Martin Božič, Arnes, Ljubljana
Arnes Classrooms is a service which enables new ways of using Moodle that are not possible in the current Moodle setups among the educational institutions in Slovenia. There were great steps made at introducing IT in Slovenian educational sphere in the last decade. There were also many changes in the IT field itself – various cloud and web services and mobile devices. The implications of those changes reflect in out expectations in communication and collaboration. On the other hand, they are bringing new challenges which we can sometimes hardly keep track of. And many times the very plethora of tools makes our collaboration difficult since weve learned to use so many different applications and services. The paradigm »1 Moodle environment per school« proved to be unsustainable because of lack of resources for technical support from Arnes. Something similar has happened with the support within schools where focus from using Moodle in-depth within classroom shifted towards collaboration and communication among coworkers. By deciding to merge the many Moodles into a single one to better manage our support and maintenance, other unforeseen options and opportunities opened up, especially in the area of collaboration and projects among different educational institutions. Additionally, because of our decision to limit user authentication to federated (AAI) login only, new paths for exams within Moodle were enabled (this was already successfully implemented for cyclist exams in Moodle of SIO Communities). The shortcomings in Arnes Classrooms in comparison with a previous model of Moodle hosting come mostly from visibility of users and courses of neighboring institutions. The limitations of Classrooms are mostly felt by the institutions Moodle administrators which were able to tailor their previous Moodle installation by the demands of their colleagues. In this sense we could compare a single Moodle installation and Arnes Classroom as moving from a single-family detached house to an apartment building. Thus the Arnes Classrooms service tries to position itself as a nexus for different educational web services and an environment for collaboration. The Slovenian teachers will be able to find their lowest common denominator upon which they will be able to build a stable and contemporary learning environment for a digital age.
