Enhancing Moodle for offline Learning in a degraded connectivity environment

Babacar Ngom *

Université Cheikh Anta DIOP de Dakar , Senegal babacar.ngom@ucad.edu.sn

Hervé Guillermet

Université de La Rochelle, France hguiller@univ-lr.fr

Ibrahima NIANG Université Cheikh Anta DIOP de Dakar, Senegal

iniang@ucad.sn

Abstract�—In developing countries, higher education is an essential vehicle of the development process. Learning Management Systems (LMS) have emerged from an auxiliary role to a critical one in higher education. In short, ICT development, telecommunication infrastructures and Internet have a strong impact in the education sector especially with the advent of distance learning that is becoming more important. More and more academic institutions are moving to eLearning today and Moodle is one of the most popular LMS with several currently active sites. However, in Moodle, learners must be connected online all time they need to do eLearning activities. Moreover, the introduction of distance learning in developing countries is done with a set of constraints such as connection costs, power cuts and permanent Internet connectivity failure in some areas.

This paper presents an enhanced solution for running Moodle in offline mode to improve asynchronous learning. This solution allows learners to continue eLearning activities in cases where Internet connection is highly disturbed or not existed. The presented solution uses transparent and automatic configuration for end user�’s PC or laptop. After the connection is restored, all offline activities will be synchronized to the principal Moodle platform.

Keywords-ELearning ; Moodle ; connectivity ; offline ; SMS

I. INTRODUCTION The improvement and the rapid growth of Information and

Communication Technologies (ICT) have promoted the adoption and diffusion of these in the education community. Indeed, ICTs, accompanied by advances in cognitive science and educational methods are changing rapidly institutional structures, training methods and, more particularly, methods and practices of teaching and learning. In summary, the integration of ICT in Education and the spectacular breakthrough of the Internet have led to changes in our teaching approaches. In developing countries, higher education is an essential vehicle of this process. ICT development, telecommunication infrastructures and the Internet have especially a strong impact in the education sector with the advent of distance learning that is becoming more important.

Also, the labor market evolution, the changing skill requirements, the development of continuing education, the emerging of eLearning in higher education and the development of campus networks with fiber optic access are in favor of the development of distance education in developing countries. On the other hand, the evolution of the web based education platforms is becoming increasingly important in education system. Learning Management Systems (LMS) are used using the web for major tasks including learning. Many courses use a LMS to organize the course contents, support the students, and provide administrative and technical support for educators. One of the most popular and established Learning Management Systems today is Moodle, the modular object-oriented distributed learning environment [1].

Moreover, E-learning is becoming more and more prominent, supporting the improvement of both synchronous and asynchronous learning. The impressive development of the ICTs has made available to higher education the infrastructure that permits universities to fulfill the increasing requirements for academic electronic services. The most widespread asynchronous e-learning tools are the learning management systems, the web-based platforms that offer instructors an easy to use environment suitable for managing and delivering educational content for their courses, but which can also be used for communication between instructors and students.

In short, Moodle [1] [6] [7] is one of the most popular Learning Management Systems (LMS) with several currently active sites. It is a course management system designed to help educators who want to create quality online courses. The software is used all over the world by universities, schools, companies and independent teachers. Moodle is open source and completely free to use. But, for Moodle LMS, learners must be connected online all the time they need to do eLearning activities.

In summary, with the improvement of Internet connections in developing countries, the Web has become a common delivery mechanism for educational and training content for many high education institutes. However, the development of eLearning platforms like Moodle in those countries is done

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with a set of constraints such as connection costs, power cuts and lack of permanent connectivity in some areas.

Thus, with a view to setting up a solution overcoming the problems of connectivity, this paper proposes research based on a production platform for using Moodle in offline eLearning. Our solution is based on a central platform and a lightweight client platform. The installation of Moodle for end users is doing in automatic way. Automatic synchronization of resources and activities of the client platforms is made with the central platform when connectivity is established. This solution allows learners, which are in disturbed Internet connection zones to continue distance-learning activities on their own computers. Our proposition provides a powerful environment for asynchronous distance education.

