Seeding organic agriculture courses on Moodle: the agriMoodle case

Vassilis Protonotarios (Agro-Know), Andreas Drakos (Agro-Know), Maria Toader (USAMVB-FA) & Anastasios Koutoumanos (CTI)

Agricultural education & learning

Agricultural Education

• Agricultural Education: teaching of agriculture, natural resources, and land management through hands on experience and guidance to – prepare students for entry level jobs or – to further education to prepare them for advanced agricultural jobs.

• Agricultural education can be taught at – elementary level, – middle school level, – secondary, – post secondary and – adult levels.

Distance learning

• Moving from classroom-based teaching & learning to web-based, distance one

Distance learning vs Classroom learning

• Eliminate location barriers;• Minimize time restrictions;• Makes use of online

resources;• Fully-featured online

course management platforms;

• Use of online collaboration tools;

• Based on digital formats;

• Personal contact with tutor;

• No internet connection needed;

• Hands-on collaboration with other classmates;

• Based on traditional formats;

About Moodle

• Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment

• Software for producing Internet-based courses• Serving >71 million users in >7.4 million courses• Released on 20 August 2002, now in 2.3 version• Open Source Software (GNU General Public v.3)

About Moodle

Moodle stats

Moodle features

About agriMoodle

• Extends moodle– with ready-to-use functionality, services, tools– targeted towards agricultural uses

• Links moodle– to existing agricultural information sources & data

• Creates a network of agri-moodle installations– Facilitating location of educational resources– Based on TEL standards– Promoting open access and re-use of resources

agriMoodle

• provides great green/agri- templates and themes

• is linked to interesting sources of green/agri- educational material

• trainers can use tools to import resources from relevant agricultural repositories

• trainers can easily create and export metadata for their courses and resources

• learners can benefit from (automatic) references to useful material

The agriMoodle concept

The agriMoodle components

1. (Organic.Edunet) IEEE LOM editor2. Automatic metadata translation functionality3. OAI-PMH compliance, – exporting Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM metadata

4. OER Finder Widget

1. LOM Editor

2. Automatic metadata translation

3. OAI-PMH compliance

• OAI-PMH: Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

4. OER Finder widget

• A work in progress– Development by UAH with AK contributions in the

context of the Organic.Lingua ICT-PSP project

Already used in other projects– Herbal.Mednet (

http://www.ieru.org/projects/herbalmednet) – V3DAS (http://www.v3das.com)

• Open Source / Available at Github:– http://agrimoodle.org

agrimoodle development

agrimoodle instances

Next steps

The agriMoodle Hub

Thank you!

vprot@agroknow.grwww.agro-know.gr

http://blog.agro-know.com