Where It All Started: Uploading to Moodle Offline

This is a short paper, but it was the seed of years of research that followed.

The Seed

This was one of my earliest papers, just a single page presented at a conference in Kumamoto in 2013. But it planted the seed for a whole line of research that would define my doctoral years.

The question was simple: in Indonesia, where internet is unreliable, how can a lecturer create Moodle learning content offline and upload it automatically when a connection appears?

The First Attempt

I built a small web application with Flask. Run one Python file, no server setup, and a lecturer could author content offline. The tool would check whether the PC could reach the Moodle server, and when it could, upload the content automatically.

The hard part was Moodle's database. To create one piece of learning content, Moodle writes across multiple tables: the course table, the section table, and format-specific tables like the Wiki or SCORM tables. And Moodle's REST API did not provide functions for all of these. So for the pieces Moodle would not expose, my tool accessed the database more directly.

Why It Matters to Me

Looking at this paper now, it is rough and short. But every big project starts as a small, imperfect first step. This one-page paper became the Moodle plugin work, the REST synchronization, and eventually the full journal paper that anchored my PhD.

I keep it here as a reminder: do not despise small beginnings. The first version of anything is allowed to be small.

Read the Full Paper

Read the full paper: A Supportive Tool for Lecturers to Upload LMS Learning Contents Automatically →

Presented at JCEEE-Kyushu 2013, Kumamoto, Japan.