Someone asked me recently what the chances would be of building an offline client for Moodle. To be honest I had not thought about that, so I did. Moodle has three types of content essentially:
- Courses built using the Moodle authoring tool
- SCORM courses (including Authorware)
- Flash modules in the Moodle course
To my mind the offline client should be a stand-alone application that is installed on the Users PC. The application should permit the following:
- Log in using their Moodle Username and Password (Network access required)
- View all their courses
- Do a Course
- Resume a Course they are busy with
- Save the progress and results locally
- Manually (or automatically) synchronize their data with the Moodle server.
- View grades
- Update their profile
- See which other students are online (red dot, green dot)
Now back to the courses. I think, and if I’m wrong please let me know, that all the courses use PHP pages to move the data from the content to the database. So, unless you install WAMP as part of the deployment, you’re pretty buggered.
So, now the question is, how can you build a course that can be used in Moodle, as well as in an offline application, that does not require Apache/MySQL and that will meet all the other requires I have mentioned above.
I have an idea, but would love to hear from you what your idea is.
