My first dabble at Moodle

Recently, I came upon Colleen M Lewis' Scratch 2.0 resources.   I requested her curriculum materials and she sent me a link to download her Moodle backups.  Unlike the stuff I got from UC Berkeley last year for their BYOB curriculum (they recently removed those Moodle backups and all that remains is the online version!), her Moodle backup actually requires you to run it from Moodle in order to see anything useful.

So, I went to Moodle and decided to try out their stand-alone package for Windows (click here).  This lets you run Moodle as localhost with an Xampp installation.  OK, I did that, but I had trouble restoring the backup archive.  The first error I got was regarding the size of the ZIP file I was trying to upload to Moodle:

The solution to this problem was found here.  One needs to change the php.ini file:
post_max_size = 288M

The next error I got was error writing to database.  A Google search “moodle restore error writing to database” found this https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=180806

Solution:  edit the my.ini in the mysql/bin directory and change the max_allowed_packet = 1M to e.g. max_allowed_packet = 100M.

Now, I could upload the ZIP file of the Moodle backup and restore it on my localhost Moodle installation.  It worked!  The course restore process takes quite a long time, so one must be patient as the course is restored.

Next, I thought I could just copy the Moodle folder from one computer to the other and it would work.  I was wrong.  I had to unzip the original Moodle distribution and go through the setup for Moodle all over again.  This was due to the change in file locations when moving from one computer to another.

I was also successful at installing Moodle on a Pentium 4 2.80 GHz computer running Windows Vista Basic and XAMPP.  I had to adjust a setting in php.ini and then the install went through without a hitch (I had created a MySQL database for it with PHPMyadmin prior to the install).  This computer will provide digital signage for an elementary school using Xibo.   I was thinking Moodle could be used to manage their RSS feed for Xibo as the Open Source School did.