(photo by Idealware)

Idealware is a nonprofit that does consumer reports type evaluations for the non profit industry. This article is intended to help nonprofits that might be considering Open Source options.

 I was pleased to see a good description of the Open and Freedom part of Open Source.

First, you are free to run these software packages for any purpose--you generally don’t pay anything to acquire them. Second, the source code is free--you can see the code and understand how it works. Third, you are free to copy and redistribute the package to anyone you want. And finally, you are free to modify the software however you like, and to release those modifications.

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(photo by Benjamin Ellis)

In my previous post, I wrote about how Solution Grove, using an integration of its previously developed ecommerce registration module based on dotLRN and Moodle, answered its client's need to have a system where students enroll for a course and the teacher approves their application.

In this post, we will go right into the details of the application process.

Requirement No. 2: "Applications" -  Students submit requested information as they enroll for a course and the teacher reviews the students' data to be able to accept them into the course.

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(photo by wiki.laptop.org)

Solution Grove is in the process of testing an installation of the XO School Server (XS) of the OLPC project.  Since I don't have an XO laptop, I needed to emulate one.  I'm already running several virtual machines using VirtualBox so it makes sense that I go that route for an emulated XO.

I've outlined below the steps I did to emulate XO on VirtualBox.  The steps here will most likely work with VMWare as well just by changing VirtualBox specific steps to their VMWare counterparts.  These were researched and accumulated on the wiki.laptop.org and sugarlabs.org wiki pages. Some parts are copied verbatim and attribution go to their original authors.

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(photo by by Benjamin Ellis)

One of Solution Grove's clients that uses Moodle as an infrastructure for their online courses recently expressed the need to expand the user registration process in a number of custom ways.  We have previously created an ecommerce registration module based on dotLRN for Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Boston Museum of Science.  Our existing system is open source and supports a wide range of customizable use cases.  We decided the best way to meet our clients' need was to integrate the dotLRN registration and Moodle.

The result is an incredible ability to support complex and custom student registration requirements. This post will be the first in a series of posts that outlines the different requirements needed by our clients and the solutions we used to answer and solve them.

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(photo by LAMS Foundation)

In an earlier post, I wrote about how to properly integrate Adaptive Curriculum Activity Objects inside Moodle.   After having success with that, the client now needs to have the activity object as part of a LAMS sequence. 

The approach I came up with is to have the URL to the scorm activity created as a resource in the LAMS sequence.  This particular client's LAMS server is in a different domain and port than the Moodle server and it doesn't satisfy the requirements of JavaScript's Same Origin Policy.  This restriction presents a minor issue when launching the resource in a framed LAMS window. The only way to integrate it properly within LAMS is to have it launch in its window.

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(photo by Adaptive Curriculum sample screenshots)

Solution Grove has a client who wanted to try out Adaptive Curriculum's (AC) Activity Objects (AO) inside Moodle.  This initially sounded trivial since they provide SCORM compliant packages and I thought it was easy as just creating a SCORM activity for the AO.  It turned out that AC's AOs are not standalone and they require authentication when installed on third party servers.  Their objects use standard SCORM API calls for getting the user and session information then use these values to authenticate.  The first part's the easy one since I don't need to write any code for that because Moodle already has API for SCORM 1.2.

The problem I encountered was that the authentication method used by AC needs to be run in a stateless manner through a server-to-server HTTP post using the user and session information that originated from the third party server (in this case, the moodle installation). This presents a problem for server-to-server communication because in moodle, the session id for the user is stored in a cookie and we will only be able to get that cookie if the script is run in the browser where it was issued.  At this point, we are now in contact with AC to ask a few questions so that I can proceed implementing a code to support their AOs.

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