Moodlerooms

Although Moodle is an intuitive and user-friendly program, training is required to use Moodle to its fullest potential. Moodlerooms believes there is great value in providing instructors with methodology and ideas so that they can create effective online communities. Online learning is different from face-to-face instruction -- the design of a course and the way content is grouped and organized is critical for a positive experience for students. More on Moodlerooms training

Before its inception in 2005, Moodlerooms’ founders were Baltimore-based educators who would use international Moodle forums to connect with fellow educators on a variety of school subjects. Each forum would be focused on a particular subject and were collectively referred to as a “rooms.” There were History Rooms, Math Rooms, Science Rooms, etc. Those who were interested in discussing in-class instruction using Moodle would use “Moodle Rooms.” That’s how Moodlerooms got its name. More about Moodlerooms

Every educator and student deserves to have the best possible e-Learning experience. Without well-developed services and support, cultivating a great experience wouldn’t be possible. That’s why since 2005, Moodlerooms has continually expanded its team of Moodle experts to deliver a suite of enterprise-level services and customer support that is simply unmatched by any other Moodle partner across the globe. http://www.moodlerooms.com/lms-solutions/services/">More on Moodlerooms service and support.

joule® is what sets Moodlerooms apart from the rest of the Moodle Partners in the network. joule is an e-Learning platform that builds on a Moodle core to combine feature/functionality enhancements and dedicated service into an affordable and adaptable turnkey solution. While open source Moodle typically requires an investment in hosting infrastructure, personnel and a particular Moodle expertise to deploy, maintain and sustain use, Moodlerooms provides needs-based consultative services that enable customers to flexibly shape their e-Learning platform by choosing the features and services they want and need. More on joule

No. joule uses Moodle as a core platform. If you backup a joule course, you can restore it into a standard Moodle site. Some of the modular features that you enjoyed in joule will not be present in the standard site; however, the core components will continue to work in Moodle. More on joule

Power® is an e-Learning platform that makes it easy for institutions, schools and corporations to teach and learn online with Moodle. Power provides organizations with all of the benefits of open-source Moodle along with the fundamental service options that enable educators to deliver engaging online courses. More on Power

At the center of Power 2 is open-source Moodle 2, the next iteration of the world’s most widely-used learning management system. Power 2 makes it possible for educators to quickly harness the robust features and functionality of open-source Moodle 2 to increase student engagement and success in the classroom. With a suite of enterprise-level services, Moodlerooms makes Power 2 available within a safe, secure, and fully-supported environment, enabling educators and students to focus on teaching and learning. More on Power

User Interface joule 2 has been updated to provide users with a more robust AJAX feel, keeping the familiar while allowing administrators to decide how much or how little of the interface to show to their users.

Personalized Learning Designer (PLD) With the PLD, instructors automate elements of their course, so that participants have different experiences, based on their interaction with the course. The PLD goes beyond Moodle 2’s basic conditional release capabilities and enables instructors to “stay personal” by creating individualized learning paths by establishing event-based “rules” that trigger special messages as well as activities and resources.

Folder View Folder View is a new course format that provides a number of user interface improvements. Course formats define the way users “see” the course.

Course Collapsed/Expanded Sections: Folder View provides “one-click” solutions to collapse course-sections into a streamlined page, as well as expand all course-sections, or individual course sections.

Individual Folder/Sections: Course sections can also be viewed on their own page (without the other sections being visible).

Course Editing for Instructors: Folder view creates a central panel that allows for more efficient activity construction and editing.

Reporting In joule 2, full ad-hoc SQL report capabilities are given to joule site administrators. There will also be a stock listing of basic reports that enables administrators to quickly run the most commonly-used reports. Some reports feature a dashboard style page with report summarizes and data visualization.

Rubrics A rubric is a scoring tool/set of criteria for subjective assessments. Rubrics allow for standardized scoring according to specified criteria, making grading simpler and more transparent. Once rubrics have been created, they can be reused through the course or exported/imported into different courses.

Synchronous joule Synchronous provides a real-time virtual meeting space that allows user communication and collaboration to facilitate learning. For corporate customers, it allows meetings and real time professional development experiences.

Community Hubs Based on the concept of a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), MOOCH (Massive Open Online Course Hub) or “Community Hubs” is a course directory network that enables the public or private sharing of popular courses or templates for use within their own Moodle site. Users can even advertise or enroll in courses.

Repository Support The repository feature in Moodle 2.0 enables users to import content from virtually any stable external repository directly into Moodle using the file picker.

Portfolio Support Portfolios in Moodle 2.0 enable data, such as forum posts or assignment submissions, to be exported to external systems, such as e-Portfolios.

Conditional Activities (conditional release) Conditional activities enable teachers to restrict the availability of any activity/access to content according to certain conditions such as dates, grade obtained, or activity completion.

Cohorts Cohorts, or site-wide groups, enable all members of a cohort to be enrolled in a course in one action, either manually or synchronized automatically.

