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README.md

Aspire Moodle Integration

This software provides a "block" for Moodle that can be added to the course page in Moodle. The block will display available reading lists in Talis Aspire for that course.

If you are looking for the Moodle Activity Module for Talis Reading Lists, you should look here...

Benefits

  • Easy integration of Talis Aspire reading lists into your Moodle installation
  • Reading lists become more visible to your students
  • Increase usage of reading lists in Talis Aspire
  • Optionally view only lists related to the time period of the currently displayed Moodle course page.
  • Customisation of wording displayed to students
  • Supports multiple languages

License

Copyright (c) Talis Education Limited, 2013 Released under the LGPL Licence - http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html. Anyone is free to:

  • change or modify the code code
  • redistribute the code without restriction There is no warranty, either expressed or implied, covering the use or installation of this software.

Pre-requisites

A running Moodle instance. This block has been tested against Moodle 2.4.x, 2.5.x and v2.6.x It has not been tested against any other version.

Our test environment was the Bitnami Moodle Stack (http://bitnami.org/stack/moodle) running in a local virtual machine.

How to install

The commands shown here are those used on a unix based system, they also contain specifics for our bitnami based moodle instance on which we were testing, but the principle of each step can be applied to other systems.

  1. ssh or telnet to your Moodle server

     ssh user@yourserver.local
    
  2. change directory to your Moodle PHP application's root htdocs directory:

     cd /somewhere/moodle/htdocs/
    
  3. Download the file aspire-moodle-integration.tar to this directory:

     wget https://github.com/talis/aspire-moodle-integration/raw/master/moodle-block-plugin/aspire-moodle2.4-integration.tar
    
  4. Extract the archive:

     tar -xvf aspire-moodle2.4-integration.tar 
    
  5. Log into Moodle as an administrator, and navigate to the Notifications screen

     http://yourserver/moodle/admin/index.php
    
  6. You should see a message telling you that the Talis Aspire Resource Lists block needs your attention. Clicking 'Upgrade Moodle database now' will finish off the installation of this block.

How to configure

The block needs to be configured to point to your Talis Aspire tenancy

  1. Now setup the block:
  2. choose Site Administration >> Plugins >> Blocks >> Talis Aspire Resource Lists
  3. Configure the plugin for your local installation * You will need the following for a basic installation:
    • Your Talis Aspire Base URL: e.g. http://readinglists.institution.ac.uk
    • To know whether your lists are attached to modules, courses, units, etc...
    • A couple of regular expressions to choose the bits of your Moodle CourseID that Talis Aspire is interested in. The first regular expression should allow a match to module codes in Talis Aspire. The second regular expression is used to match to time period slugs in Talis Aspire. If you need help with these, please raise a ticket with some example Moodle codes, and we'll give you a hand. * HTTPS and Talis Aspire. If your Talis Aspire tenancy is running with HTTPS forced to true, you will need to add your HTTPS Alias to the plugin configuration. In all other cases Leave this blank.

Making it live

  1. Now add the block to all courses
  2. Follow the instructions in this Moodle Documentation
  3. Sticky blocks are a moodle feature and not something we have any direct control over.
  4. Or you might want to only add to a selected course:
  5. From the Blocks drop down on the right hand column, choose "Resource Lists".
  6. The resource lists block will be placed on the page. Optionally, you can now position the block using the icons under the block title to move it about.