Moodle, Mahara and Mahoodle

Posted on 3 October, 2011 by Admin

Recently, we have launched our Moodle and Mahara demonstration sites. If you are interested in the open source e-learning platform and e-portfolio system, you should definitely take a look. With our demo logins you can not only explore Moodle and Mahara as stand-alone applications, but also explore a seamless integration (“Mahoodle”) between the two, where Moodle is acting as the master application and Mahara is the slave.

For the interface design, we adopted the latest responsive design methods for both applications, aiming to provide a clean and professional look, and the same time improve the viewing experience for mobile device users. To find out more or get the demo login details, you can visit the demos page.

Knowledge Base:

If you are not familiar with the terms mentioned above, you can find a brief introduction below:

What is Moodle?

Moodle is an open source Learning Management System (LMS), also known as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.

What is Mahara?

Mahara is a fully featured open source electronic portfolio system with social networking features used to create online communities. In education, it is usually used to provide students/learners space to showcase their work and skills.

What is Mahoodle?

A Moolde and Mahara integration is officially called “Mahoodle”. Such an integration is usually used to create a comprehensive e-learning environment with a learning community.

There are two ways you can configure Moodle and Mahara to work together with a Single-Sign-On (SSO) solution.

1) Moodle as the master application (We use this method for our Mahoodle implementation)

Users will need to log into Moodle to access Mahara. Here Mahara is behaving as a Moodle plugin. (see screenshot)

2) Mahara as the master application

Users will need to log into Mahara to access Moodle. Here Moodle is behaving as a Mahara plugin.

How To Add A Horizontal Navigation Menu in Moodle 3.x

Posted on 24 September, 2011 by Admin

Update:

We have released a new post to reflect the changes in Moodle 4.x:

How To Add A Responsive Custom Menu In Moodle 4.x

A horizontal navigation menu is an almost must-have element for all websites these days, and it has become a website design convention. Site navigation has a great impact in terms of user experience, hence it is essential to have this enabled for your Moodle site.

By default, Moodle doesn’t have the horizontal navigation menu (Custom Menu) enabled, so you need to follow the steps below to configure and enable it for your Moodle site.

Step 1

Log into your Moodle site as an admin user, and navigate to the Theme settings option: Settings > Site administration > Appearance > Themes > Theme settings

Step 2

On the Theme settings page, you should find a form field called “Custom menu items” where you can enter your menu items following the instructions located right underneath the form field. Here we’re just going to paste in the example provided by the instructions for demonstration purposes.

Step 3

Click the “Save changes” button, and now you should see a horizontal navigation bar with your chosen navigation items. You can view our Moodle theme demo site here to see the menu in action.

Conclusion

Although the instructions provided by Moodle are informative and easy to understand, the real difficulty lies in finding the page location. Below is a list of the common Moodle page locations and you can just copy and paste the ones you want to add to the form.

Note: the example below assumes that your Moodle installation is in your server’s root folder

My Home | /my/
Courses | /course/index.php
My private files | /user/files.php
Calendar | /calendar/view.php
Course search | /course/search.php
View profile | /user/profile.php
Edit profile | /user/editadvanced.php
Change password | /login/change_password.php
Messaging | /message/
Blog | /blog/
Tags | /tag/
Notes | /notes/
Login | /login/
Forgotten password | /login/forgot_password.php

Want to add static pages (eg. Contact, About, FAQs) to your Moodle site? You can check out our tutorial here.

Embed YouTube videos into your Moodle 2.0 course

Posted on 23 September, 2011 by Admin

More and more teachers and trainers are using video clips to enhance their material these days. As YouTube has gained great popularity among educators, I’m going to show you how to embed YouTube videos into your Moodle course.

Step 1

First things first, before doing any work in Moodle, you need to go to YouTube and find the video you’d like to use. Here I’m going to use a Moodle presentation video, you can find the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvCIv5KCbeE

Step 2

On the video page, click the “Share” button

Step 3

Now you should see something like the screenshot below, and you need to click the “Embed” button.

Step 4

After clicking the “Embed” button, a box with some HTML code will appear. Now, you need to highlight the code as shown in the screenshot and copy it (“Ctrl +C” on PC or “Cmd+C on Mac).

Step 5

Let’s go back to Moodle now:
Log in and navigate to the desired course where you’d like to embed the video.

Step 6

Click the “Turn editing on” button.

Step 7

Select the “Label” option from the “Add resources…” pull down menu.

Step 8

Now you are on the “Add a new label” page, and you should see a form field called “Label text”. Click the “HTML” button on the form editor menu.

Step 9

A popup called “HTML Source Editor” should be triggered where you can paste in the code which you copied from YouTube in Step 4 above (“Ctrl+V” on PC or “Cmd+V” on Mac to paste). Then you need to click the ”Update” button to save the code.

Step 10

After clicking the “Update” button the HTML Source Editor popup should be closed and you are back to the “Add a new label” page like shown below. Now you need to click the “Save and return to course” button.

Step 11

There you go, a YouTube video is now embedded in the Moodle course. Remember to exit the editing mode by clicking the “Turn editing off” button; otherwise you might not see the video on the course page!

How to install a new Moodle theme

Posted on 21 September, 2011 by Admin

Update:
There is a new blog post about how to install a Moodle theme in Moodle 3.x.

We have finally finished our first free Moodle theme, you can go to the freebies page to download the zip file and feel free to use for your Moodle implementation. I thought it would make sense to write a quick post to guide you through the theme installation process. I hope you find this helpful.

Here I’m using our free theme Mandarin as an example in the tutorial. The following steps will guide you through the process of installing a new Theme for Moodle 2.0.x.

Step 1

Download our free Moodle theme Mandarin here.

Step 2

Unpack the theme zip file and extract the /mandarin/ folder and the files.

Step 3

Upload the /mandarin/folder to your hosting server’s Moodle theme directory. You can use an FTP program to do so.

Step 4

Log into your Moodle site as an admin, and navigate to the theme selector:

Settings >Site administration> Appearance > Themes > Theme selector

Step 5

Click “use theme” next to the Mandarin theme to active

Step 6

Click “continue” to confirm, and here you go now you can enjoy your new Moodle theme.