CLASM: Mashing up Moodle and repositories
We were pleased to learn today that the JISC has agreed to fund our proposal to the Rapid Innovations strand of the recent call, for a project called CLASM: Copyright Licensing Application with SWORD for Moodle!
This will be a six-month project with a double-edged purpose: to develop a SWORD plugin for Moodle, so that it can interact, platform independently, with common repository applications like EPrints and DSpace; and to explore and demonstrate the use of that plugin for managing Copyright Licensed materials in Moodle courses.
The issue of managing CLA materials for VLE courses was drawn to our attention on several occasions by colleagues from other institutions, and the superior bibliographic features of e-repositories seem to offer a promising approach to managing these objects effectively for tutors, students and library staff, while making them available within a VLE, in accordance with CLA terms and conditions.
CLASM will be developed by the same team that developed SNEEP, one of the first JISC Rapid Innovations projects, and we will also be working closely with ULCC’s E-learning team, responsible for our Moodle and Mahara service. This should be a particularly rewarding and fruitful collaboration, since there is huge potential to improve the integration between these three critical educational applications – repositories, VLEs and e-Portfolios.
You can find out more about Phil and James’s adventures in e-Learning at our recently revamped sister blog: El Blog.
Post scriptum, 18th March.
I also learned that, among the other successful bids to the JISC’s Information Environment/e-Research call, were: MERLIN, a text-mining initiative for Institutional Repositories, led by UCL Library; and PhilPapers, a project led by the Institute of Philosophy, to extend the impressive Philosophy portal currently hosted by ANU. ULCC will be contributing, as partners, to both of these exciting projects.
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April 15th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Great news. Sounds like a very interesting project. Will the eventual outputs be available to people outside the UK?
Thanks,
- Eamon
April 15th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Eamon, Absolutely: we’re just setting up a public wiki, alongside our test repository and VLE systems. Once we’ve got a basic Moodle plugin communicating with the repository, we will be looking for examples of CLA approaches. The idea for the project came in part from discussions with David Kane of WIT and I expect to be in touch with him again in due course.
April 17th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Thanks Richard, Great to hear there is an Irish involvement!
This project sounds like it could also be the missing piece of the Moodle repository connectivity puzzle in that it would complement Moodle’s upcoming repository plugin architecture which is just focused on retrieval (as far as I understand it). Best of luck and I look forward to following your progress.
Eamon
April 20th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Moodle 2.0 has two new pieces:
Repository API – for getting documents from repositories into Moodle
Portfolio API – for pushing documents and data from Moodle into repositories/portfolios
Of course these can easily be used to read/write to one system when required, but they are separate because many of the use cases call for one or the other, and the integration points are different.
So, the best approach for SWORD would certainly be to use these APIs!