We are going moodle

On may the 13th, we had our first virtual call to discuss how to bring the osmooc content into a moodle course. The five people present (Jennifer, Nate, Nicolas, Axel and me) represented a large panel of expertise in open science, markdown formatting, teaching with moodle and h5p, promotion with badges, and technical aspects of open badges. We decided to work independently on the first module of the MOOC (https://github.com/OpenScienceMOOC/Module-1-Open-Principles) and see how to create/design/extend the content to allow an interactive training and automatic badges distribution, and meet again in 3 weeks. You can join the discussion in our #moodle slack channel (join our open Slack channel here).

Open badges goes 2.1

Nate (from https://badgr.com) explained us that it will soon (in about 6 months) be possible to use badges created on badgr (or a different platform) in moodle courses. On the other hand, badges created in moodle can be pushed to bagr already, making it a 2-way interaction between badgr and moodle instances. There might also be a way to deliver badges directly from h5p tasks, as Nicolas saw it in a wordpress hosted h5p content. Nate told us that badgr is now integrated with zapier, which would make it possible to issue badges from action done in a slack channel or on Github. He will look into h5p integration.

This would make it possible to have different instance of the moodle course to give the same badge. In theory, one could get a module 1 badge in one moodle instance, the moodle 5 badge in a different instance and get automatically a badge that would represent module1+5, making the mooc content distributed with a central badging system.

Open science mooc content

I then presented a three pillar vision of the open science mooc course: one about societal and ethical implications (Open principles, Open Collaboration, Open Advocacy), one about scholarly communication (open access, open peer review, open evaluation, Public Engagement with Science) and one more technical about open source practices (open data, open source research software, Reproducible Research, Open Educational Resources). We then discussed ways to have interactions in a moodle course, while making it still possible to be run without a facilitator (peer assessment of tasks, quizzes, external tool via zapier?).

We then decided to look at the material of the module 1 and come back with more practical examples and wishes.

Markdown automated export

We finally talked about ways to create moodle backup files (or/and h5p content) directly from the markdown content we have at hand. This could facilitate the work and updating the content of the course and could be reused by other teams. If it could be as easy to update a moodle course, as it is to update the osmooc book (One R script to run, see https://opensciencemooc.github.io/book), it would be awesome!

Join the discussion on the #moodle channel on slack

Julien Colomb, OSMOOC community member.