FOSS and Education: iTalc and Moodle

If you’re running a training center, whether it concerns distance education or not, you need tools to help you manage your classes and facilitate discussions, especially for those who are into distance education learning programs. Issues that need to be addressed include: course management as well as ensuring that the training room is managed well so that learners can focus on the lessons and not be distracted by other applications.

Let the Training Room Come into Order with iTalc

Today, I’ve learned about iTalc. It is an application that lets you manage your training room’s computers by ensuring that your students will not be distracted. If you are the trainer, then you can do the following:

• View snapshots of each unit – just so you could check if they’re still doing their exercises or if they’re goofing off already. Better yet, you could use this monitor if they’re just passing messages to each other.
• Lock all the computers so that they will listen to what you are trying to explain. This will be very handy when you are explaining the instructions of an exercise.
• Remote control of computers. In case one of your learners needs some assistance, you could access it without a hitch and you could help him/her.
• Allow access to the network even if the learner is remote. As long as your learner has the iTalc client, then he/she can join via VPN-connections. He/She doesn’t need to be left behind by her peers.

The developers have made this software available for Linux and Windows users but especially those with Debian and Ubuntu Linux, as well as Windows XP. The minimum hardware requirements are listed here. Ubuntu LTSP users of iTalc have a specific guide too.

Moodle Gets the Distance Education Classes Going

Managing a group of learners not interacting with you face to face might not be easy. It’s not the same as guiding someone personally. Some people don’t really do well with just emails and forums. As a teacher, you’d need to announce deadlines, etc. With Moodle you could do that too.

Other things you could do with Moodle:

• Manage a student profiles. People can enlist in your class and you would be able to view their profiles and let your students manage their profiles too.
• Have a place for your reading lists, course outline, etc. Whatever is relevant for your course, it’s possible to put them all on Moodle.
• You could also manage your Moodle setup so that you could make the students more comfortable in their native language since it supports 70+ languages. If ever, students can select the language of their choice too. This is especially for those with a students from everywhere.
• Moodle supports various media and file formats. This would hopefully enhance the courses so that students will have a variety of material to choose from and learn from.

If you’re thinking about how to make learning better for your trainees or those who are interested in having their training with you but they are so far away, Moodle seems to be a good choice.