, the related object will be returned. If it doesn't exist, $user->passport will return null. In the preceding example, we test for the existence of a record and return the appropriate response. One-to-many relationships One-to-many relationships are similar to one-to-one relationships. In this relationship type, one model has many of other relationships, which in turn belongs to the former. One example of a one-to-many relationship is a professional sports team's relationship to its players. One team has many players. In this example, each player can only belong to one team. The database tables have the same structure. Now, let's look at the code which describes this relationship. class Team extends Eloquent { public function players() { return $this->has_many('Player'); } } class Player extends Eloquent { public function team() { return $this->belongs_to('Team'); } } This example is almost identical to the one-to-one example. The only difference is that the team's players() relationship uses has_many() rather than has_one(). The has_one() relationship returns a model object. The has_many() relationship returns an array of model objects. Let's display all of the players on a specific team: $team = Team::find(2); if(is_null($team)) { echo "The team could not be found."; } if(!$team->players) { echo "The team has no players."; } foreach($team->players as $player) { echo "$player->name is on team $team->name. "; } Again, we test to make sure that our team could be found. Then, we test to make sure that the team has players. Once we know that for sure, we can loop through those players and echo their names. If we tried to loop through the players without first testing and if the team had players, we'd get an error. Many-to-many relationships The last relationship type that we're going to cover is the many-to-many relationship. This relationship is different in that each record from each table could potentially be tied simultaneously to each record in another. We aren't storing foreign keys in either of these tables. Instead, we have a third table that exists solely to store our foreign keys. Let's take a look at the schema. Here we have a students table and a courses table. A student can be enrolled in many courses and a course can contain many students. The connection between students and courses is stored in a pivot table. A pivot table is a table that exists to connect two tables specifically for many-to-many relationships. Standard convention for naming a pivot table is to combine the names of both of the related tables, singularized, alphabetically ordered, and connected with an underscore. This gives us the table name course_student. This convention is not only used by Laravel and it's a good idea to follow the naming conventions covered in this document as strictly as possible as they're widely used in the web-development industry. It's important to notice that we're not creating a model for the pivot table. Laravel allows us to manage these tables without needing to interact with a model. This is especially nice because it doesn't make sense to model a pivot table with business logic. Only the students and courses are a part of our business. The connection between them is important, but only to the students and to the course. It's not important for its own sake. Let's define these models, shall we? class Student extends Eloquent { public function courses() { return $this->has_many_and_belongs_to('Course'); } } class Course extends Eloquent { public function students() { return $this->has_many_and_belongs_to('Student'); } } We have two models, each with the same type of relationship to each other. has_many_and_ belongs_to is a long name. But, it's a fairly simple concept. A course has many students. But, it also belongs to (belongs_to) student records and vice-versa. In this way, they are considered equal. Let's look at how we'll interact with these models in practice: $student = Student::find(1); if(is_null($student)) { echo "The student can't be found."; exit; } if(!$student->courses) { echo "The student $student->name is not enrolled in any courses."; exit; } foreach($student->courses as $course) { echo "The student $student->name is enrolled in the course $course->name."; } Here you can see that we can loop through the courses much the same way we could with the one-to-many relationship. Any time a relationship includes the word many, you know that you'll be receiving an array of models. Conversely, let's pull a course and see which students are a part of it. $course = Course::find(1); if(is_null($course)) { echo "The course can't be found."; exit; } if(!$course->students) { echo "The course $course->name seems to have no students enrolled."; exit; } foreach($course->students as $student) { echo "The student $student->name is enrolled in the course $course->name."; } The relationship functions exactly the same way from the course side. Now that we have established this relationship, we can do some fun things with it. Let's look at how we'd enroll a new student into an existing course: $course = Course::find(13); if(is_null($course)) { echo "The course can't be found."; exit; } $new_student_information = array( 'name' => 'Danielle' ); $course->students()->insert($new_student_information); Here we're adding a new student to our course by using the method insert(). This method is specific to this relationship type and creates a new student record. It also adds a record to the course_student table to link the course and the new student. Very handy! But, hold on. What's this new syntax? $course->students()->insert($new_student_information); Notice how we're not using $course->students->insert(). Our reference to students is a method reference rather than a property reference. That's because Eloquent handles methods that return relationship objects differently from other model methods. When you access a property of a model that doesn't exist, Eloquent will look to see if you have a function that matches that property's name. For example, if we try to access the property $course->students, Eloquent won't be able to find a member variable named $students. So it'll look for a function named students(). We do have one of those. Eloquent will then receive the relationship object from that method, process it, and return the resulting student records. If we access a relationship method as a method and not as a property, we directly receive the relationship object back. The relationship's class extends the Query class. This means that you can operate on a relationship object in the same way that you can operate on a query object, except that it now has new methods that are specific to the relationship type. The specific implementation details aren't important at this point. It's just important to know that we're calling the insert() method on the relationship object returned from $course->students(). Imagine that you have a user model and it has many relationships and belongs to a role model. Roles represent different permission groupings. Example roles might include customer, admin, super admin, and ultra admin. It's easy to imagine a user form for managing its roles. It would contain a number of checkboxes, one for each potential role. The name of the checkboxes is role_ids[] and each value represents the ID of a role in the roles table./p> When that form is posted we'll retrieve those values with the Input::get() method. $role_ids = Input::get('role_ids'); $role_ids is now an array that contains the values 1, 2, 3, and 4. $user->roles()->sync($role_ids); The sync() method is specific to this relationship type and is also perfectly suited for our needs. We're telling Eloquent to connect our current $user to the roles whose IDs exist within the $role_ids array. Let's look at what's going on here in further detail. $user->roles() is returning a has_ many_and_belongs_to relationship object. We're calling the sync() method on that object. Eloquent now looks at the $role_ids array and acknowledges it as the authoritative list of roles for this user. It then removes any records that shouldn't exist in the role_user pivot table and adds records for any role that should exist in the pivot table. Summary In this article we discussed three types of Eloquent relationships—one-to-one relationship, one-to-many relationship, and many-to-many ralationship. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Modeling Relationships with GORM [Article] Working with Simple Associations using CakePHP [Article] NHibernate 2: Mapping relationships and Fluent Mapping [Article]

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Introduction Getting your course ready for students at the beginning of each semester can be a daunting task. You'll need to verify links to external content, make sure that previous materials have been copied successfully to your new course, and modify the existing assignment dates, among other tasks. You get the point—there are quite a few things you need to take care of before students ever see your course. This article offers recipes for streamlining this process to make setting up your course as stress-free as possible. The first two recipes deal with getting materials into your course, whether you're copying an entire course from a previous semester or importing a compatible course cartridge provided by a textbook publisher. You may be surprised to know that course cartridges created for other Learning Management Systems ( LMSs) , such as Blackboard and Moodle, can often be imported without any trouble! Other recipes in the article focus on making quick work of date changes and external link validation. We'll wrap up the article by previewing everything from the student's view. Please note that the recipes in this article, as well as the rest of the book, are written for Version 10.0 of the Desire2Learn Learning Environment. While many of the recipes are also applicable to earlier versions of the system, you may need to modify the steps to follow along. Copying course materials from a previous semester Copying materials, activities, and settings from one course to another can save you a considerable amount of time when preparing for the start of a new semester. The learning environment's Import /Export /Copy Components tool allows you to easily clone an entire course or select just the parts of the original course that you want to use in a new course. In this recipe, we will discuss copying materials from an existing course within the system. We will use the same tool to import a course cartridge from a publisher in the next recipe. Getting ready The Desire2Learn (D2L) Learning Environment is highly customizable, and each organization that uses it can customize many aspects of the user experience. This recipe assumes that your school has allowed the use of the Import/Export/Copy Components tool for your specific role within the system. In order to complete this recipe, you'll also need access to two courses—an empty course that we will be copying materials to and another one that contains the materials we will be copying. To copy materials from one course to another, your role in both courses needs to allow the use of the Copy Components function. For example, you wouldn't be able to copy quizzes from a class in which you are enrolled as a student into one that you are teaching. How to do it... We will be working with two courses in this recipe – a new, empty course and an existing course that contains the materials to be copied. Remember to start by accessing the destination course or the course that you want to copy materials to. Start by accessing the destination course from My Homepage. Click on the Edit Course link in the course navigation bar. Click the Import/Export/Copy Components link under the Site Resources heading. Select the option Copy Components from Another Org Unit and then click on Start. Locate the course from which we will be copying materials by clicking on the Search for offering link. If needed, use the search tool at the top of the list of courses to help locate the course. You can also click on any of the column headers to sort the list of courses based on that field (clicking twice reverses the order). Check the radio button to the left of the course, and click on the Add Selected button. Within a few seconds, the page updates to display all of the available components from the course we just selected. To clone an entire course, check the Select All Components box, and click on the Continue button. Since we chose to clone an entire course, we can continue on our way by clicking on the Finish button. Depending on the amount of materials being copied and the server load, the copy process may take a few seconds to several minutes. When the Done button becomes active, it means that the process has completed. As each tool finishes copying, you'll see its progress indicator change into a green checkmark. Anything that didn't copy successfully will be noted in the summary. How it works… We start off by accessing the destination course. The Search for Offering screen displays a list of all of the courses you currently have access to copy from. If you've been teaching for a while, this list may be quite large. The search and filtering tools at the top of the course offering list may be helpful if you are having difficulty finding the correct course from the list. In this recipe, we copied all the available components from the source offering by choosing the Select All Components option. However, you can copy individual tools or even individual items within those tools by choosing the Select individual items to copy option. If you decide to copy specific components, then you need to select those items on the Choose Components to Copy screen, as shown in the following screenshot: There's more... If you're copying large course files or complex question libraries, there's a chance that your browser will time out before the copy process is complete. If this happens, there are a few things you can do to complete the task: Break up the copy process into several smaller jobs. If, for example, you're getting error messages while copying Course Files, try only copying half of the files, then return to the tool and try the second half later. The current server load can greatly impact the time it takes to copy components. You may want to try copying the components during an off-peak time. If you experience a browser time-out while copying Course Files, you might want to visit File Manager and look for duplicate or large files in the source course. Deleting unnecessary files can speed up the process significantly. Your Desire2Learn administrator has access to other ways of cloning a course or copying files. If you continue to experience difficulty with the tool, talking with your friendly admin would be a great idea! Importing a publisher's course cartridge Publishers frequently offer complimentary course cartridges to instructors who adopt their textbooks. The content of these cartridges varies greatly, but can include content and files, assessments, web links, and more. In this recipe, we will walk through the process of importing a course cartridge into an existing Desire2Learn Learning Environment course. Getting ready In order to complete this recipe, you'll need either a publisher's cartridge or an export from another Desire2Learn Learning Environment course. These files come in the form of .zip archives. Publishers typically offer different versions of cartridges for several of the major learning management systems. While you may not always find a version of a particular cartridge formatted for the Desire2Learn Learning Environment, you may be surprised to know that versions made for other systems, such as Blackboard 6 and WebCT, will typically work just fine. Check with your system administrator, if you have any difficulties importing a cartridge. You will also need access to the Import/Export/Copy Components tool. You will need to talk with your Desire2Learn system administrator if your role in the current course does not include access to the tool. How to do it... Start off by accessing the destination course from the My Home page. Click on the Edit Course link in the course's navigation bar. Access the Import/Export/Copy Components tool by clicking on the link under the Site Resources heading. Select the option to Import Components. Then, select the from a File option and choose the cartridge to import by clicking on the Choose File button. Click on the Start button after locating and selecting the file: Click on the Continue button on the Preprocessing screen when it becomes available. Import the entire cartridge's contents by choosing the Select All Components checkbox and then clicking on the Continue button. Click on the Continue button on the Confirm Import Selections screen. The process is complete when all of the progress indicators have changed to green checkmarks. Click on Finish, then