We recognise that many practitioners use (or wish to use) the NLN Materials within Moodle. In general, the materials have a long history of working well within Moodle systems, but there is also a fair amount of confusion within the community about which of the several possible methods to use, as well a number of past and present pitfalls to avoid. This page - which will be updated regularly - is dedicated to giving up-to-date and complete information on making the NLN Materials available within Moodle. The first section discusses the various methods that can be used (and is suitable for any Moodle-using practitioner). We then discuss various more technical details which are designed for Moodle administrators. Although this discussion focuses solely on Moodle, much of it may apply to users of other VLEs, such as the discussion whether to host the materials locally on a VLE, or link to them on the NLN site.
Target platform: none. No need to download.
For many users this will be the simplest way to add NLN Learning Objects to a Moodle installation, since it requires no special set-up by the Moodle administrator. It also allows you to use your NLN collections directly in Moodle. To use this method, either:
Once you have the Learner URL in your clipboard:
Target platform: Moodle (add Scorm)
This method is also fairly simple, and does not require any special set-up of your Moodle installation, but may require significant download times. It is more suitable when you wish to add many Learning Objects to a course. Note that when you come to upload the file to Moodle in step 5, most Moodle installations have a limit as to the maximum file size that can be uploaded. The default is 8mb, though this might be changed by your administrator. The file-size of your collection file is given whenever you download it from the NLN site. The exact steps required are given in more detail in the User Guide, but briefly the procedure is as follows:
Target platform: Moodle (repository)
This method requires some initial work by the Moodle administrator. (Details of this are given in the technical section below.) Once this is done, NLN Learning Objects should be available for you to use within Moodle without needing to visit the NLN website, though note that this method may make it more difficult to find appropriate Learning Objects, and you will not have direct access to supplementary information such as the tutor guide, ratings, level indicators etc. You can of course use the NLN site to find and preview appropriate LOs, and then find and add the same LOs in your Moodle’s local repository.
Once the repository is set up by your administrator, the procedure is as follows:
Target platform: Moodle (repository)
MrCute is an extension to the IMS Repository functionality, and so has all the requirements of Method 3, and the procedure to use it is largely identical, except that:
Target platform: none. No need to download materials.
“Noodle” is a new facility being developed by Xtensis - the developers of the NLN site. It consists of an extension to Moodle that allows access to the materials without the need for a local repository, but also without the need for users to separately log-in the NLN site. Instead, a cut-down version of the NLN site appears within Moodle, allowing users to:
More information, with updates on the project and a video of it in action, is available on Noodle's dedicated project page.
This section is designed primarily for Moodle administrators. It may prove valuable for an administrator of a Moodle system to consider the various available approaches and define an organisation-wide best-practice policy and communicate that to tutors within the organisation - preferably together with instructions specific to that installation.
It is beyond the remit of this site to suggest a single ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution, but the following table aims to summarise the pros and cons of the different methods, and includes a range of considerations, both short and long term, and implications for learner, practitioner and administrator. All values are set with a range of 0 to 5, where 0 means “no effort required”, and 5 is the most difficult. Roll-over the underlined values for special notes.
| Method | 1. Learner URLs | 2. “Add a Scorm” | 3. “IMS Repository” | 4. “MrCute” | 5. Noodle |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Practitioner ease of use | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
| Initial admin set up | 0 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 |
| Updates to materials | 0 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| Access to supplementary info | 2 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| Tracking | 4 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 4 |
In this section we consider the above implications, and look at why and how to create a local repository within Moodle.
First, a bit of history: Before the current implementation of the NLN site, those using the previous site - the Content Access Tool - experienced significant problems in effectively locating and using the materials; learners required individual accounts, and to log-in whenever they required access; practitioners had no equivalent to the new Collections feature, for storing and managing groups of LOs within the site; and the site sometimes suffered outages. These factors led many to a “grab and store” approach, holding local copies of the entire library, where they could be used most effectively. It was exactly this reason that the “IMS Repository” module was created - originally as an optional add-on designed to store the NLN materials within Moodle - and eventually becoming part of Moodle itself. This proved hugely useful for many practitioners, and such systems are still in popular use in many organisations.
Such systems are still perfectly possible with the new NLN site, but it is certainly worth considering the advantages and disadvantages of using local repositories in the light of the new site’s capabilities and stability. In particular, Method 1 outlined above is only possible using the new site, and relies on its ability to link directly to individual Learning Objects (or collections of them) without requiring the learner to log-in, or even have an account. Linking to the content vs. hosting it locally, has the following implications, among others:
Generally speaking, the need for a practitioners to register themselves and locate the materials in an external site adds a level of complexity. However, this is likely tempered by the ease and power of the search and browse functionality within the NLN site. Since this is specifically tailored to the extensive metadata available with the NLN LOs, such as “qualification framework level” and various kinds of classifications, along with several textual fields, it is likely that the NLN site will always provide a more effective way to search than any locally installed repository system, though of course the latter will often be set up to give access to non-NLN resources too.