This paper is structured as follows: the overview of Moodle and the related work are presented in section II. Section III outlines the motivation and the challenges of or contribution. Next in section IV, the detail design and implementation of the framework using offline Moodle is presented. In section V, we conduct some tests to demonstrate the proper functioning of the proposed framework. In section VI, we conclude.

II. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORKS

A. Moodle LMS overview Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning

Environment) is a course management system for online learning. It is a software package for producing Internet-based courses and web sites. It has many features expected from an e-learning platform including Forums, content managing (Resources), Quizzes with different kinds of questions and several activity modules. Moodle also has several contributed modules, including SCORM [1] [6] [7].

The design of Moodle is based on socio-constructivist pedagogy. This means that goal is to provide a set of tools that support an inquiry- and discovery-based approach to online learning. Furthermore, it purports to create an environment that allows collaborative interaction among students as a standalone or in addition to conventional classroom instruction. One of the advantages of Moodle is that it has been developed as an Open Source software project. It is entirely supported by a team of programmers and the user community. This also means that Moodle is available free of charge under the terms of the General Public License (GNU) and has no licensing cost attached.

Moodle runs without modification on Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, NetWare, and many other systems that support PHP (HTML-embedded scripting language), including most Web host providers. Data is stored in a single database: MySQL and PostgreSQL are best supported, but it can also be used with Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Borland Interbase, Informix, Visual FoxPro, SAP DB, SQLite, Sybase, Microsoft Access, ADO, and generic ODBC database access, since it uses ADOdb. Moodle is also a template-based system to which content must be is added. This makes Moodle's interface very intuitive and allows for easy navigation. The whole page is presented in a "flat view" format.

Note that, the LMS Moodle is a teacher's dream in terms of course management features that it offers. Access to nearly all lesson assignments can be made in time- or password-restricted, however, only quizzes can be password restricted at this point. Moodle also keeps automatic log reports of each student work. That means the teacher knows, in addition to information about students who have completed or uploaded an assignment, also how much time they spent on an assigned task or quiz.

The Moodle learning management system makes use of asynchronous communication software to provide instruction and facilitate communication between teachers and learners. Asynchronous communication indicates that lesson delivery and teacher/student communications are not done in real time. Participants do not have to be at their computers at specific times. Learners log into the system at their convenience to read lessons, view movies and presentations and submit assignments.

B. Related works Several solutions are proposed to enhance or to extend

Moodle. Rößling et al., in [2], provide an overview of current CS

specific on-line learning resources and guidance on how one might better about extending an LMS to include such tools and resources. They focus specifically on full-featured, extensible LMSs similar to Blackboard and Moodle. They do not prescribe how to write a plug-in for existing LMSs, nor to promote one LMS over another, but rather to describe the features and characteristics proposed plug-ins and extensions should have.

Sakharkar et al., in [8], discuss about some existing learning management tools for mobile and the issues that arise in network constrained areas. Authors specifically consider an existing Mobile Learning Engine (MLE) system. Moodle, and present a modification to its architecture for resource and network constrained environments. The proposed solution provides a mobile client for Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) that can be plugged to LMS software. This initiative works in the same direction that the work described in this paper but is developed under proprietary license, and thus the code is not available. In fact, mobile devices cannot display large volumes of rich multimedia content, due to screen size and storage limitations. So mobile devices are not suitable for a student learning a concept for first time. Nevertheless, authors believe that mobiles can be useful for revision of content and practice tests.

Georgouli et al., in [3], propose the experience of using an asynchronous e-learning platform, called cs e-Class, to enhance traditional classroom instruction by incorporating a number of online activities. The paper presents experience from the use of that platform and discusses the success of its adaptation to the educational and administrative needs of our department. Authors compare it with an independent but similar approach that is being used at the Department of Informatics of the Universidad Nova de Lisboa.

Forment et al., in [9], present the development of a mobile extension for the most popular Free/Libre Open Source

Software (FLOSS) LMS: Moodle. The main goal of the project is to extend to mobile devices the most commonly used activities of a Moodle course: forum, calendar, wiki, glossary and internal mail, in a way that the mobile user may work online as well as offline. The simplest approach would have been to create a special Moodle theme and CSS that makes accessible the Moodle web based interface from the mobile devices with little screens. But since the wireless connections are not cheap (plain access unavailable) and there is not access coverage in every place, soon the need for a software client in the mobile device, that stores information locally and syncs with the server when the connection is available and authorized by the user, became clear.

