Open formats requirements for VLEs?

[pete]

Essentially, pfy and myself believe that teachers should stick content in plain text / html / pdf rather than bunging their one page powerpoint slide onto moodle.

 

Writing the stuff as a moodle resource means a kid clicks and it's there. Using power point = click - save - open if you have something that can handle .ppt.

 

Lengthy documents (which would benefit from offline reading) should be .pdf - pdf readers are available freely.

 

Does anyone know about the guidelines for such things? I'm hoping there's something that says "content must be accessible and not bundled into $proprietary_format that requires specific programs to access." Equal access and all that.

[mrforgetful]

Isn't PDF a proprietry format?

 

We have to convert stuff to PDF for DiDA and it's a nightmare, PDF's are good for text and simple pictures, anything else and you get all sorts of problems.

[pete]

@mr forgetful

yes, but it's a better option that the teachers converting Office docs to html using office. Openoffice creates nice clean .pdfs IME.

 

And "pdf" has become a bit "hoover" - everyone uses it and there's loads of free converters and readers.

[CyberNerd]

Theres some stuff in bectas technical specification about proprietry format, basically says openformat = good, proprietry = bad.

Becta tell me this document is a contractural requirement for new PFI schools. hooray.

 

http://schools.becta.org.uk/downloads/techspec_institutional_infrastructure.pdf

 

Scorm is a good way to go with this, as scorm imports directly to moodle. There are a number of plugins for office that export scorm, sadly none for Ooo atm.

[NetworkGeezer]

PDF is a bit like Java. It is open but not free in the RMS sense.

The author controls the standard but does not prevent interoperability.

[Geoff]

Er no. Not quite. To quote wikipedia:

 

Anyone may create applications that read and write PDF files without having to pay royalties to Adobe Systems; Adobe holds a number of patents relating to the PDF format and claims that it is an open standard, licensing them on a royalty-free basis for use in developing software that complies with its PDF specification.

 

Personally though, I'd use ODF.