Local repositories may be set up in a variety of ways (see below - “Building a local repository”) and note that the MrCute extension builds on the “Browse repository” functionality (which uses only the folder structure and the LO’s name to allow location) to also add text searching of title, description and keywords.
Moodle has powerful capabilities for tracking user uptake and grades. The method used to expose the NLN Materials has implications for what can be tracked. How important such data is, of course, is up to the individual practitioner and organisational policy.
Three levels of tracking are possible:
Simplifying a little, methods that link to the NLN site (methods 1 and 5) support only level 1. Methods that use local repositories (3 and 4) currently support levels 1 and 2, though level 3 may be supported in future upgrades of Moodle. Only method 3, which uses Moodle’s inbuilt Scorm functionality, currently supports all three levels of tracking “out of the box”.
Which method makes most sense in terms of speed of access and bandwidth usage is dependant on various factors, such as whether learners and the Moodle install are within the same intranet. When played on the NLN site, the materials are hosted on the Rackspace network, which is highly connected to Janet and all other major networks in the UK. The service has a guaranteed uptime of 99.9%, which it has so far well-exceeded, and has constant monitoring and redundant capacity in place. Learner URLs to Learning Objects will remain valid through the lifetime of the service.
Naturally, one of the challenges of running a local repository is to keep the materials up-to-date. The following information is designed to help evaluate significant a problem this may be.
The NLN content is updated fairly rarely, but is not an entirely static library. A large update of the first two rounds of materials was commissioned and executed in 2006. Although no large-scale updates have occurred since then, small updates and fixes are made to the materials from time to time, and when a significant issue is found there is a good chance it will be researched and a solution implemented. Besides the content itself, the surrounding information in a Learning Object - its “metadata” - is updated quite regularly, usually comprising additions of new or clarified descriptions, keywords, classifications etc. Of course, the importance of updates to metadata depends on whether a local system actually uses and exposes that information.
As well as the content and metadata of the Learning Object, each LO has a range of information associated with the batch it is part of, which can prove invaluable for the LO’s effective use. This includes the tutor guide, specific FAQ questions, and (soon to be made available) a list of matching Skills Funding Agency Learning Aims, 3rd party copyright information, ratings and reviews, and many others. All of this information would be difficult to access via a local repository, requiring practitioners to manually locate the equivalent LO on the NLN site.
This section aims to give some recommendations for those who do choose to build a local repository of the NLN Materials.
First, remember that the IMS Repository module - although part of a standard Moodle installation - is disabled by default - and must be enabled and configured using the file \mod\resource\type\ims\repository_config.php.
Both the default IMS Repository and MrCute modules utilise a single directory (usually called “ims_repository”) with the Learning Objects unpacked into their own directories within that base location. Both allow the Learning Object directories be arranged within a folder structure which, before MrCute, was the primary method of organising them and providing navigable access. Indeed, when retrieving the materials from the Content Access Tool, the resulting downloaded zip was always structured into subject-based folders, and this, therefore, became the primary method for practitioners to locate materials within the local repository. On launching the new site, it was decided that downloads would not be delivered in these subject-based folders, since such a feature is confusing and not useful for all other users. Administrators may still recreate such a structure manually of course - note that two-letter subject codes appear within the package folder names, which can help here. One of the primary features of MrCute is the added ability to search using the title, description, and keywords of the LOs, rather than just relying on folders.
Note there is currently no way within the NLN site to automatically locate LOs that have changed since a given date, though we would almost certainly introduce such functionality if a new major update project was commissioned.
To download the materials, we would strongly recommend the use of Permanent Collections. This is a new feature which allows easy and efficient access to whole batches of NLN LOs at once. The collections are ready-made, and do not count against the usual daily download limit. Whichever method is used however, it is strongly recommended to choose “Moodle (repository)” as the target platform. The primary difference between this and most other target formats is that the LOs are already unzipped within the collection zip, in contrast to, say, “Moodle (add Scorm)” for which the collection is a container for zipped-up versions of each NLN LO. Access to the list of permanent collections is available here, or by clicking the “View permanent collections” link within the Collections box at the left of any page while logged-in.
Note that practitioners who have previously gone through the process of downloading and attempting to deploy the LOs and have encountered the message “UTF-16 - CAN’T DEPLOY” should read this FAQ question, which has been recently updated.
Many thanks to those who have contributed information to this page, with special thanks to Richard Goddard of Learning Objectivity for his invaluable input.
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