Done when the components are finished copying. How it works... We start off by accessing the Import/Export/Copy Components tool in the destination course. After selecting the .zip folder to import, the system uploads and pre-processes the archive's manifest file. Depending on the complexity of the cartridge and the size of the archive, this can happen very quickly or it may take quite some time. After the pre-process action is complete, we choose to import the entire cartridge into the course, just as we did in the previous recipe. While this is often the easiest approach, it is possible to pick and choose individual components (such as Quizzes or Grades) or even individual items (such as specific quizzes or grade items), as we will discuss in the following section. Once you verify the components to be imported, it's just a matter of waiting for the progress indicators to become green checkmarks. Any item not able to be imported will be displayed on screen at the end of the process. You probably won't run into too many problems unless you are importing extremely large or complex cartridges, but it is always a good idea to verify that everything was successful before clicking on the Done button. There's more... In the last two scenarios, we have seen examples of copying and importing entire courses. While this is common at the beginning of the semester, there may be times when you will need only certain parts of another course. Suppose, for example, you only want the question library portion of a publisher's course cartridge. Luckily, this is easily accomplished by selecting individual components on the Choose Components to Copy screen instead of the All Components option. In the following screenshot, I have chosen to copy all the available Content items, but only selected Discussions and Dropbox folders: After selecting the components to copy and clicking on the Continue button, I'm prompted to select the individual quizzes I want to copy into my course. Clicking on the Expand All link shows a list of all quizzes, and selecting individual items to be imported is as easy as checking the option next to the item titles. Since I've chosen to also import selected Dropbox folders, I would complete a similar process for selecting those items on the next screen: I should point out one "gotcha" that frequently causes trouble for new users of the Desire2Learn Learning Environment. Items under the Content heading are frequently linked to uploaded documents or system-generated HTML files, which are stored in the File Manager. Unfortunately, selecting the items under Content doesn't copy these associated files, so you need to manually select these files under Course Files. Since this can be a somewhat tricky task depending on how you've organized your files, you may find it easier to copy everything and delete what you do not need. See also The Copying course materials from a previous semester recipe

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) SOA and web services SOA is a distinct approach for separating concerns and building business solutions utilizing loosely coupled and reusable components. SOA is no longer a nice-to-have feature for most of the enterprises and it is widely used in organizations to achieve a lot of strategic advantages. By adopting SOA, organizations can enable their business applications to quickly and efficiently respond to business, process, and integration changes which usually occur in any enterprise environment. Service-oriented solutions If a software system is built by following the principles associated with SOA, it can be considered as a service-oriented solution. Organizations generally tend to build service-oriented solutions in order to leverage flexibility in their businesses, merge or acquire new businesses, and achieve competitive advantages. To understand the use and purpose of SOA and service-oriented solutions, let's have a look at a simplified case study. Case study Smith and Co. is a large motor insurance policy provider located in North America. The company uses a software system to perform all their operations which are associated with insurance claim processing. The system consists of various modules including the following: Customer enrollment and registration Insurance policy processing Insurance claim processing Customer management Accounting Service providers management With the enormous success and client satisfaction of the insurance claims processed by the company during the recent past, Smith and Co. has acquired InsurePlus Inc., one of its competing insurance providers, a few months back. InsurePlus has also provided some of the insurance motor claim policies which are similar to those that Smith and Co. provides to their clients. Therefore, the company management has decided to integrate the insurance claim processing systems used by both companies and deliver one solution to their clients. Smith and Co. uses a lot of Microsoft(TM) technologies and all of their software applications, including the overall insurance policy management system, are built on .NET framework. On the other hand, InsurePlus uses J2EE heavily, and their insurance processing applications are all based on Java technologies. To worsen the problem of integration, InsurePlus consists of a legacy customer management application component as well, which runs on an AS-400 system. The IT departments of both companies faced numerous difficulties when they tried to integrate the software applications in Smith and Co. and InsurePlus Inc. They had to write a lot of adapter modules so that both applications would communicate with each other and do the protocol conversions as needed. In order to overcome these and future integration issues, the IT management of Smith and Co. decided to adopt SOA into their business application development methodology and convert the insurance processing system into a service-oriented solution. As the first step, a lot of wrapper services (web services which encapsulate the logic of different insurance processing modules) were built, exposing them as web services. Therefore the individual modules were able to communicate with each other with minimum integration concerns. By adopting SOA, their applications used a common language, XML, in message transmission and hence a heterogeneous systems such as the .NET based insurance policy handling system in Smith and Co. was able to communicate with the Java based applications running on InsurePlus Inc. By implementing a service-oriented solution, the system at Smith and Co. was able to merge with a lot of other legacy systems with minimum integration overhead. Building blocks of SOA When studying typical service-oriented solutions, we can identify three major building blocks as follows: Web services Mediation Composition Web services Web services are the individual units of business logic in SOA. Web services communicate with each other and other programs or applications by sending messages. Web services consist of a public interface definition which is a central piece of information that assigns the service an identity and enables its invocation. The service container is the SOA middleware component where the web service is hosted for the consuming applications to interact with it. It allows developers to build, deploy, and manage web services and it also represents the server-side processor role in web service frameworks. A list of commonly used web service frameworks can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_service_frameworks; here you can find some popular web service middleware such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Apache CXF, Apache Axis2, and so on. Apache Axis2 can be found at http://axis.apache.org/ The service container contains the business logic, which interacts with the service consumer via a service interface. This is shown in the following diagram: Mediation Usually, the message transmission between nodes in a service-oriented solution does not just occur via the typical point-to-point channels. Instead, once a message is received, it can be flowed through multiple intermediaries and subjected to various transformation and conversions as necessary. This behavior is commonly referred to as message mediation and is another important building block in service-oriented solutions. Similar to how the service container is used as the hosting platform for web services, a broker is the corresponding SOA middleware component for message mediation. Usually, enterprise service bus (ESB) acts as a broker in service-oriented solutions Composition In service-oriented solutions, we cannot expect individual web services running alone to provide the desired business functionality. Instead, multiple web services work together and participate in various service compositions. Usually, the web services are pulled together dynamically at the runtime based on the rules specified in business process definitions. The management or coordination of these business processes are governed by the process coordinator, which is the SOA middleware component associated with web service compositions. Simple Object Access Protocol Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) can be considered as the foremost messaging standard for use with web services. It is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/ as follows: SOAP is a lightweight protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is an XML based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined datatypes, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses. The SOAP specification has been universally accepted as the standard transport protocol for messages processed by web services. There are two different versions of SOAP specification and both of them are widely used in service-oriented solutions. These two versions are SOAP v1.1 and SOAP v1.2. Regardless of the SOAP specification version, the message format of a SOAP message still remains intact. A SOAP message is an XML document that consists of a mandatory SOAP envelope, an optional SOAP header, and a mandatory SOAP body. The structure of a SOAP message is shown in the following diagram: The SOAP Envelope is the wrapper element which holds all child nodes inside a SOAP message. The SOAP Header element is an optional block where the meta information is stored. Using the headers, SOAP messages are capable of containing different types of supplemental information related to the delivery and processing of messages. This indirectly provides the statelessness for web services as by maintaining SOAP headers, services do not necessarily need to store message-specific logic. Typically, SOAP headers can include the following: Message processing instructions Security policy metadata Addressing information Message correlation data Reliable messaging metadata The SOAP body is the element where the actual message contents are hosted. These contents of the body are usually referred to as the message payload. Let's have a look at a sample SOAP message and relate the preceding concepts through the following diagram: In this example SOAP message, we can clearly identify the three elements; envelope, body, and header. The header element includes a set of child elements such as <wsa:To>, <wsa:ReplyTo>, <wsa:Address>, <wsa:MessageID>, and <wsa:Action>. These header blocks are part of the WS-Addressing specification. Similarly, any header element associated with WS-* specifications can be included inside the SOAP header element. The <s:Body> element carries the actual message payload. In this example, it is the <p:echoString> element with a one child element. When working with SOAP messages, identification of the version of SOAP message is one of the important requirements. At first glance, you can determine the version of the specification used in the SOAP message through the namespace identifier of the <Envelope> element. If the message conforms to SOAP 1.1 specification, it would be http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/, otherwise http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope is the name space identifier of SOAP 1.2 messages. Alternatives to SOAP Though SOAP is considered as the standard protocol for web services communication, it is not the only possible transport protocol which is used. SOAP was designed to be extensible so that the other standards could be integrated into it. The WS-* extensions such as WS-Security, WS-Addressing, and WSReliableMessaging are associated with SOAP messaging due to this extensible nature. In addition to the platform and language agnosticism, SOAP messages can be transmitted over various transports such as HTTP, HTTPS, JMS, and SMTP among others. However, there are a few drawbacks associated with SOAP messaging. The performance degradations due to heavy XML processing and the complexities associated with the usage of various WS-* specifications are two of the most common disadvantages of the SOAP messaging model. Because of these concerns, we can identify some alternative approaches to SOAP.

  About assignments An assignment is essentially an activity where the instructor tells the student, "Go do this, and then submit proof that you've done it". Optional features enable the instructor to supply the student with a file, to upload a file, and to submit both feedback and comments. Blackboard will create a link in the assignment, for the student to upload material to the instructor. Every assignment must have instructions and a student submission. The instructions are entered by the instructor when (s)he creates the assignment. The student submission can be material that the student types directly into the assignment-feedback form, or something that the student uploads (such as a word document or picture). The instructor can give a student feedback on the student's submission. In return, the student can give the instructor feedback on the assignment. Instructors can also allow multiple submissions, so the student has multiple tries to get it right. No matter how many trials the student takes, or how many files the student uploads, the instructor will give only one grade to the student. Adding an assignment To add an assignment to a Content Page, follow these steps: Select the Content Page to which you want to add an assignment. Select Create Assessment | Assignment. The Create Assignment page is displayed. Both the Name and the Instructions fields that you enter will be displayed on the page with the assignment, as shown in the following screenshot: In the preceding example, the instructor tells the student to download a file. You might want to remind the students to create a folder on their computers to hold all the material that they download from the course. Under Attached Files, you can add any files that you want the student to download and use in the assignment (this is optional). These can be files that you want the student to modify and then upload (such as a form to fill out), or files that contain instructions for an activity (such as instructions for performing an experiment), or source files that the student will use to create something (such as some raw video footage).If the student will complete the assignment while (s)he is online, enter the instructions into the Instructions area as shown earlier. If the student will complete the assignment while (s)he is offline, consider supplying the student with printer-friendly instructions that (s)he can download.Blackboard will allow the student to upload files up to 100 MB in size. The Grading and Availability sections contain standard options. If you enter Due Date for the assignment, it will not appear on the Content Page (see the preceding screenshot). However, it will appear in several other places. When the student enters the assignment, the due date will appear on the assignment page: The due date will also appear in the student's To Do block. Usually, the To Do block is added to the course's home page, and also to the student's home page. In the following screenshot, you can see the assignment in the To Do block of the course's home page. Because it was recently added, you can also see the assignment in the What's New block: And finally, Due Date will appear on the student's My Grades page: The due date has no effect on the availability of the assignment, or the student's grade. It is for informational purposes only. If you want Blackboard to limit the time period for which students can submit an assignment, use the Availability setting to make the assignment available only during a specified time. Under Recipients, determine if this assignment will be graded individually for each student, or for a group. Click on Submit to save your work. The assignment is added to the course. You don't need to do anything to make the assignment appear within the Assignments page and the To Do block. And, you can create a link to the assignment on the pages of your course.

