[Server-devel] Server setup, acct management, moodle

[Martin Langhoff]

Hi all!

First of alll, brief intro: I'm Martin Langhoff, one of the core
Moodle developers, and involved with a few other web-based e-learning
projects. I am catching up with this list -- just read the archives
but I suspect other things may be in motion.

I had a few private exchanges with Wad and Holger that I want to
summarise here in case I get run over by a bus...

Account handling in school environments

Wad and JG were asking how school environments handle accounts
currently. Very often -- they don't. If they have a student mgmt
system at all, they are mostly backwards and only tracking grades and
course assignments, and don't talk to anything else. Also the school
mgm software market is very fragmented. In short - unless a particular
country is consolidated on a given tool, it's not worth the effort.

There are a few foss student mgmt systems out there, non very mature,
none widespread. CentreSIS is probably the most mature (though it has
some issues) but the question is whether we need one of these.
SchoolTool/SchoolBell has been touted as targetting this space but
isn't there yet, and has been in development for years now.

I also looked at the acct mgmt tools included in DebianEdu/Skolelinux,
and found them very awkward and raw from a UI POV. They use LDAP
internally.

Holger also asked about LDAP. At this point in time, and being very
familiar with LDAP (maintainer of various LDAP systems in production,
and the LDAP Moodle integration), I think using LDAP is overkill.
Also, OpenLDAP has significant performance and stability issues -- the
2.1/2.2/2.3 series have all had pretty serious dataloss bugs that I
don't want to have to deal with in the field.

(And the main reason for using LDAP in the past -- that everything
talks to LDAP -- no longer holds. Now everything that talks to LDAP
also talks to MySQL and PostgreSQL. Cutting the unreliable middleman
works great for me.)

Wad or JG suggested using Moodle as the primary acct mgmt point, and
it is perfectly reasonable:

- Moodle's acct management is very usable if the school has no other
backend. Besides manual data-entry, it can take CSV file uploads and a
few other alternatives.

- We have a a Google SoC student working on acct mgmt UI improvements.
If OLPC has specific comments/needs/expectations in this area we can
work on them.

- Moodle is really easy to configure to be a slave to an external data
source containing user acct data (ldap, database, imap/pop/nntp,
OpenID, shibboleth, radius, etc). It can also use IMS-Enterprise files
(an XML-based standard, newish, not very widespread).

- The OS can use PAM MySQL modules to provide login, GeCOS, etc

- MTAs and mailing lists can similarly be setup to run based on moodle
acct info, and course participants listing using lookups against MySQL

- I was reading recently discussion on devel about "activation"
procedures for the newly-arrived-to-school laptops. Happy to work
through those steps on a moodle-based UI or make moodle a slave to the
activation data collected elsewhere.

OpenID

I'll be happy to do any work on the Moodle side to work within the
OpenID/Bitfrost model that Ivan has designed for OLPC. At this moment
there is a non-official OpenID plugin for Moodle that I've reviewed.
It didn't meet some of our criteria for inclusion of the official
release at the time. It seems to be good code so I don't think there's
any major blocker there.

The code is mainly focused on being an OpenID client rather than a
provider. If Moodle is to be the OpenID provider, that'll take a bit
more work.

Moodle Install

I setup an initial install on the XS machine that Wad setup, and I've
setup a Git branch to track any custom work we do there. I am happy to
prep an RPM if noone else does -- but I'd be happy of someone takes
ownership of the packaging, and just packages the 'olpc' branch I
publish.

Theme / UI for Moodle

Roped Paul Walker -- who works with me -- to read through the OLPC HIG
and prepare a Moodle theme and iconset matching OLPC, and perhaps
draft some UI changes. Going a bit slow on that track, but I'll talk
with him this week.

~~~~

Phew. That was a lot, but a bit of a starting point.

cheers,


martin