Moodle TextCloud


Funding: AAA/SWITCH – e-infrastructure for e- science” programme under the leadership of SWITCH, the Swiss National Research and Education Network, supported by funds from the Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology (OPET).

Coordinator: Riccardo Mazza

Period: October, 2010 - December, 2010



Motivation

Learners should reach their desired resources in few clicks. But to find a particular learning resource in a Learning Management System like Moodle or in a specific course is sometimes not easy at all. Text clouds can help to find a targeted file with only one click.


Description

In this project a plugin for the LMS Moodle was created that generates a block with a text cloud of the most popular keywords of the course. Text keywords are automatically extracted from course resources (HTML and text pages, PDF files, WORD and PPT documents, ODF documents), and correspond to the most frequent words that appear in course resources. Keywords are represented in form of a tag cloud visualization. The size of keywords in the visual representation reflects the frequency of the keywords among the resources of the course. Keywords in visual representations are hyperlinks. When the user click on a keyword, a small pop-up shows a collection of resources that contains that keyword. The user can then select and immediately access the requested resource. The instructors can include this block in their course, and the students will see the visualization that can be used for a direct access to the resources that are associated with a keyword.
The software works with version 1.9.x and 2.0 of Moodle.

My contribution

I submitted this project to the funding institution and coordinated the work.



 

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