Installing and configuring BP Courseware As BP Courseware is a plugin that runs atop BuddyPress, we must have already installed, activated, and configured BuddyPress. To install BP Courseware, log in to the WordPress dashboard, hover over Plugins in the left sidebar, and choose Add New. Search for BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware and install the plugin. BuddyPress Courseware requires the Private Messaging BuddyPress component to be enabled. If you have disabled Private Messaging, you will be prompted to enable it before activating BuddyPress Courseware. To enable Private Messaging, log in to the WordPress dashboard and visit the BuddyPress Components screen. BuddyPress Courseware settings While BuddyPress Courseware will work immediately, there are a number of settings that can be adjusted to ensure that the plugin meets our needs. To access the BuddyPress Courseware settings, log in to the WordPress dashboard, hover over BuddyPress in the left sidebar, and select Courseware. Global settings BP Courseware integrates with BuddyPress groups for course management. By default, we must enable courseware individually for each group. Checking the Enable Courseware globally checkbox will turn courseware on for all new groups. This is useful if groups are used exclusively for course management. If you intend to use BuddyPress groups for other purposes, such as student project collaboration, the Enable Courseware globally option should remain unchecked. In this scenario each group will require enabling courseware manually. To do so, follow the instructions given in the Enabling BP Courseware section later in the article. Collaboration settings Within BP Courseware we are able to define users as either teachers or students. By enabling the Collaboration settings option, any site user with a teacher role has the ability to edit and add courses, assignments, and schedules. Make assignment responses private When students submit an assignment their response is public to all site users. By enabling the Make assignment responses private feature, student responses will be visible only to the teachers and the student who has completed the assignment. Gradebook default grade format The default BuddyPress Courseware Gradebook format is numeric. Within the Gradebook default grade format settings we are able to choose between numeric, letter, or percentage grading for assignments. Webservices API integration BP Courseware has the ability to integrate with WorldCat and ISBNdb web services to aid in locating books and articles. To integrate these services with BuddyPress Courseware, follow the links from the BudddyPress Courseware settings screen to sign up for a free API key. Customization Cascading stylesheets (CSS) are the files that control the look and formatting of a web page. BuddyPress Courseware allows administrators with advanced web skills to create a custom stylesheet for fine grain control over the look of Courseware. Renaming the groups page BP Courseware utilizes the BuddyPress group feature for course content. While the term Groups makes sense in the context of a standard BuddyPress installation, it can be confusing when using BuddyPress Courseware as a learning management system. To prevent this confusion, I find it helpful to rename the Groups page to Courses.   To rename Groups: Log in to the WordPress dashboard. Create a new WordPress page titled Courses by hovering over Pages in the left sidebar, and choosing Add New. Title the page Courses, leaving the page content blank, and click on the blue Publish button Adjust the BuddyPress page settings by hovering over BuddyPress in the left sidebar and selecting the Pages tab. In the menu next to User Groups, select the Courses option and click on the Save button. Delete the Groups page by clicking on Pages in the left sidebar. From the All Pages screen, hover over the Groups page and click on the red Trash link. Setting Courses as the site home page Using the BuddyPress Courseware plugin, we may wish to enable our Courses page as the site's front page. Doing so will allow students to quickly access course information and prevent confusion regarding how to find the courseware dashboard.   To enable the Courses page as our site's home page: Log in to the WordPress dashboard. If you have not already done so, create an empty page titled Blog Hover over Settings in the left sidebar and select the Reading tab. From the Reading Settings screen, select Front page displays | A static page option. Select Courses from the Front page menu choices and Blog as the Posts page Creating a course When setting up a course we must first create a BuddyPress group. To create course or group: From our public facing site, visit the Courses page (or Groups if not renamed). Click on the Create a Group button. From the Details screen, provide a Group Name such as the course name and section number and enter a Group Description such as the course catalog information. On the Privacy Options page, select This is a public group, allowing any site member to join. Complete the installation by optionally adding an avatar image and inviting members. Enabling BP Courseware Once the course group has been created, we may enable BP Courseware. This step may be skipped, if we selected Enable Courseware globally from the BuddyPress Courseware settings screen. To enable BP Courseware: Visit the page of the newly created group. Click on the Admin tab Click on the Courseware link from the row of links below the Admin tab. Below Courseware Status , select Enable to enable BP Courseware for the group. Optionally, if you wish to keep student assignment responses private, select Enable below Private Responses. Click on the Save button. Courseware dashboard Within BP Courseware, the courseware dashboard acts as the course home screen for both instructors and students. From the courseware dashboard, instructors are able to add and manage course content. Students use the dashboard to access course materials and submit assignments. To access the courseware dashboard, visit the Courses page (or Groups if unchanged) and click on the Courseware link located below the course/group description. The teacher dashboard appears as shown in the following screenshot: The student dashboard appears as shown in the following screenshot: Adding course content Adding course content to BP Courseware allows educators to easily organize and share course information with students. The BP Courseware plugin provides a structure for managing course lectures, assignments, quizzes, grades, resources, and schedules. Lectures Adding lecture information allows instructors to share course notes, resources, and slides with students in a structured format. While the term lecture implies the lecture format of university courses, I find it useful to think of lectures in terms of teaching units. The lecture pages can serve as a resource for a chunk of course content. To add a new lecture, click on the Add a new lecture button from the course dashboard. We may then edit the content of the lecture much in the same way as a WordPress post adding text, images, links, and embedded media. Lectures will appear in the Latest Lectures section of course dashboard, with the most recently posted lecture appearing at the top. This allows students to quickly access the most recently posted course lecture. Assignments BP Courseware provides a means for us to post assignments and collect student responses. The assignments can take multiple formats, allowing students to respond to questions, upload a file, or embed media. Posting assignments as a teacher As a teacher, we have the ability to post assignments. To post an assignment, visit the course dashboard and click on the Create an assignment button. This will take us to the New Assignment screen. From the New Assignment screen, we may enter the details of the assignment. From the New Assignment screen, assign a title to the assignment and enter the assignment description and necessary information. This acts much in the same way as WordPress posts, allowing us to enter text, images, media, and links. In the right column, we may choose the corresponding lecture topic and select the assignment due date. Once the assignment information is complete, click on the Publish assignment button to make it visible to students. Submitting assignments as a student Students can access assignments by clicking on the All Assignments button or viewing the Latest Assignments from the course dashboard. By clicking on the Assignment Title, students can see the detailed assignment information written by the instructor. Clicking on the Add a response button, will give the students an opportunity to submit the assignment. For standard assignments, students will be presented with a text input area similar to the WordPress post editor. Within this text area, students may type a written response, add links, embed media, and attach files. Viewing student responses Instructors have access to all student assignment responses, while students are only able to view their own. To view student assignment responses, visit the individual assignment page and click on the Responses button, located in the right sidebar. This will present us with a list of student responses. Clicking on the individual assignment link, will take us to a screen containing the student's assignment response. Gradebook BP Courseware provides us with a Gradebook feature for assessing student assignments. To access the Gradebook, visit an individual assignment page and click on the Gradebook button, located in the right sidebar. This will take us to the Gradebook screen for the assignment. For each student, we are given the option to enter a grade value, a private comment, and a public comment. Once the grades and comments have been entered, we may click on the Save grades button. After an assignment has been graded, students will receive a message containing the grade. Students will be alerted to this message by a notification, but may access their grades directly by visiting the individual assignment page. The grade is posted in the Assignment Meta sidebar of the assignment page. Bibliography The Bibliography is designed so that educators can easily maintain a list of course materials and resources. To add entries to the bibliography, visit the Courseware dashboard and click on the Manage bibliography button. From the Bibliography page we may add entries manually or import them by pasting information from BibTeX. The bibliography is ideal for courses utilizing a wide range of materials. BibTeX is a tool for formatting references. It is typically used in conjunction with the LaTeX typesetting system. More information can be found at http://www.bibtex.org. Schedule and calendar The BuddyPress Schedule page functions as a course calendar, automatically containing assignment due dates as well as manually managed schedule items. To view the course calendar, visit the Courseware Dashboard and click on the Schedules link. To schedule more items, click on the Add a schedule button from the Courseware dashboard. Complete the New Schedule form and click on the Publish Schedule button once it is complete. New schedule items will be added to the calendar as well as featured in a list format on the Schedules page.

