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Shared Portable Moodle - Spoodle

A free, customisable USB-run copy of your Moodle to support remote students

News - April 2023

We're back. Its been a little while. Will be trying to shift pages across from the previous lost site to this one & Wordpress, have some drafts and some pages accessible via archive.org.
After a lengthy break, keen to get this site back up, and announce a refreshed and current versions of Spoodle, our offline moodle project, all the way up to Moodle 4.2 to celebrate its release!

Welcome

As we increasingly use Learning Management Systems like Moodle to deliver online learning to more people, the learning materials we provide to them also becomes increasingly multimodal. Instead of just being able to provide a flat printed booklet, or a couple of PDFs on a CD and calling it a day, the materials we provide are now full of videos, images, audio, interactive activities, quizzes, and so-on to support learning. The spaces we build to support this learning are often carefully scaffolded so learning occurs in a particular sequence and structure.

So if someone who wants to learn doesn't have internet, or can only get online once a week, does this mean they won't have these same opportunities?

Spoodle - Shared Portable Moodle - is a project to develop a lighter, adapted version of Moodle to run directly from a flash drive, which can be loaded with your course materials and provided to the student. This will allow them to access all of your course materials in their full context, with all the related Moodle activities and resources along with it, even when they don't have internet access.

We're hoping this project will help to support students in rural & remote environments with poor or inconsistent internet access, as well as those who may find themselves with limited connectivity due to their work or life commitments.

Download

To make compatibility with any plugins and functionality you may have within your own Moodle, you'll find a ready-to-go version of Spoodle for a range of different Moodle versions up to the latest 4.2 release

Spoodle 4.2.0 - Download Link (221mb)
Spoodle 4.1.1 - Download Link (209mb)
Spoodle 4.0.6 - Download Link (202mb)
Spoodle 3.11.12 - Download Link (202mb)
Spoodle 3.10.11 - Download Link (194mb)
Spoodle 3.09.19 - Download Link (193mb)

(last updated 28 April 2023)

These download files will contain a fully-installed local copy of Moodle customised to be happily transferred between computers and run directly from a flash drive. To begin, simply download, unzip onto a flash drive or onto your base directory of your computer (that is, you should end up with the folder sitting directly in your C drive or similar letter of choice, eg 'C:\server\' and 'C:\Click to Start.exe')

You can log in with the username 'admin' and the password 'sp00dLe!' (which, obviously, I'd recommend changing straight away before providing to students). From here, turn on editing and add your own banner and logo images over the templated version, and import the courses you need from your live version of Moodle. You can also add any plugins you prefer, or bring across your Moodle theme to match your real version.

Full instructions of how to take specific whole courses, activities and all, from your live version of Moodle into this offline version can be found in the topics below.

Here is the one page (if you print back to back) instructions I've been sending with the flash drive. Adapt as you like! -
Instructions.docx 281.1kb

How to set up and use Spoodle

The section below will cover customising Spoodle to make it look the way you want, some possible uses, and how to add course content to send out to an individual or small group of learners.

Customise Spoodle to suit you

Once you've downloaded the preinstalled version of Moodle above, this section will look at ways of adding your own branding, colours, themes and plugins to make your copy of Spoodle look more your own.

Use cases / Why use it?

Lets look at some possible uses - from supporting students with only occasional access to internet accessing and engaging with their study materials, to possible uses over a local network and collaborative uses.

Setting up for a student

Once you've set up your blank copy with all the look and functionality to match your needs, will go through the most important step - restoring course content and adding users - so these offline materials can be provided directly to the learner.

Notes about what we changed

While the majority of changes work version to version, there are a few differences in where to find some settings, or their names. To save you a bit of sanity, made a note of these differences and have differentiated setup instructions below.

If you've got the zip file from above - skip to section 5 and have a look at how to customise and import your courses! You're still in the right place.

Mac / Linux Note: So the above are set up for Windows. Everything beyond things specific to setting up the server should adapt with the exact same instructions, so try it and see

Complete setup instructions / changes made for Moodle 3.3 - 3.6
Complete setup instructions / changes made for Moodle 3.2.3
Complete setup instructions / changes made for Moodle 3.1.6

Older version setup instructions (2016): 3.1.1 | 3.0.5 | 2.9.7 | 2.8.12 | 2.7.15

Contact Details

Been able to use Spoodle to assist your own students?
Problems with any of the links above?
Thoughts, improvements, feedback, or grand tales to share?

Feel free to drop me an email any time via sgrono2@une.edu.au

Cheers
Steve

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