Moodle localizationMoodle localization Regional cooperation and Regional cooperation and

towards official Serbian towards official Serbian language pack(s)language pack(s)

Branka Ignjić, Živana KomlenovDepartment of Mathematics and InformaticsFaculty of ScienceUniversity of Novi Sad

Moodle is…

* a free e-Learning platform (Course Management System)* designed to help educators create instructionaly sound online courses

Introduction

Moodle has…

* Open Source license * modular design

* over 30.700 registered sites (from 191 countries)* more than 12.800.000 users* about 1.690.000 teachers

Statistics

* > 60 sites with more than 20.000 users* Site with most users is moodle.org: ≈ 288.000 users and 40+ courses

Germany 1300

Hungary 142

Slovenia 121

Romania 76

Bulgaria 64

Croatia 64

Bosnia and Herzegovina 27

Serbia and Montenegro 26

Albania 16

Macedonia 9

Country sites

Statistics

* Usage of Moodle in Serbia is rapidly growing.* Computer illiteracy is note too rare among students (schools, universities), as well as poor English language skills. * System itself is created to make localization simple, still a huge job.

* Problems which appear are not technical.

* There is a special interface for translating strings and help files.

Need for localization

* First official version – Dragan Simić, Banja Luka, Bosnia* Partial translation for moodle 1.5 - Miloš Bajčetić, Belgrade* Bosnian language pack (incomplete)* Croatian language pack (incomplete)* Grammar–sensitive language pack – Bojan Milosavljević,

Kruševac (experimental)

Previous relevant lang packs

* Translation of interface for Moodle 1.6 – Živana Komlenov* Accepted as the official UTF-8 Serbian language packs (August 2006): Cyrillic & Latin + Bosnian (Cyrillic, local version - a dialect spoken in Bosnia)

Current lang packs

* Serbian language packs are regularly updated (basic strings + interesting third-party modules).* Translation of help files has been started last winter.

Fine-tuning & updates

* During DMI’s elective e-Learning seminar, Nikolina Lacković and Branka Ignjić translated 168 help files for Moodle 1.6 and wrote a localization guide (in Serbian).

* Recently formed localization team:

Miloš Bajčetić and his students (School of Medicine, Belgrade) Bojan Milosavljević, Kruševac Živana Komlenov, Gordana Rakić, Ivan Omorac and Branka Ignjić (Faculty of Science, Novi Sad)

* First localization meeting: Novi Sad, July 17, 2007 => Complete 1.8.2 interface + more than 50% of help files* New gatherings are planned* Meanwhile, collaboration is continued online

Extending localization team

http://perun.im.ns.ac.yu/SrMoodle

Localization Web site

* Živana was invited to participate at first Croatian localization meeting as well (June 30, Zagreb).* This workshop was powered by HrOpen (Croatian Society for Open Systems and Internet)

Regional collaboration

* Chief organizer was HrOpen’s chairman, Kristijan Zimmer, (employed at Information Support Centre, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing).

* The meeting was lead by Jasmin Klindžić, who maintains the biggest Moodle site in Croatia, with more than 3.500 students and over 200 teachers at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb.

Regional collaboration

* Miloš Bajčetić joined Živana at this meeting, together with a dozen Moodlers from several Croatian universities.

* Maintenance of Serbian language packs* Solving language tangles (main problems: lack of adequate IT terms in Serbian, grammatical errors)* Joint activities in the region (grammar-sensitivity issues) => Reorganization of language packs to handle cases, genders, etc. properly * Possible hiring of lecturers (funding?)

Further work

Questions?