The Moodle Offline Project from the Open University, in [10], provides a description of an offline mobile Moodle client that can be used to work offline and synchronize with the Moodle server but also remains a theoretical report.

III. MOTIVATION AND CHALLENGES In developing countries, Internet connectivity is more and

more increasing, thus access to the Internet spreads to small towns and rural areas through new technologies. The introduction of the Internet represents an opportunity for African countries to access, on a massive scale to sources of scientific and technical information. It is also a medium that can enhance the skills and knowledge of the continent.

However, rates of Internet access in sub-Saharan Africa are the most expensive in the world, according to the ITU, the cost of a broadband connection is on average about $ 100 to 110 kilobits / second against less $ 30 in North Africa and less than $ 20 in the world. The low Internet penetration and high cost of the connection are mainly due to the lack of high-capacity international networks. Operators can therefore impose a price above the marginal cost of service. Today, only one submarine cable of optical fiber serves the western coast of Africa-SAT-3. In addition of that, comes one energy supply failure due to lack of electricity.

Until recently, the concept of offline Moodle has been limited. Indeed, Moodle Offline is focused on principle that without an Internet connection, Moodle operates in a close community and is accessible only by those who have direct physical access to the machine that is hosting Moodle. In summary, it is about providing an isolated personal Moodle instance that can be accessed only by, the owner of the desktop personal computer that hosts Moodle Offline.

The aim of our work is to implement a device that allows a student to be able to dispose out of a permanent connection to the eLearning platform, all the activities and resources constantly on his computer. The user in question will get updates on his computer when the Internet connection is available automatically from a set of programs installed in client and server for managing synchronization. Our contribution is to develop an eLearning platform operating in disconnected mod. The proposed framework is based on the Moodle platform with a set of java programs for the management of installations, update and synchronization and Internet performance for monitoring and testing connectivity.

For several works, the concept of Moodle Offline is the name given to an instance of Moodle operating on a desktop personal computer. It is to replicate the eLearning environment that is being used within Offline Moodle on machines using the Windows or Linux operating system. In many cases, there is no connection with other online platform.

IV. MOODLE OFFLINE FRAMEWORK After the text edit has been completed, the paper is ready

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A. Architecture The proposal of this framework is to allow a learner to

access its resources and activities of online courses while being disconnected. That is why a client application communicating with a server application was put in place to allow updating resources and activities related to the learner automatically.

The general system architecture (shown in figure 1.) consists of the following parts:

In this architecture, we have a set of client platforms "light Moodle" connecting from an Internet connection to a server with a Moodle platform. Thus, we have two parts: client and server

1) Client side: In the client side, we have a combination of JAVA programs for updating resources and activities of the learner and the Iperf tool for testing connectivity with the server. The combination of these two elements will maintain the consistency of the client platform " light Moodle " for the learner.

2) Server side: At the server level, we have the same structure of application programs with Java technology for recovering and preparing updates, Iperf tool for monitoring the connectivity module and a module for notifying users of the system changes through a mechanism of SMS based always on Java technology.

Figure 1. System Architecture

B. Frameworks modules

Figure 2. Framework Description

1) Client Modules Java Client module: It is the main unit processing at the

client platform. It allows starting the installation of Moodle module, to retrieve and install updates at the client side and run the iperf module before any operation requesting the server. This module also supports the execution of client updates to the server. Launching the execution of SQL statements in PHP to query the server platform does this.

Iperf client module: it allows you to test connectivity with the server before installation, update or information back to the server. This module interacts with the iperf server module for the connectivity test and is launched by the java module. The tests are based on the Percentage of packet loss between the client and server. Thus, if the percentage of loss is less than 10%, the connection is good, otherwise if the percentage is between 10 and 50%, the connection is acceptable, otherwise if the percentage exceeds 50%, the connection is bad and updates are transferred to a shorter period (10 minutes) than the normal time (30 minutes), i.e. after a successful update.