  Getting to the gradebook All courses in Moodle have a grades area, also known as the gradebook . A number of activities within Moodle can be graded and these grades will automatically be captured and shown in the gradebook. To get to the gradebook, view the Settings block on the course and then click on Grades. The following screenshot shows an example of the teachers' view of a simple gradebook with a number of different graded activities within it. Let's take a quick tour of what we can see! The top row of the screenshot shows the column headings which are each of the assessed activities within the Moodle course. These automatically appear in the grades area. In this case, the assessed activities are: Initial assessment U1: Task 1 U1: Task 1 U1: Task 2 U2: Test Evidence On the left of the screenshot, you can see the students' names. Essentially, the name is the start of a row of information about the student. If we start with Emilie H, we can see that she received a score of 100.00 for her Initial assessment. Looking at Bayley W, we can see that his work for U1: Task 2 received a Distinction grade. Using the gradebook, we can see all the assessments and grades linked to each student from one screen. Users with teacher, non-editing teacher, or manager roles will be able to see the grades for all students on the course. Students will only be able to see their own grades and feedback. The advantage of storing the grades within Moodle is that information can be easily shared between all teachers on the online course. Traditionally, if a course manager wanted to know how students were progressing they would need to contact the course teacher(s) to gather this information. Now, they can log in to Moodle and view the live data (as long as they have teacher or manager rights to the course). There are also benefits to students as they will see all their progress in one place and can start to manage their own learning by reviewing their progress to date as shown in the following example student view: This is Bayley W's grade report. Bayley can see each assessment on the left-hand side with his grade next to it. By default, the student grades report also shows the range of grades possible for the assessment (for example, the highest and lowest scores possible), but this can be switched off by the teacher in the Grades course settings. It also shows the equivalent percentage as well as the written feedback given by the teacher. Activities that work with the gradebook There are a number of Moodle activities that can be graded and, therefore, work with the gradebook. The main ones are the following: Quiz Assignments: Four different core assignment types can be used to meet a range of needs within courses: Advanced uploading of files Online text Upload a single file Offline activity (The offline assignment is particularly useful for practical qualifications or presentations where the assessment is not submitted and is assessed offline by the teacher. The offline activity allows the detail of the assessment to be provided to students in Moodle, and the grade and feedback to be stored in the gradebook, even though no work has been electronically submitted.) Encouraging the use of the gradebook The offline activity is often a good way to start using the gradebook to record progress, as the assessment can take place in the normal way, but the grades can be recorded centrally to benefit teachers and students. Once confident with using the gradebook, teachers can then review assessment processes to use other assignment types   Forum Lesson SCORM package Workshop Glossary It is also possible to manually set up a "graded item" within the gradebook that is not linked with an activity, but allows a grade to be recorded. Key features of the gradebook The gradebook primarily shows the grade or score for each graded activity within the online course. This grade could be shown in a number of ways: Numeric grade: A numerical grade between 1 and 100. This is already set up and ready to use within all Moodle courses. Scale: A customized grading profile that can be letters, words, statements, or numbers (such as Pass , Merit, and Distinction). Letter grade: A grading profile that can be linked to percentages (such as 100 percent = A) Organizing grades With lots of activities that use grades within a course, the gradebook can be a lot of data on one page. Categories can be created for group activities and the gradebook view can be customized according to the user to see all or some categories on the screen. Think about a course that has 15 units and each unit has three assessments within it. The gradebook will have 45 columns of grades – which is a lot of data! We can organize this information into categories to make it easier to use.

(For more resources on PHP and MongoDB, see here.) A geolocation primer The term geolocation refers to the act of locating the geographic position of a person, a place, or any place of interest. The geographic position of the object is determined mainly by the latitude and longitude of the object, sometimes its height from sea level is also taken into account. In this section, we are going to learn about different techniques that location- based applications use to determine a user's location. You may skip this section if you are already familiar with them, or if you just cannot wait to get started coding! Methods to determine location There are several ways to locate the geographic position of a computing device. Let's briefly learn about the most effective ones among them: Global Positioning System (GPS ): Nowadays, tech savvy people carry GPS-enabled smartphones in their pockets. Devices like these act as GPS receivers; they constantly exchange information with GPS satellites orbiting the Earth and calculate their geographic position. This process is known as trilateration . This is perhaps the most accurate way to determine location, as of today. Cellphone tracking: Each cellphone has a Cell ID assigned to it that uniquely identifies it in a particular cellular network. In a process known as cellular triangulation , three base stations (cellphone towers) are used to correctly identify the latitude and longitude of the cellphone identified by the Cell ID. This method is more accurate in urban areas, where there are more cellphone towers close to each other, than in rural areas. IP address: Internet service providers are given blocks of IP addresses based on a country/city/region. When a user visits a website, the website could take a look at his IP address and consult an database that stores location data against IP addresses (it might be either an internal database or provided by a third-party service) to get the location of the user. Accuracy of this approach depends on the accuracy of the database itself. Also, if the user is behind a proxy server, the application will see the IP address of the proxy server, which could be located in a different region than the user. Wi-Fi MAC address tracking: A Wi-Fi access point has a MAC (Media Access Control) address assigned to it, which is globally unique. Some location-based services use this to identify the location of the Wi-Fi router, and therefore, the location of users on that Wi-Fi LAN. In principle, it works in the same way IP address-based geolocation does. Google has an API that gives location information (latitude, longitude, and so on) when provided with a MAC address. If you are curious to learn more about how geolocation works, How Stuff Works has a comprehensive article on it available at http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/ everyday-tech/location-tracking.htm. Detecting the location of a web page visitor When building a location-aware web application, the first part of the problem to be solved is to get the location of the user visiting the web page. We have covered geolocation techniques in the previous section, now it is time to see them in action. The W3C Geolocation API We are going to use the W3C Geolocation API for locating the visitors to our web page. The W3C Geolocation API provides a high-level interface for web developers to implement geolocation features in an application. The API takes care of detecting the location using one or more methods (GPS, Cell ID, IP address). The developers do not have to worry about what is going on under the hood; they only need to focus on the geographic information returned by the API! You can read the whole specification online at http://www.w3.org/TR/ geolocation-API/. Browsers that support geolocation The following table lists the browsers that support the W3C Geolocation API: Browser Version Google Chrome 5.0+ Mozilla Firefox 3.5+ Internet Explorer 9.0+ Safari 5.0+ Opera 10.6+ iPhone 3.1+ Android 2.0+ Blackberry 6.0+ Make sure you use one of these browsers when you try the practical examples in this article. Time for action – detecting location with W3C API In this section, we are going to build a web page that detects the location of a visitor using the Geolocation API. The API will detect the latitude and longitude of the user who loads the page in his browser. We are going use that information on a map, rendered dynamically using the Google Maps API: Fire up your text editor and create a new HTML file named location.html. Put the following code in it: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xml_lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> <link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css"/> <style type="text/css" media="screen"> div#map { width:450px; height: 400px; } </style> <title>Locating your position</title> </head> <body> <div id="contentarea"> <div id="innercontentarea"> <h2>Locating your position</h2> <div id="map"></div> </div> </div> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false"> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="geolocation.js"> </script> </body> </html> Create another file named geolocation.js and put the following JavaScript code in it: var mapContainer = document.getElementById('map');var map;function init() { //Google map settings (zoom level, map type etc.) var mapOptions = {zoom: 16, disableDefaultUI: true, mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP}; //map will be drawn inside the mapContainer map = new google.maps.Map(mapContainer, mapOptions); detectLocation();}function detectLocation(){ var options = { enableHighAccuracy: true, maximumAge: 1000, timeout: 30000}; //check if the browser supports geolocation if (window.navigator.geolocation) { //get current position window.navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition( drawLocationOnMap, handleGeoloacteError, options); } else { alert("Sorry, your browser doesn't seem to support geolocation :-("); }}//callback function of getCurrentPosition(), pinpoints location//on Google mapfunction drawLocationOnMap(position) { //get latitude/longitude from Position object var lat = position.coords.latitude; var lon = position.coords.longitude; var msg = "You are here: Latitude "+lat+", Longitude "+lon; //mark current location on Google map var pos = new google.maps.LatLng(lat, lon); var infoBox = new google.maps.InfoWindow({map: map, position:pos, content: msg}); map.setCenter(pos); return;}function handleGeoloacteError() { alert("Sorry, couldn't get your geolocation :-(");}window.onload = init; Load the location.html page in your browser. When the browser asks for permission to allow the page to access your location, click Yes/OK/Allow:   (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge.)   Once you allow the page to access your location, it renders a map that shows your current location on it, along with the geographic coordinates: What just happened? We built a web page and added JavaScript code that detects the latitude and longitude of the user who loads the page in his browser. The API needs the user's permission to get his geographic information. So when the page loads, it prompts the user to specify whether or not he will allow the page to get his location. If the user agrees, the JavaScript code executes and gets his geographic coordinates using the W3C Geolocation API. Then it renders a small map using the Google Maps API, and highlights the user's location on the map. The Geolocation object The Geolocation object implements the W3C Geolocation API. The JavaScript engine uses this object to obtain geographic information of the computer or phone on which the browser is running. Geolocation is a property of the Browser object (window.navigator), accessed as window.navigator.geolocation. In our example, we detect if the browser has geolocation capabilities by accessing this object, and notify the user if the browser fails the test: //check if the browser supports geolocationif (window.navigator.geolocation) { window.navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition( drawLocationOnMap, handleGeoloacteError, options);} else { alert("Sorry, your browser doesn't seem to support geolocation.");} The getCurrentPosition() method The location information is obtained invoking the getCurrentPosition() method on the Geolocation object.   getCurrentPostition(callbackOnSuccess, [callbackOnFailure, options])   The argument callbackOnSuccess is a reference to a callback function. It is executed when the getCurrentPosition() method successfully determines the geolocation. This is a mandatory argument. callbackOnFailure is an optional argument, a callback function for handling failure to get the geolocation. options represents the PositionOptions object, which specifies optional configuration parameters to the method. The PositionOptions object has the following properties: enableHighAccuracy : Tells the API to try its best to get the exact current position. It is set to false by default. When set to true, the API response tends to be slower. maximumAge : If API responses are cached, this setting specifies that the API will not use the cached responses older than maximumAge milliseconds. timeout : The timeout value in milliseconds to receive the API response. In our example, we used the drawLocationOnMap() method as a callbackOnSuccess function , which draws a map and pinpoints the location on it (we will walkthrough it shortly). The handleGeoloacteError() method notifies the user of any error while getting the position: window.navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition( drawLocationOnMap, handleGeoloacteError, options); Drawing the map using the Google Maps APTI The Google Maps APTIis a popular JavaScript API for drawing maps on a web page. This API has methods to highlight objects on the rendered map. We can access the API methods by adding the following script tag in the web page (as we did in the location.html file): <script type="text/javascript"src="http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false"></script> If you are on a GPS-enabled device, set the sensor parameter to true, as follows: When the script is loaded, we can initiate the map drawing by instantinating the google. maps.Map object . The Map object takes a DOM object as its first parameter; the map will be rendered inside this DOM. It also takes an optional JSON object that specifies configurations for the map (zoom level, map type, and so on): var mapContainer = document.getElementById('map');var mapOptions = {zoom: 16, disableDefaultUI: true, mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP};map = new google.maps.Map(mapContainer, mapOptions); Now, let's focus on the drawLocationOnMap() function in the geolocation.js file, which is the callback function of the getCurrentPosition() method . As we know, this method gets called when the W3C API successfully locates the position; it receives a Position object as its argument. This object holds all the geolocation data returned by the API. The Position object holds a reference to the Coordinates object (accessed by the property coords). The Coordinates object contains geographical coordinates such as latitude, longitude, altitude, and so on of the location: function drawLocationOnMap(position) { var lat = position.coords.latitude; var lon = position.coords.longitude; var msg = "You are here: Latitude "+lat+", Longitude "+lon; ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………} After we get the latitude and longitude values of the coordinate, we set it as the center of the map. We also display an information box with a message saying, You are here on the map! function drawLocationOnMap(position) { var lat = position.coords.latitude; var lon = position.coords.longitude; var msg = "You are here: Latitude "+lat+", Longitude "+lon; var pos = new google.maps.LatLng(lat, lon); var infoBox = new google.maps.InfoWindow({map: map, position:pos, content: msg}); map.setCenter(pos); return;} Get to know Google Maps API We are going to use the Google Maps API in the upcoming examples as well. You might consider familiarizing yourself with it by reading some of its online documentation at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/ documentation/javascript/basics.html. Geospatial indexing We can now turn our attention to the main topic of this article—geospatial indexing . A geospatial index is a special kind of index, designed specifically with location queries in mind, so you can perform queries like "Give me the closest n objects to my location". Geospatial indexing essentially turns your collection into a two-dimensional map. Each point of interest on that map (each document in the collection) is assigned a special value named geohash. Geohashing divides the coordinate system into hierarchical buckets of grids; the whole map gets divided into smaller quadrants. When you look for objects nearest to a point (x,y) on the map, MongoDB calculates the geohash of (x,y) and returns the points with the same geohash. I am not going to delve into much detail here on how it works, but if you are interested, I recommend you read MongoDB in Flatland (found at http://www.snailinaturtleneck.com/blog/2011/06/08/mongo-in-flatland/), an elaborate yet simple demonstration of how geospatial indexing works in MongoDB. Indexes are generally applied on fields to make field lookups faster. Time for action – creating geospatial indexes Let's see how we can build the geospatial index on a MongoDB collection: Launch the mongo interactive shell. Switch to a new database namespace called geolocation: $ ./mongodb/bin/mongoMongoDB shell version: 1.8.1connecting to: test> use geolocationswitched to db geolocation> Insert a few documents in a collection named ?map. Each document must contain an embedded document with two fields, latitude and longitude: > db.map.insert({coordinate: {latitude:23.2342987, longitude:90.20348}})> db.map.insert({coordinate: {latitude:23.3459835, longitude:90.92348}})> db.map.insert({coordinate: {latitude:23.6743521, longitude:90.30458}}) Create the geospatial index for the map collection by issuing the following command: >db.map.ensureIndex({coordinate: '2d'}) Enter the next command to check if the index was created: > db.system.indexes.find(){ "name" : "_id_", "ns" : "geolocation.map", "key" : { "_id" : 1 }, "v" : 0 }{ "_id" : ObjectId("4e46af48ffd7d5fd0a4d1e41"), "ns" : "geolocation.map", "key" : { "coordinate" : "2d" }, "name" : " coordinate _" } What just happened? We created a MongoDB collection named geocollection in a database named map. We manually inserted documents into the collection, each document contains some random latitude and longitude values in an embedded document named coordinate: > db.map.findOne(){ "_id" : ObjectId("4e46ae9bffd7d5fd0a4d1e3e"), "coordinate" : { "latitude" : 23.2342987, "longitude" : 90.20348 }} After that, we built the geospatial index on the latitude/longitude pairs by calling the ensureIndex() method on the collection: db.map.ensureIndex({coordinate: "2d"}) Next, we invoked the system.indexes.find() method that lists the indexes in the database. The index we created should be in that list: > db.system.indexes.find(){ "name" : "_id_", "ns" : "geolocation.map", "key" : { "_id" : 1 }, "v" : 0 }{ "_id" : ObjectId("4e46af48ffd7d5fd0a4d1e41"), "ns" : "geolocation.map", "key" : { "coordinate" : "2d" }, "name" : " coordinate _" } Geospatial indexing – Important things to know There are a few of things you must know about geospatial indexing: There can be only one geospatial index for a MongoDB collection. You cannot have more than one geospatial index for a collection. The index must be created for an embeded documendt or an array field of the document. If you build the index for an array field, the first two elements of the array will be considered as the (x,y) coordinate: >db.map.insert({coordinate: [23.3459835, 90.92348]})>db.map.ensureIndex({coordinate: "2d"}) Ordering is important when you are storing coordinates. If you store them in the order (y,x) rather than (x,y), you will have to query the collection with (y,x). Use arrays to store coordinates When storing coordinates in a geospatially indexed field, arrays are preferable to embedded objects. This is because an array preserves the order of items in it. No matter what programming language you are using to interact with MongoDB, this comes in very handy when you do queries.

  (For more resources on this topic, see here.)   Understanding Vaadin In order to understand Vaadin, we should first understand what is its goal regarding the development of web applications. Vaadin's philosophy Classical HTML over HTTP application frameworks are coupled to the inherent request/response nature of the HTTP protocol. This simple process translates as follows: The client makes a request to access an URL. The code located on the server parses request parameters (optional). The server writes the response stream accordingly. The response is sent to the client. All major frameworks (and most minor ones, by the way) do not question this model: Struts, Spring MVC, Ruby on Rails, and others, completely adhere to this approach and are built upon this request/response way of looking at things. It is no mystery that HTML/HTTP application developers tend to comprehend applications through a page-flow filter. On the contrary, traditional client-server application developers think in components and data binding because it is the most natural way for them to design applications (for example, a select-box of countries or a name text field). A few recent web frameworks, such as JSF, tried to cross the bridge between components and page-flow, with limited success. The developer handles components, but they are displayed on a page, not a window, and he/she still has to manage the flow from one page to another. The Play Framework (http://www.playframework.org/) takes a radical stance on the page-flow subject, stating that the Servlet API is a useless abstraction on the request/response model and sticks even more to it. Vaadin's philosophy is two-fold: It lets developers design applications through components and data bindings It isolates developers as much as possible from the request/response model in order to think in screens and not in windows This philosophy lets developers design their applications the way it was before the web revolution. In fact, fat client developers can learn Vaadin in a few hours and start creating applications in no time. The downside is that developers, who learned their craft with the thin client and have no prior experience of fat client development, will have a hard time understanding Vaadin as they are inclined to think in page-flow. However, they will be more productive in the long run. Vaadin's architecture In order to achieve its goal, Vaadin uses an original architecture. The first fact of interest is that it is comprised of both a server and a client side. The client side manages thin rendering and user interactions in the browser The server side handles events coming from the client and sends changes made to the user interface to the client Communication between both tiers is done over the HTTP protocol. We will have a look at each of these tiers.   Client server communication Messages in Vaadin use three layers: HTTP, JSON, and UIDL. The former two are completely un-related to the Vaadin framework and are supported by independent third parties; UIDL is internal. HTTP protocol Using the HTTP protocol with Vaadin has the following two main advantages: There is no need to install anything on the client, as browsers handle HTTP (and HTTPS for that matter) natively. Firewalls that let pass the HTTP traffic (a likely occurrence) will let Vaadin applications function normally. JSON message format Vaadin messages between the client and the server use JavaScript Objects Notation (JSON). JSON is an alternative to XML that has the following several differences: First of all, the JSON syntax is lighter than the XML syntax. XML has both a start and an end tag, whereas JSON has a tag coupled with starting brace and ending brace. For example, the following two code snippets convey the same information, but the first requires 78 characters and the second only 63. For a more in depth comparison of JSON and XML, refer to the following URL: http://json.org/xml.html <person> <firstName>John</firstName> <lastName>Doe</lastName> </person> {"person" { {"firstName": "John"}, {"lastName": "Doe"} } The difference varies from message to message, but on an average, it is about 40%. It is a real asset only for big messages, and if you add server GZIP compression, size difference starts to disappear. The reduced size is no disadvantage though. Finally, XML designers go to great length to differentiate between child tags and attributes, the former being more readable to humans and the latter to machines. JSON messages design is much simpler as JSON has no attributes. UIDL "schema" The last stack that is added to JSON and HTTP is the User Interface Definition Language (UIDL). UIDL describes complex user interfaces with JSON syntax. The good news about these technologies is that Vaadin developers won't be exposed to them. The client part The client tier is a very important tier in web applications as it is the one with which the end user directly interacts. In this endeavor, Vaadin uses the excellent Google Web Toolkit (GWT) framework. In the GWT development, there are the following mandatory steps: The code is developed in Java. Then, the GWT compiler transforms the Java code in JavaScript. Finally, the generated JavaScript is bundled with the default HTML and CSS files, which can be modified as a web application. Although novel and unique, this approach provides interesting key features that catch the interest of end users, developers, and system administrators alike: Disconnected capability, in conjunction with HTML 5 client-side data stores Displaying applications on small form factors, such as those of handheld devices Development only with the Java language Excellent scalability, as most of the code is executed on the client side, thus freeing the server side from additional computation On the other hand, there is no such thing as a free lunch! There are definitely disadvantages in using GWT, such as the following: The whole coding/compilation/deployment process adds a degree of complexity to the standard Java web application development. Although a Google GWT plugin is available for Eclipse and NetBeans, IDEs do not provide standard GWT development support. Using GWT development mode directly or through one such plugin is really necessary, because without it, developing is much slower and debugging almost impossible. For more information about GWT dev mode, please refer to the following URL: http://code.google.com/intl/en/webtoolkit/doc/latest/DevGuideCompilingAndDebugging.html There is a consensus in the community that GWT has a higher learning curve than most classic web application frameworks; although the same can be said for others, such as JSF. If the custom JavaScript is necessary, then you have to bind it in Java with the help of a stack named JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI), which is both counter-intuitive and complex. With pure GWT, developers have to write the server-side code themselves (if there is any). Finally, if ever everything is done on the client side, it poses a great security risk. Even with obfuscated code, the business logic is still completely open for inspection from hackers. Vaadin uses GWT features extensively and tries to downplay its disadvantages as much as possible. This is all possible because of the Vaadin server part. The server part Vaadin's server-side code plays a crucial role in the framework. The biggest difference in Vaadin compared to GWT is that developers do not code the client side, but instead code the server side that generates the former. In particular, in GWT applications, the browser loads static resources (the HTML and associated JavaScript), whereas in Vaadin, the browser accesses the servlet that serves those same resources from a JAR (or the WEB-INF folder). The good thing is that it completely shields the developer from the client-code, so he/she cannot make unwanted changes. It may be also seen as a disadvantage, as it makes the developer unable to change the generated JavaScript before deployment. It is possible to add custom JavaScript, although it is rarely necessary. In Vaadin, you code only the server part! There are two important tradeoffs that Vaadin makes in order achieve this: As opposed to GWT, the user interface related code runs on the server, meaning Vaadin applications are not as scalable as pure GWT ones. This should not be a problem in most applications, but if you need to, you should probably leave Vaadin for some less intensive part of the application; stick to GWT or change an entirely new technology. While Vaadin applications are not as scalable as applications architecture around a pure JavaScript frontend and a SOA backend, a study found that a single Amazon EC2 instance could handle more than 10,000 concurrent users per minute, which is much more than your average application. The complete results can be found at the following URL: http://vaadin.com/blog/-/blogs/vaadin-scalabilitystudy-quicktickets Second, each user interaction creates an event from the browser to the server. This can lead to changes in the user interface's model in memory and in turn, propagate modifications to the JavaScript UI on the client. The consequence is that Vaadin applications simply cannot run while being disconnected from the server! If your requirements include the offline mode, then forget Vaadin. Terminal and adapter As in any low-coupled architecture, not all Vaadin framework server classes converse with the client side. In fact, this is the responsibility of one simple interface: com.vaadin.terminal.Terminal. In turn, this interface is used by a part of the framework aptly named as the Terminal Adapter, for it is designed around the Gang of Four Adapter (http://www.vincehuston.org/dp/adapter.html) pattern. This design allows for the client and server code to be completely independent of each other, so that one can be changed without changing the other. Another benefit of the Terminal Adapter is that you could have, for example, other implementations for things such as Swing applications. Yet, the only terminal implementation provided by the current Vaadin implementation is the web browser, namely com.vaadin.terminal.gwt.server.WebBrowser. However, this does not mean that it will always be the case in the future. If you are interested, then browse the Vaadin add-ons directory regularly to check for other implementations, or as an alternative, create your own! Client server synchronization The biggest challenge when representing the same model on two heterogeneous tiers is synchronization between each tier. An update on one tier should be reflected on the other or at least fail gracefully if this synchronization is not possible (an unlikely occurrence considering the modern day infrastructure). Vaadin's answer to this problem is a synchronization key generated by the server and passed on to the client on each request. The next request should send it back to the server or else the latter will restart the current session's application. This may be the cause of the infamous and sometimes frustrating "Out of Sync" error, so keep that in mind.  

