poodle

An April visit to the Development Associates International (DAI) Ministry Center in Colorado Springs, CO, by MAF staffers Nicholas Ivins and Brian Ward could lead to more effective distance learning through DAI’s ‘Masters of Arts in Organizational Leadership’ program.
   
DAI leadership set out to enhance the learning experience for their Masters program students.   This search lead them to consider new web-based technology products developed by MAF such as DEScribe, DEViewer, and Poodle (Portable Moodle). The next step is ...

MAF-LT is excited to announce the official release of Poodle, a portable Moodle solution!  Poodle was developed out of the need to be able to view existing Moodle content in an offline setting.  Poodle helps to bridge the gap in areas where internet access is either not reliable or not affordable.

Please visit the Poodle information page for more information.

Here is a response about Poodle from one of our partners:

Thanks so much for all your work at MAF on this project.  We had a board meeting the other day for Horizon, and many are excited about this project.  It will be useful for students that don’t have access to a personal computer and want to study. They can go to a café and use the Poodle to plug in and work. It will be useful for students in the secured countries that cannot identify themselves and want to study in a secure environment.

I will keep you posted on the use and progress of Poodle as we move forward.

Please express our gratitude to all those at MAF for their careful and long work on this project.  Keep up the good work for the Kingdom of God.  We deeply appreciate all your efforts.

There is a project at the Open University in the U.K called Offline Moodle. Here’s the new idea which as in most “new” ideas isn’t actually new at all. It was an idea that was discussed years ago in the little LT building in Redlands, California by our very own LT staff. I remember my father used to tell me “there’s nothing new under the sun” I would argue with him vigorously, I discovered much later he was quoting out of Ecclesiastes.

The original LT discussion was something like this, “wouldn’t it be great if we could connect to the internet and do a very simple ‘push and pull’ operation on selected content sitting up on the Moodle server ? Effectually allowing one to participate in an online Moodle course in an offline way. It would be a solution for people who live in areas where the internet connectivity is very intermittent and of limited bandwidth. We didn’t have the resources or the will to pursue it at the time but like clothing fashion if you wait long enough usually it will circle back around.

In February three of our Learning Technologies team members traveled to Germany to meet with our long-term partners, Greater Europe Mission and Horizon International Schools. These two ministries provide theological education in dozens of countries around the world.

Our purpose in partnering is to share resources in providing quality theological education in a distance format. Horizon International Schools has chosen to provide courses through an online course management system with the strange name of Moodle. Moodle is open source so it is free and fairly easy to use for teachers and students alike.

Moodle’s limitation has been that it is all online. For a student to take a course he or she must connect to the Internet. While this works in places where the Internet is available and affordable, Moodle is not a solution for the many pastors and students who are beyond the reach of the Internet.

While in Germany, Learning Technologies introduced Portable Moodle, or “Poodle,” as it was jokingly called. Our LT tools team has been working on this for years and was successful in getting it up and running in time for our meetings.

“Poodle” will enable students without Internet connection to take courses delivered by CD or on a thumb drive. (Teacher-student interactions can take place through other means, including cell phone.)

The leadership of Greater Europe Mission and Horizon International Schools was exstatic when we introduced this new tool. They will be able to put it to immediate use in delivering courses beyond where they have been able to reach thus far.

“This is going to be huge,” said Al Cuthbert, director of Horizon International Schools.

One of our top priorities in MAF Learning Technologies is to put our efforts into training that reaches to the remote pastors and leaders who do not have access to training. It was a delight to be able to deliver “Poodle” to our partners who will then take it and use it to transform lives.

Portable Moodle like the name suggests is based on the world’s most popular course management system (CMS) which is just plain Moodle. Moodle was designed on the world’s most popular web development platform LAMP or Linux, Apache, Mysql and PHP. Portable Moodle is based on WAMP (Windows, Apache, Mysql, PHP and will run on any version of windows. Win95 up to Vista. Portable Moodle was created completely with Free and Open Source software. Which means it can easily be modified and changed according to the need of the context.

Any person with basic windows skills can develop and deliver courses using Portable Moodle.

It can be run on any kind of media ‘Read Only’ or ‘Writable’ media, the only requirement is that the media be recognized by the Windows Operating System. Moodle is now in 70 languages in 196 countries. Portable Moodle supports up to 250 plug-in modules written specifically to extend the capabilities of Moodle. Moodle now has an estimated community of over 1,000,000 users. The moodle.org site alone has 330,000 registered users. The pedagogical model used to develop Moodle is based on Social Constructivism.