Moodle module: it is the primary tool of interaction between the client platform and the learner. This module is a platform Moodle installed from the java module automatically. It allows the learner to have a local copy of the simplified online course platform, with data concerning only him. Any consistency is managed from the java module.

2) Server Modules Java server module: it represents the main processing unit at

the server platform. This module is responsible for preparing the device update client applications by giving the value of the lock file front, by removing the files updated as database of resources and user files by referencing the changes affecting them. It is from this module that reports on changes in the system are made by SMS empower users.

Iperf module: This module allows the server to retrieve the various states of connectivity and to respond to requests from client�’s modules Iperf. All this is done to meet the connectivity tests.

SMS module: it provides a mechanism to notify users by SMS system, as these learners are not permanently connected. Thus, it will be necessary to notify major changes from the platform through their mobile phones. This module consists of a Java application communicating with a GSM modem and notifications are triggered by the java module (at the server side) that uses the module for sending SMS messages to end users.

C. Framework engine description The first time that the client application is running, a

connectivity test is performed to complete the download installation files, then a local installation of Moodle platform will be made automatically.

For update operations of client-server and server-client, the first action is a test of connectivity. If the second step is an SQL statement activities insertion made by the user locally, it

will be executed after this check, otherwise if the next step is to update information about the user of the client platform, a status check of the file front is to check if the download is allowed. Then retrieve the file from the user in question is and its comparison with the local file is performed to retrieve the updated information. From there, the recovery of items is updated from the repository and these elements will be relative to the user. Thus, the local platform will be a lightened replica of the main platform containing only the data related to the user. Only after recovering updates that the installation is finalized.

The SMS module will be responsible for notifying major system changes to the end users, such as adding user at a new course or creating a new task or activity by the teacher.

D. Implementation and Tests Installation is performed on Windows System. So, it is

necessary to have: • Windows System • Easy PHP • JRE 1.5 or higher

An executable jar is then launched where it is specified the name and email of the user who is first on the centralized platform. After the connectivity test is successful, the download and installation of the local platform is done. Then, application identifies each user according to his username and email (like figure 3). After successful identification of the central Moodle platform, the following message is displayed, otherwise an error message.

Figure 3. Client Tools installation

For a first connection to the Moodle central platform via Client tool, the connectivity test will be launched. If the result is acceptable then installation will be triggered to set up a Moodle client platform, as shown in the figure 3.

Note that, the Iperf tool is used to test the download speed between the client and the server is running on the client side.

Figure 4. IPERF Client

At the server side, it also exist an Iperf module that responds to requests to evaluate bandwidth as follows in figure 5.

Figure 5. IPERF Server

If the bandwidth is considered sufficient, then the program installation will be made, otherwise it will be postponed.

The Moodle client platform installation concerns resources for a user who logged via this Client tool. Thus, the database resources such as courses, activities, chats and forums of this user will be deported on his local computer. As a result, we have a limited client platform on the user�’s side. After installation, the login page will be opened as the home page (figure 3).

The user, which has an account on, the main platform can connect to its local platform. Thus, all courses that concern him can be seen on the local platform.

V. CONCLUSION The proposed solution is on one hand based on three client

side modules: Java, Iperf and Moodle. The Java Client module is the client side main process unit that manages installations, updates and uploads to the server. The Iperf Client module gives the information about the connectivity state between client and server. The Moodle Client module is a lightweight Moodle customized with the subscribed user information�’s only.

On the other hand, we have four server side modules: Java, Iperf, SMS and Moodle. The Java Server module is the server side main process unit preparing updates for clients and end users SMS notifications. The Iperf server communicates with the Iperf Client about the connectivity state. The SMS module sends information about resources and activities updates to end users who are not full time connected. The Moodle Server module is a Moodle platform where are centralized all resources and courses activities.

As an application system we first targeted the distance learning system of teachers-students who act critical role in rural area education system. Constrained to stay in this degraded connectivity environment for training students and studying on distance learning system, our solution will permit these teachers-students to optimize their activities.

After validation of all tests and users feedback on our first target, we plan to provide a package allowing distance leaning system Moodle based to be used overcoming connectivity constraints, representing a real problem in developing countries.

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