(For more resources on Moodle, see here.) From curriculum to courses: What counts as a Moodle course Let's start this section with me describing the course I'm going to be converting to Moodle as we work together through this book. The course is called "Backyard Ballistics" and it's a science course that forms part of an applied physics qualification. The course is all about the art of firing weird objects through the air with chemicals and equipment that you will find in your average domestic kitchen and garden shed.   There are certain aspects of this course that I can't convert to Moodle. I want my students to get an appreciation of energy and dynamics by "doing" (kinesthetic learning) the science using everyday items you'll find around your house. But there is a good deal of support material, handouts, diagrams, and quizzes, that currently I try and distribute electronically using a "shared drive" on the college server. However, my students can never find the materials I tell them to go and look for. At least, that's their excuse. But I've got to admit that after a few years of use our shared drive is starting to look a bit of a mess. But where do I put these resources in Moodle? The answer is that you put them into a Moodle course. And here is a screenshot of just a fragment of a Moodle course: (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge.) I've divided my course into six topics: Getting Things Flying &#x8B; Lighter Than Air: Hydrogen Filled Balloons Fire Kites &#x8B; Basic Rocketry: The Match Rocket &#x8B; The World Famous Tennis Ball Mortar! &#x8B; Backyard Ballistics: End of Course Project The reason why I've chosen to convert Backyard Ballistics into topics is partly because that's how I teach it and partly because I am happy for the students to "dip into" the resources and activities I have converted to Moodle. Before we look at how we can get a course and start adding content to it we really need to understand what Moodle considers to be a course and how Moodle organizes them. What is a Moodle course You can clearly see now that, at its most basic, a Moodle course is a placeholder for resources and activities. Obviously it's much more than this, as you'll be learning as you work through this book. One obvious advantage Moodle has over a shared drive is that links to resources and activities can be interspersed with text and graphics to make the experience more visually appealing and engaging, and the resources I upload easy to find (I don't accept any excuses these days). How Moodle organizes its courses Let's take a quick look at how you can organize courses in Moodle. To help organize courses, Moodle has the idea of categories and subcategories: Remember that you'll only find resources and activities in a Moodle course. Categories and subcategories are only there to help you organize and manage the organization of courses. So how does that work in practice? For example, I work in the Physics department, part of the Faculty of Science. My Backyard Ballistics course supports the Applied Physics qualification. Here's how we've got our categories and subcategories arranged: I'm sure you could think of examples for your subject area. You could have a category called English that contained two subcategories, Literature and Language. Within literature you could have short courses on particular aspects of the set text you are teaching. You could have a category 20th Century History containing subcategories for Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and USA. Each country subcategory can contain further subcategories called Politics, Society, and so on. Because this is such a key issue when you first start using Moodle, let's spend a little time investigating the more common approaches taken when converting face-to-face teaching to Moodle. Breaking up is hard to do How you break up a face-to-face, traditionally taught course, depends on the age group and the subject area you are working in, so let's study some examples. Often younger children will have the same teacher for all of their subjects. Schools in this situation usually categorize Moodle courses based on year groups, and within the year group each teacher will have their own subcategory in which they are free to create and delete courses as they wish: Each teacher having their own Moodle course means it is much easier for the children to find the resources that have been uploaded and activities created for them. As the children get older you can start running different Moodle courses for different subjects depending on that child's age and ability. Now I could have a category for each year group, and within them categories for each subject area: Instead of a mathematics teacher having just one course they may instead have a course in Year 9, two in Year 10 and another one in Year 12. As the subject areas begin to broaden and the amount of material you need to get through increases, you might need to think about having Moodle courses for particular subject areas, especially those areas that students tend to struggle with. As students become older, things tend to become easier, because qualifications examined by external examination bodies will have their own syllabus. Read the syllabus carefully and you will often be able to see immediately how to break the subject down into Moodle courses. Mathematics, for example, naturally falls into categories, namely: &#x8B; Number &#x8B; Algebra Geometry (shape, space, and measure) &#x8B; Data handling and statistics Within each category there is then a natural divide between subject areas. See whether you can spot a similar pattern in your subject area. For students who are older still (that is, college or university age), subjects are most often taught in units anyway. A short 10-week unit, for example, is an ideal candidate for a Moodle course. To close this section, I will leave you with just a few more thoughts. One is that Moodle courses can also be created to develop a student's key skills. Examples of key skills could be: Communication &#x8B; Application of number &#x8B; Information and communication technology &#x8B; Problem solving &#x8B; Collaboration Another is that Moodle courses are not set in stone; once they are created they can be changed as you require. You will also see later in this book that responsibility for different aspects of your Moodle course can be delegated down to your students, enabling you all to work together developing your page. Have a go hero – developing key skills Try identifying courses that support developing one of the key skills. If key skills are a priority in your school or college, then no doubt you will have lots of skills-based teaching materials already to hand that you can convert into Moodle courses. If in doubt, hold a meeting In this section we've been investigating how we could break up traditionally taught, face-to- face courses and identifying what might be converted into Moodle courses. You can do this along traditional lines, or you can approach the problem by looking at key skills or learning styles. It is an extremely complicated issue and will undoubtedly involve discussions with your department colleagues. I strongly suggest you hold a Moodle meeting to discuss which courses are going to be created, initially. Use the opportunity to discuss who is going to teach them, and what categories they are going to ft into. Plan as much as you can before you start doing anything in Moodle. Remember to involve your Moodle administrator in those meetings, especially if they are the one responsible for creating your categories and courses. Now that we know what Moodle categories and courses we're going to need, we can focus on creating and running those courses. Let's get started: Setting up the course The remainder of the book will focus on just one course. If you're putting your whole department into Moodle then you'll have lots of courses to work through. That's why it's so useful to assign other teaching staff to course creation, and let them share the work. We'll show you how to do that too.

(For more resources on Liferay, see here.) Designing the site—Painting the full picture Whenever we get the requirements of the portal, we should first ask ourselves, how would the portal look when it goes live? This one small question will open a door to a lot of other questions and a lot of information which will be required to implement the portal. You should always think of the end state of the portal and then start painting the complete picture of the portal. This approach is known as Beginning with the end! Now, as we have just discussed the approach we should take while starting the site design, let's understand what all information we can retrieve or get when we ask this question to ourselves. We will discuss about four main components of the Liferay Portal design. Users No matter what the size of the portal is—small, medium, or large—it will always be designed for the users. Users are in the centre of any portal application. Let's think of a very common portal . Just imagine that you have to implement this portal. You are sitting in your nice comfy rocking chair and thinking of the users of this portal. What all questions would you ask yourself (or the client, if he/she is with you) about the users of this portal? Who will be using this portal? Will all the users of this portal have same privileges? Or some of the users will have more privileges than the others? Can we collect the users into any specific group? Are these users organized in any kind of hierarchy? Can the users leave or join this portal at a will? and so on. Let's discuss about the answers of the preceding questions and the information we can retrieve from the answers. If we want to provide an answer to the first question in only one word, then it can be—Users. It is quite obvious that the portal will be used by the users. However, if we go into the detail of this question we can get an answer like—all the employees of CNN, users from all over the world, John Walter who will be responsible for administration of the entire portal, and so on. So answer to this question will give us the information about all the players associated with the portal. If all the users of the portal have the same privileges, then it's pretty obvious that every user will be able to perform the same function in the portal. However, this may not be the case with our portal, http://www.cnn.com. Here, we have end users who will come to the portal and will access the information; we can also have a group of internal users who can create the content. Similarly, there can be a group who can approve the content and other group can publish the content; there can also be users who are responsible for user management and one or more users who are responsible for portal management. So this kind of question will give us the information about different roles and permissions associated with each role in our portal. It will also give us the information that which user should be associated with what kind of role. This information is very useful when we are working on the security piece of the portal. If the answer of the third question is Yes then we can either create a user group in our portal or group the users into a specific role. This question will give us the information about user grouping in the portal. Now, answer to the last two questions will be discussed in more detail in this article. However, these questions will help us to determine if we should use an organization or community or mix of both in our portal. Every Liferay portal must have at least one organization or community. Once we get the information about the users in our portal, we should think of the content next. Content No portal can exist without any kind of content. The content can be a static HTML, a static article, a video, an audio, podcast, document, image, and so on. To make the portal more effective, we have to manage the content properly. We will continue with our example of : What kind of questions can we ask to ourselves or to the client about the content? What are the types of the content we will use in the portal? Where are we going to store the content? To Liferay database or some other external database? Do we have to create the content from scratch? Do we need to migrate existing content to Liferay? And a few more… I am sure you must be visiting many portals every day. Can you think of the possible answers to the preceding questions? Also, think of the information which can be retrieved from those answers. The answer to the first question can be—document, images, web content, video, podcast, and so on. This answer will give us an idea about the content types which need to be implemented in the portal. Some of the contents like web content and documents can be available out of the box in Liferay; while other content types like video and podcast may not be available out of the box. This information will enable us to determine the types of content and effort required to create the new content. The second question is a bit tricky. By default, Liferay stores the content into database. However, if the client wants we can store the content in some shared location as well. For example, storing documents into file system. Also, it requires high availability. You can refer to wiki about this on . An answer to this question will give us information like if we need to add any additional hardware or not, if we should do any specific configuration to meet the requirements, and so on. Answers to third and fourth questions will be mainly used for the effort estimation purpose. If a portal like site is using a huge amount of content and all of the content has to be built from scratch then it may take a good amount of time. If the content is already available, we need to consider the effort of migrating and organizing the content. We can also think of other questions like requirement of workflow, type of the flow, if staging is required for the content or not, and so on. All of the preceding questions will give us a good picture about the content to be created or used in our portal. Once we are thorough with this section, it becomes easy to appoint someone to do content management design for your portal. Applications We have discussed about the user and the content of the portal. However, what about the applications which will be hosted on the portal? We cannot imagine a portal without any application nowadays. A portal can contain different applications like forum, wiki, blog, document viewer, video player, and so on. Let's get a list of questions which you should ask yourself while designing the portal: What are the different applications required for this portal? Do we have any application available out of the box in Liferay? Do we need to modify/extend any existing application available in Liferay? Do we have to create any new application for the portal? If yes, what is the complexity of this application? Liferay ships with more than 60 applications pre-bundled known as portlets. These applications are very commonly used in many of the portals. When we ask the preceding questions to ourselves, we get the following information: Number of applications required in the portal How many applications are available out of the box? If we have more applications available OOTB (out of the box) then it can reduce the development time Scope of the project. Do we need any integration with external system or not? Kind of applications we have to develop from scratch Once we go through the preceding set of questions, it becomes very easy to get a picture of the applications required in our portal. It will also provide us information about the efforts required to implement the portal. So, if you are managing a portal development project, you should definitely have this information ready before starting the project. Security Security is one of the most important aspects of any portal. When we think about security of any portal, we must consider access to the content and the applications on the portal. You must have come across many of the portals so far. Some of the portals allow you to create your account freely; some of the portals require an authorization before creating the account while some other portals don't allow creating an account at all. Also, there are some portals which display the same information to all the users while other portals display certain information to members only. To put this in a nutshell, each of the portal has its own security policy and it operates based on that policy only. Once we have discussed/thought about users, content, and application in portal design, we should consider the security aspect of the portal. Now, let's think of some of the questions which we should normally ask to ourselves/client while considering security aspect of the portal. Can everyone freely create an account with the portal? Do we need to migrate the users from an existing user base like LDAP? Can everyone access the same information or we need to display certain information to portal members only? Can all the members of the portal access all the applications with the same privileges or certain users have more privileges over other members? And so on… When we get answers to the preceding questions, we get following information about the portal security: If everyone can create an account with the portal, then in that case we need to provide the create account functionality to the users. Also, we don't need to do any authorization on account creation. If the answer to the first question is NO, then we need to either provide some kind of authorization on account creation or we need to remove the account creation facility completely If we have to migrate the users from an existing user base, then we have to think about the migration and integration. Liferay provides integration with LDAP. If the user base is not present, then we will end up creating all the accounts manually or provide users an ability to create their accounts If all the users (including non-logged in users) can access the same information then we will keep all the information on public pages but if we want certain information to be accessed by members only, then we might consider putting that information on the pages which can be accessed only after logging in If all the members of the portal can access the same information with same privileges then we will not need any special role in the portal. However, if a certain group or a set of users have more privileges over the other—like only content creators can create content—then we will have to create a role and provide the required permission to the role When we think of the security of the portal, we are thinking about users and their access, applications and access to those applications, and other security-related aspects of the portal. It is very important to think about the security before implementing the portal to prevent unauthorized and unauthenticated access to the portal and applications within the portal.

