VLE but not Moodle

[MManjra]

Can anyone reccomend any different vle's apart from Moodle. We have been in a trial scheme with lancsngfl with moodle, but the staff seem to be very reluctant to give it the green light.

One of the teachers here is dead certain that FrogTeach is the way to go. has any one had any experiences with frog teach??

i am not sure if it would be possible to do this, but my line manager seems to think it is possible with some vle's to to synchronise pupils user area with a vle that they can access at home with out having to upload and download the work manually. is this possible???
i would have thought that we would need reverse proxy to be able to get through the county firewall to do this.

[SteveT]

Moodle ----> Free
Frogteacher ------> £????

[russdev]

i am not sure if it would be possible to do this, but my line manager seems to think it is possible with some vle's to to synchronise pupils user area with a vle that they can access at home with out having to upload and download the work manually. is this possible???
i would have thought that we would need reverse proxy to be able to get through the county firewall to do this.

in theroy yes but dont know of any of top of head instead i would use web folders or opensource equlivant cant remeber its name on web server than have virtual folders set to user area.

Then set it so that uses security permsions of the folder so that asks for user name and password

then finnaly have asp page that gets current username that you entered and create link to users area that should open as web folder..

but al that needs time to be developed

Russ

[indie]

We're using Blackboard at the moment, its expensive, but polished (unlike Moodle) and does everything we need it to do. It's expandable by using Building Blocks to add functionality like plagiarism checking (which is damn good, checks sentences against google, work already handed into the system and other sources), automatic sms messaging to say work is due/marked etc

I've heard that FrogTeach is the dogs knackers! Not had a chance to look at it for myself, our RBC is having a Regional Learning Platforms meeting in March which it's going to be demoed at though.

[Ric_]

Class Server from MS integrates everything together (if you have a Windows network) and the necessary connections to the outside world. I don't think it's cheap though.

There have been a few people recently experimenting with WebDAV and the like to give access to user areas over HTTP.

A VLE and remote access are two separate things really. Why not use two separate means of serving it? Surely a hyperlink from the VLE to a WebDAV folder would be acceptable?

[GrumbleDook]

It all depends on what you are looking for in a VLE.

Things like Moodle and Bodington are Course Management Systems, then you have things like FirstClass that are predominantly use for discussions and resource management.

You then have WebCT / Blackboard but there is a lot you can do with Sharepoint Portal (in fact the whole Microsoft Learning Gateway is not a bad thing ... )

[CyberNerd]

i am not sure if it would be possible to do this, but my line manager seems to think it is possible with some vle's to to synchronise pupils user area with a vle that they can access at home with out having to upload and download the work manually. is this possible???

Have the vle access the fileserver you mean? auto-sync your filesystem with students home computers - that would be tricky!

i would have thought that we would need reverse proxy to be able to get through the county firewall to do this.

You can do this with reverse proxying your webserver to the fileserver,provided you run the vle on the fileserver. but its not a firewall restriction because your using http for the transfer, reverse proxy is a method of allowing http access to internal webservers.
Setup apache to reverse proxy:

LoadModule proxy_module lib/httpd/mod_proxy.so
<VirtualHost _vhostname_>
         ProxyPass   /redirect/           http://internal/web/server
      
         ProxyPassReverse  /redirect/     http://internal/web/server
         
</VirtualHost>

you'll need to SSL this though !


Alternatively you could mount the homedrives on the webserver. I guess you'd need to open up your firewall ports for SMB/CIFS/NFS/whatever from the DMZ to the fileserver, then 'pretend' the homedrives are on the webserver.

from a security PoV I guess they both have drawbacks.