Mark Aberdour

Experienced learning technologies practitioner and senior leader with a strong track record in B2B product management, technical project management, learning platforms implementation and strategic business development. Established high growth learning platforms services at Kineo and LEO using open source to disrupt the enterprise LMS market, before moving onto commercial SaaS product development at Brightwave/Capita.

Experiments with Moodle multi-tenancy

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Multi Sites

We should see native support for multi-tenancy in Moodle 2.3 which is due out in June and I’m keen to see how this will work. UPDATE 19/03: thanks to Gavin Henrick and Tim Hunt who pointed out that this feature was dropped from the Moodle 2.3 roadmap last month. I have removed a few references this release below.

A few months ago I came across this excellent post over on Dan Poltawski’s blog:  Multi-tenant Moodle without the 2.2 feature where he expands on the multi-tenancy Moodle setup they have at LUNS which scales to over 1,000 Moodle sites from a single codebase. I think this method will be hard to beat but we shall see with the release of 2.3.

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LAK12 Reflections – Week One

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So, I’m having another attempt at attending a MOOC! I registered for the hugely popular Stanford AI Class last year but those attempts were scuppered by the predominantly video-driven course being delivered as Flash Video only, which made it impossible for me as my main learning device these days is an iPhone. Then last week I stumbled across Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2012, or LAK12 for short, an 8 week introduction to Learning Analytics led by George Siemens and hosted by the Society for Learning Analytics Research.

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Research into open source software quality

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My first decade in software development was in software testing and test management and despite moving away from that discipline it remains a special interest. As an open source practitioner I maintain a keen interest in where the worlds of software quality and open source meet. It goes without saying that quality is managed VERY differently in open source projects than it is in traditional closed-source projects. How differently, and how project attributes positively impact on quality, has been the focus of an increasing amount of academic research, especially now that the open source phenomenon is mainstream.

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Moodle 2.2 preview – the mobile LMS

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December sees the release of Moodle 2.2 which is now under code freeze and being put through the rigours of the Moodle QA process to iron out those last niggling issues prior to official launch. The beta is already available on the Moodle Downloads page and the team are encouraging people to download and test it and feed back any issues found.

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Standard Moodle, Distribution or Flavour – which version is for me?

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Over the years a number of Moodle versions and distributions have been released. In the past year alone, a major new Moodle 2 upgrade has become available, a new Moodle Distribution has been released and an interesting new plugin called Moodle Flavours was developed which effectively allows you to ‘roll your own’ Moodle distribution. So where do you start if you’re considering a Moodle implementation? If you’re not sure whether to use Standard Moodle, a Moodle Distribution or a Moodle Flavour, then this article is for you!

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