  (For more resources on Moodle, see here.) There are a number of additional plugin types; namely, Enrolments, Authentication, Message outputs, Licences, and Web services. Plugins—an overview Moodle plugins are modules that provide some specific, usually ring-fenced, functionality. You can access the plugins area via the Plugins menu that is shown in the following screenshot:   Plugins overview displays a list of all installed plugins. The information shown for each plugin includes the Plugin name, an internal Identifier, its Source (Standard or Extension), its Version (in date format), its Availability (enabled or disabled), a link to the plugin Settings, and an option to Uninstall the plugin. The table is useful to get a quick overview of what has been installed on your system and what functionality is available. Some areas contain a significant number of plugins, for instance, Authentication and Portfolios. Other categories only contain one or two plugins. The expectation is that more plugins will be developed in the future, either as part of the Moodle's core or by third-party developers. This guarantees the extensibility of Moodle without the need to change the system itself. Be careful when modifying settings in any of the plugins. Inappropriate values can cause problems throughout the system. The last plugin type in the preceding screenshot is labeled Local plugins. This is the recommended place for any local customizations. These customizations can be changes to existing functionality or the introduction of new features. For more information about local plugins, check out the readme.txt file in the local directory in your dirroot. Module plugins Moodle distinguishes between three types of module plugins that are used in the courses—the front page (which is treated as a course), the My Moodle page, and the user profile pages: Activities modules (which also covers resources) Blocks Filters   Activities modules Navigating to Plugins | Activity modules | Manage activities displays the following screen: The table displays the following information: Column Description Activity module Icon and name of the activity/resource as they appear in courses and elsewhere. Activities The number of times the activity module is used in Moodle. When you click on the number, a table, which displays the courses in which the activity module has been used, is shown. Version Version of the activity module (format YYYYMMDDHH). Hide/Show The opened eye indicates that the activity module is available for use, while the closed eye indicates that it is hidden (unavailable). Delete Performs delete action. All activities, except the Forum activity, can be deleted. Settings Link to activity module settings (not available for all items). Clicking on the Show/Hide icon toggles its state; if it is hidden it will be changed to be shown and vice versa. If an activity module is hidden, it will not appear in the Add an activity or Add a resource drop-down menu in any Moodle course. Hidden activities and resources that are already present in courses are hidden but are still in the system. It means that, once the activity module is visible again, the items will also re-appear in courses. You can delete any Moodle Activity module (except the Forum activity). If you delete an activity or resource that has been used anywhere in Moodle, all the already-created activity modules will also be deleted and so will any associated user data! Deleting an activity module cannot be undone; it has to be installed from scratch. It is highly recommended not to delete any activity modules unless you are 100 percent sure that you will never need them again! If you wish to prevent usage of an activity or resource type, it is better to hide it instead of deleting it. The Feedback activity has been around for some time as a third-party add-on. It is hidden by default because it has been newly introduced in the core of Moodle 2, due to its popularity. You might probably want to make this available for your teachers. The settings are different for each activity module. For example, the settings for the Assignment module only contain three parameters, whereas the settings for the Quiz module allow the modification of a wide range of parameters. The settings for Moodle Activity modules are not covered here, as they are mostly self-explanatory and also dealt with in great detail in the Moodle Docs of the respective modules. It is further expected that the activity modules will undergo a major overhaul in the 2.x versions to come, making any current explanations obsolete. Configuration of blocks Navigating to Plugins | Blocks | Manage blocks displays a table, as shown in the screenshot that follows. It displays the same type of information as for Activity modules. Some blocks allow multiple instances, that is, the block can be used more than once on a page. For example, you can only have one calendar, whereas you can have as many Remote RSS Feeds as you wish. You cannot control this behavior, as it is controlled by the block itself. You can delete any Moodle block. If you delete a block that is used anywhere in Moodle, all the already-created content will also be deleted. Deleting a block cannot be undone; it has to be installed from scratch. Do not delete or hide the Settings block, as you will not be able to access any system settings anymore! Also, do not delete or hide the Navigation block, as users will not be able to access a variety of pages. Most blocks are shown by default (except the Feedback and Global search blocks). Some blocks require additional settings to be set elsewhere for the block to function. For example, RSS feeds and tags have to be enabled in Advanced features, the Feedback activity module has to be shown, or global search has to be enabled (via Development | Experimental | Experimental settings).   The parameters of all standard Moodle blocks are explained in the respective Moodle Docs pages. Configuration of filters Filters scan any text that has been entered via the Moodle HTML editor and automatically transform it into different, often more complex, forms. For example, entries or concepts in glossaries are automatically hyperlinked in text, URLs pointing to MP3 or other audio files become embedded, flash-based controls (that offer pause and rewind functionality) appear, uploaded videos are given play controls, and so on. Moodle ships with 12 filters, which are accessed via Plugins | Filters | Manage filters:   By default, all filters are disabled. You can enable them by changing the Active? status to On or Off, but available. If the status is set to On, it means that the filter is activated throughout the system, but can be de-activated locally. If the status is set to Off, but available, it means that the filter is not activated, but can be enabled locally. In the preceding screenshot, the Multimedia plugins and Display emoticons as images (smileys) filters have been turned On and will be used throughout the system, as they are very popular. The TeX notation and Glossary auto-linking filters are available, but have to be activated locally. The former is only of use to the users who deal with mathematical or scientific notation and will trigger the Insert equation button in the Moodle editor. The Glossary auto-linking filter might be used in some courses. It can then be switched off temporarily at activity module level when learners have to appear for an exam. Additionally, you can change the order in which the filters are applied to text, using the up and down arrows. The filtering mechanism operates on a first-come, firstserved basis, that is, if a filter detects a text element that has to be transformed, it will do so before the next filter is applied. Each filter can be configured to be applied to Content and headings or Content only, that is, filters will be ignored in names of activity modules. The settings of some filters are described in detail in the Moodle Docs. As with activities and blocks, it is recommended to hide filters if you don't require them on your site. In addition to the filter-specific settings, Moodle provides a number of settings that are shared among all filters. These settings are accessed via the Filters | Common filters menu and are shown in the following screenshot: Setting Description Text cache lifetime It is the time for which Moodle keeps text to be filtered in a dedicated cache. Filter uploaded files By default, only text entered via the Moodle editor is filtered. If you wish to include uploaded files, you can choose any one from the HTML files only and All files options. Filter match once per page Enable this setting if the filter should stop analyzing text after it finds a match, that is, only the first occurrence will be transformed. Filter match once per text Enable this setting if the filter should only generate a single link for the first matching text instance found in each item of text on a page. This setting is ignored if the Filter match once per page parameter is enabled.  