Web Services Support Web services in Moodle 2 enable the communication between external applications in order to complete a specific function. The Web services in Moodle 2 have been expanded to enable administrators to complete common administrative functions pertaining to users, courses, groups and enrollment management.

New Blocks: Comments, My Private Files, Community, Course Completion

Comments: Leave comments on any page where the block exists—great for facilitating student feedback.

My Private Files: Gives all users a space for storing personal files (with quota support).

Community: The community block enables users to search for courses to download or enroll in on a community hub and lists courses in which the user is enrolled.

Course Completion: Report on the completion status of courses.

Plagiarism prevention integration Moodle 2 now provides integration with the popular plagiarism prevention tool, Turnitin.

Moodlerooms and Moodle’s core developers operate under very different release models. Moodle’s core developers use an “agile development model.” This means that updates to Moodle’s core codebase are released to the public to download as soon as the code is deemed stable and secure.

Moodlerooms operates six-month release cycle. This means that twice a year (typically once in June/July and once in December) all joule developments and major updates to Moodle core that were developed six months prior are compiled and applied to customer sites. Moodlerooms operates under this six-month schedule for two main reasons: 1) to limit the impact that new features/functionality/UI adjustments have on end users. 2) To allow all Moodle core updates and joule developments to pass through our additional level of QA testing, thereby confirming the code’s security, stability, reliability and performance.

Moodlerooms Release Notes

Because joule is not a fork of Moodle, you will be able to take your joule database and data files and ingest them into a standard Moodle site. But if Moodlerooms were to share the modular extensions of joule a single time, it would be required to distribute those same extensions to anyone in the world (as per the open source license agreements).

The PayPal enrollment plugin enables Moodlerooms customers to set up paid courses. Once a joule/Power instance is fully provisioned, the plugin has to be enabled by Moodlerooms then added to the course by the site administrator or manager. You can then set an individual price for the course if needed. For more information on the PayPal enrollment plug-in, visit the moodle.org documentation page.

To automatically collect course payments, login to your business’ PayPal portal and connect a merchant bank account to the business PayPal account. For more information on this process, please visit PayPal’s merchant services page.

Moodlerooms provides email-based notifications that are sent to the designated site administrators and support contacts that Moodlerooms has on record.

Express: Instead of using the Moodle theme system to brand a customer’s joule site, “Express” provides basic and advanced users with tools to completely customize the appearance of their site, course categories and courses. Within joule 2, Moodlerooms has made four new templates available, as well as a number of other features.

Moodlerooms can provide an enhanced, hosted integration with Alfresco Community, which offers the industry leading open-source document management system to capture, search, and collaborate on documents with full library services and lifecycle management on a unified, robust repository. With Alfresco, users can easily maintain the integrity of content using check-in/checkout features, version control, auditing, and full permissions management.

It is possible to randomize the order of questions and possible answers to those questions for any learner taking an assessment. This ensures that every student answers the same assortment of questions, but in a different order.

Instructors can also setup personalized learning paths in joule 2’s Personalized Learning Designer to ensure that students access different quizzes/assessments depending on their demonstrated mastery/comfort level with a subject.

Attendance and progress can be tracked in joule using the attendance module and the course completion block.

Attendance Module: joule’s Attendance module records if a user has logged into the course during a specified time frame and applies an attendance grade in the student’s Gradebook.

Course Completion Block: This block shows whether a course has been completed and can indicate the progress a student is making towards finishing the course according to specific criteria. The criteria can include meeting an activity's grade level or a manual checking "complete" by either the student and/or teacher. The report can also show if the student has completed another course(s) that is marked as a recommended, pre-requisite course.

joule’s flexibility allows administrators to edit settings, roles and permissions to ensure compliance of FERPA rules. Moodlerooms can assist with this during the implementation process. Current FERPA guidelines currently include, but are not limited to:

Disabling e-mail-based self-registration (joule offers several other ways of authenticating users).

Do not use the “opentogoogle” setting (this prevents information in a joule site from appearing in a Google search)

Eliminate the guest login option or edit guest permissions to prevent view of profiles and participants lists

Configure the Front Page so that the courses list is not visible for unauthenticated users

Edit permissions to prevent student users from viewing the profiles of others (even if the two students are in a course together, the profile shows the list of courses a student is in, and thereby discloses non-directory information).

With joule, Moodlerooms has made very slight modifications to the core Moodle codebase in order to offer a comprehensive administrator control panel and session management capabilities. Additionally, modification have been made to the core Moodle codebase in order to make site-wide SSL certificates available to specific customers in our multi-tenant cloud hosting environment.

Moodle is designed to be modular, so that developers can write individual plug-ins that add functionality. Everything from course activities and resources (e.g. chat, quiz, assignments, etc.), course formats (e.g. week view, topic view, etc.), question types (e.g. true false, multiple choice, essay type, etc.), filters (e.g. multimedia filter, glossary names, etc.) and authentication and enrollment tools are plug-ins. Plug-ins can often be enabled and disabled, so that you only use the ones that are important to the mission of your learning programs.