(For more resources on Moodle, see here.) Introducing the SIMILE timeline widget The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed various visualization and data manipulation tools as part of the SIMILE project. One of these is a free/open source timeline JavaScript widget, which takes time-based data as input and creates an interactive timeline that scrolls from left to right and contains popup panes and links. A timeline for the life and career of Monet is as follows: You can view more examples on the web site, http://simile-widgets.org/timeline/. In order to use the timeline widget we need these components: The Moodle timeline filter, containing the SIMILE timeline Javascript libraries A timeline data file, in XML or JSON (Javascript Object Notation) format Photographs to show in the popup panes A web page to host the timeline We will deal with installing the filter later, but first we must decide on the subject for our timeline. If you visit the home of SIMILE, http://simile-widgets.org/timeline/, you will be able to explore timelines for the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the life of Claude Monet, and other examples. Timelines can be granular to the minute or hour, as in the case of the assassination. Or they can be spread over centuries or millennia—this is currently the limit for the widget. A suitable subject for our young audience would be significant or important inventions. This can encompass subjects as diverse as printing, paper, penicillin, steam, and the computer. And these inventions originate in different parts of the world, which adds an extra dimension to the subject. Now that we have our subject, a search on Google reveals some useful links, including a list of the top 10 inventions, http://listverse.com/2007/09/13/top-10-greatestinventions/. We may or may not agree with a list like this, but it acts as a useful starting point and aide memoire. There are pictures here, and more information and images on other websites including Wikipedia. To progress from ideas to our timeline, we need to create an XML data file. One of the easier tools to help us produce the XML is a syntax highlighting text editor, which we will install now. If you already have a text editor on your computer that you think is suitable, skip this section. Installing a text editor We have our subject, so the next step is to install some editing software to help us create our XML timeline file. Though most operating systems including Windows contain simple text editors, it will be helpful to install an editor that features syntax highlighting for various computer languages including XML. Some general-purpose text editors are: Notepad2 for Windows, a simple open-source editor, distributed under a BSD license (http://opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php). It is a small download, less than 300 kilobytes, from http://flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html. Notepad++ for Windows, distributed under a GPL license. Download it from http://notepad-plus-plus.org. TextWrangler for Mac OS X, distributed under a Freeware license (not open-source), http://barebones.com/products/textwrangler/. Most flavors of Linux and Unix include the vi or vim text editor. Or use Emacs or your favorite editor. We will carry on and install Notepad2 for the examples in this article. Time for action – installing Notepad2 To install Notepad2 on Windows, visit the website http://flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html in your browser and follow these steps: Under the Downloads section, find the link to the notepad2.zip file. Download it to your computer. Open the file notepad2.zip with the Unzip program available on your computer (the one built-in to Windows XP or later. Or Winzip, 7zip, or similar). Extract all the files in notepad2.zip to a directory on your hard drive, for example, C:apps2Notepad2. In your new directory, click on the file Notepad2.exe with your right mouse button. Choose Create Shortcut from the context menu that appears. Name the shortcut Notedpad2, and copy it to the clipboard. Now in Windows Explorer on Windows 7, go to the directory C:Users{USER}SendTo (or on Windows XP, go to the directory C:Documents and Settings{USER}SendTo). In each case {USER} is your username. Paste a copy of the shortcut in the directory. (Note, you will probably see a shortcut for Notepad, the basic editor included in Windows in this directory. You may want to delete it to avoid confusion.) Go to your Desktop and paste the shortcut there as well. Whew! Notepad2 is a little fiddly to set up, but don't worry, its easy to use. What just happened? We downloaded and installed a text editor for Windows called Notepad2. This has a feature called syntax highlighting, which as we will see helps us to write the XML file for our timeline widget. Note that the shortcuts we created are useful in different contexts. The SendTo shortcut is useful when we wish to edit a file—simply select it in Windows Explorer, right-click, and choose SendTo | Notepad2 in the context menu. The Desktop shortcut is useful for creating new files. We also found that there are many alternatives for Windows, Mac OS X, and other operating systems. These included Notepad++ for Windows, TextWrangler for Mac OS X, and vi/vim and Emacs for Linux. We have added a shortcut for the editor to the SendTo menu in Windows, as shown below: Now that we have a text editor we can create the timeline XML.

  (For more resources on Moodle, see here.) The Moodle philosophy Moodle is designed to support a style of learning called Social Constructionism. This style of learning is interactive. The social constructionist philosophy believes that people learn best when they interact with the learning material, construct new material for others, and interact with other students about the material. The difference between a traditional class and a class following the social constructionist philosophy is the difference between a lecture and a discussion. Moodle does not require you to use the social constructionist method for your courses. However, it best supports this method. For example, Moodle allows you to add several kinds of static course material. This is course material that a student reads, but does not interact with: Web pages Links to anything on the Web (including material on your Moodle site) A directory of files A label that displays any text or image However, Moodle also allows you to add interactive course material. This is course material that a student interacts with, by answering questions, entering text, or uploading files: Assignment (uploading files to be reviewed by the teacher) Choice (a single question) Lesson (a conditional, branching activity) Quiz (an online test) Moodle also offers activities where students interact with each other. These are used to create social course material: Chat (live online chat between students) Forum (you can have zero or more online bulletin boards for each course) Glossary (students and/or teachers can contribute terms to site-wide glossaries) Wiki (this is a familiar tool for collaboration to most younger students and many older students) Workshop (this supports the peer review and feedback of assignments that students upload) In addition, some of Moodle's add-on modules add even more types of interaction. For example, one add-on module enables students and teachers to schedule appointments with each other. The Moodle experience Because Moodle encourages interaction and exploration, your students' learning experience will often be non-linear. Moodle can be used to enforce a specific order upon a course, using something called conditional activities. Conditional activities can be arranged in a sequence. Your course can contain a mix of conditional and non-linear activities. In this section, I'll take you on a tour of a Moodle learning site. You will see the student's experience from the time that the student arrives at the site, through entering a course, to working through some material in the course. You will also see some student-to-student interaction, and some functions used by the teacher to manage the course. The Moodle Front Page The Front Page of your site is the first thing that most visitors will see. This section takes you on a tour of the Front Page of my demonstration site. Probably the best Moodle demo sites are http://demo.moodle.net/ and http://school.demo.moodle.net/. Arriving at the site When a visitor arrives at a learning site, the visitor sees the Front Page. You can require the visitor to register and log in before seeing any part of your site, or you can allow an anonymous visitor to see a lot of information about the site on the Front Page, which is what I have done: (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge.) One of the first things that a visitor will notice is the announcement at the top and centre of the page, Moodle 2.0 Book Almost Ready!. Below the announcement are two activities: a quiz, Win a Prize: Test Your Knowledge of E-mail History, and a chat room, Global Chat Room. Selecting either of these activities will require to the visitor to register with the site, as shown in the following screenshot: Anonymous, guest, and registered access Notice the line Some courses may allow guest access at the middle of the page. You can set three levels of access for your site, and for individual courses: Anonymous access allows anyone to see the contents of your site's Front Page. Notice that there is no Anonymous access for courses. Even if a course is open to Guests, the visitor must either manually log in as the user Guest, or you must configure the site to automatically log in a visitor as Guest. Guest access requires the user to login as Guest. This allows you to track usage, by looking at the statistics for the user Guest. However, as everyone is logged in as the user Guest, you can't track individual users. Registered access requires the user to register on your site. You can allow people to register with or without e-mail confirmation, require a special code for enrolment, manually create their accounts yourself, import accounts from another system, or use an outside system (like an LDAP server) for your accounts. The Main menu Returning to the Front Page, notice the Main menu in the upper-left corner. This menu consists of two documents that tell the user what the site is about, and how to use it. In Moodle, icons tell the user what kind of resource will be accessed by a link. In this case, the icon tells the user that the first resource is a PDF (Adobe Acrobat) document, and the second is a web page. Course materials that students observe or read, such as web or text pages, hyperlinks, and multimedia files are called Resources.

  (For more resources on Moodle, see here.)   Kinds of static course material that can be added Static course material is added from the Add a resource drop-down menu. Using this menu, you can create: Web pages Links to anything on the Web Files A label that displays any text or image Multimedia   Adding links On your Moodle site, you can show content from anywhere on the Web by using a link. You can also link to files that you've uploaded into your course. By default, this content appears in a frame within your course. You can also choose to display it in a new window. When using content from outside sites, you need to consider the legality and reliability of using the link. Is it legal to display the material on your Moodle site? Will the material still be there when your course is running? In this example, I've linked to an online resource from the BBC, which is a fairly reliable source: Remember that the bottom of the window displays Window Settings, so you can choose to display this resource in its own window. You can also set the size of the window. You may want to make it appear in a smaller window, so that it does not completely obscure the window of your Moodle site. This will make it clearer to the student that he or she has opened a new window. To add a link to a resource on the Web: Log in to your course as a Teacher or Site Administrator. In the upper-right corner of the page, if you see a button that reads, Turn editing on, click on this button. If it reads Turn editing off, then you do not need to click on this button. (You will also find this button in the Settings menu on the leftmost side of the page.) From the Add a resource... drop-down menu, select URL. Moodle displays the Adding a new URL page. Enter a Name for the link. This is the name that people will see on the home page of your course. Enter a Description for the link. When the student sees the course's home page, they will see the Name and not the Description. However, whenever this resource is selected from the Navigation bar, the Description will be displayed. Here is a link as it appears on the home page of a course: Here is the same link, as it appears when selected from the Navigation bar: In the External URL field, enter the Web address for this link. From the Display drop-down menu, select the method that you want Moodle to use when displaying the linked page. Embed will insert the linked page into a Moodle page. Your students will see the Navigation bar, any blocks that you have added to the course and navigation links across the top of the page, just like when they view any other page in Moodle. The center of the page will be occupied by the linked page. Open will take the student away from your site, and open the linked page in the window that was occupied by Moodle. In pop-up will launch a new window, containing the linked page on top of the Moodle page. Automatic will make Moodle choose the best method for displaying the linked page. The checkboxes for Display URL name and Display URL description will affect the display of the page, only if Embed is chosen as the display method. If selected, the Name of the link will be displayed above the embedded page, and the Description will be displayed below the embedded page. Under Options, the ShowAdvanced button will display fields that allow you to set the size of the popup window. If you don't select In pop-up as the display method, these fields have no effect. Under Parameters, you can add parameters to the link. In a Web link, a parameter would add information about the course or student to the link. If you have Web programming experience, you might take advantage of this feature. For more about passing parameters in URLs, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string. Under Common Module Settings, the Visible setting determines if this resource is visible to students. Teachers and site Administrators can always see the resource. Setting this to Hide will completely hide the resource. Teachers can hide some resources and activities at the beginning of a course, and reveal them as the course progresses. Show/Hide versus Restrict availability If you want a resource to be visible, but not available, then use the Restrict Availability settings further down on the page. Those settings enable you to have a resource's name and its description appear, but still make the resource unavailable. You might want to do this for resources that will be used later in a course, when you don't want the student to work ahead of the syllabus. The ID number field allows you to enter an identifier for this resource, which will appear in the Gradebook. If you export grades from the Gradebook and then import them into an external database, you might want the course ID number here to match the ID number that you use in that database. The Restrict Availability settings allow you to set two kinds of conditions that will control whether this resource is available to the student. The Accessible from and Accessible until settings enable you to set dates for when this resource will be available. The Grade condition setting allows you to specify the grade that a student must achieve in another Activity in this course, before being able to access this Resource. The setting for Before activity is available determines if the Resource will be visible while it is unavailable. If it is visible but unavailable, Moodle will display the conditions needed to make it available (achieve a grade, wait for a date, and so on.). Click on one of the Save buttons at the bottom of the page to save your work.   Adding pages Under the Add a resource drop-down menu, select Page to add a Web page to a course. A link to the page that you create will appear on the course's home page. Moodle's HTML editor When you add a Page to your course, Moodle displays a Web page editor. This editor is based on an open source web page editor called TinyMCE. You can use this editor to compose a web page for your course. This page can contain almost anything that a web page outside of Moodle can contain. Pasting text into a Moodle page Many times, we prefer to write text in our favorite word processor instead of writing it in Moodle. Or we may find text that we can legally copy and paste into a Moodle page, somewhere else. Moodle's text editor does allow you to do this. To paste text into a page, you can just use the appropriate keyboard shortcut. Try Ctrl + V for Windows PCs and Apple + V for Macintoshes. If you use this method, the format of the text will be preserved. To paste plain text, without the format of the original text, click on the Paste as Plain Text icon, as shown below: When you paste text from a Microsoft Word document into a web page, it usually includes a lot of non-standard HTML code. This code doesn't work well in all browsers, and makes it more difficult to edit the HTML code in your page. Many advanced web page editors, such as AdobeDreamWeaver, have the ability to clean up Word HTML code. Moodle's web page editor can also clean up Word HTML code. When pasting text that was copied from Word, use the Paste from Word icon, as shown in the image below. This will strip out most of Word's non-standard HTML code.