Adapt Learning Community: Course as an "external tool" in moodle

Hi,

congratulations to this wonderful authoring tool. It is right at the edge of what is required today. So I am convinced it will have a bright future.

To try it out, I drafted a small course (9.5 Mb) and uploaded it into moodle as a scorm package. With some hints from this forum I got it to work. The course opens into a new window and works on all devices as intended.

A major drawback is, however, the long loading duration before the course actually starts:
--- 1 min 15 sec! ----

Alternatively, when I call the course just by an URL (index.html) directly, it opens instantly.
It does not make sense to split up the course into several smaller SCOs as I prefer to have the navigation inside the course. From my understanding it is also not possible to get the whole course running via the moodle activity “file” (in latest moodle versions). It might be possible by enabling “legacy course files areas”, but this feature seems to become more and more outdated.

So I thought a possible solution could be to set up the course as an “external tool” in moodle. To add the IMS LTI functionality to my courses seems manageable. (Tracking functionality could be added via xAPI at later stage.)

Would this be a good approach or are there better solutions?

How could I then best protect the course files if they reside outside the “moodle data” folder (like in a separate course directory in the public folder)?

It shouldn't take your course any longer to load just because it's being launched as a SCO on Moodle... does this same thing also happen if you use SCORM Cloud? Is the course something you're able to share with one of us so that we can try and replicate?

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Thanks a lot for your reply! I will do some further testing. The course needs some modification before I can share it as there is some proprietary content in it.

I will be travelling the next weeks, but I will report as soon as I have any news.

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So after about 3 weeks I came back to the issue and believe it or not the course now loads very quickly. So the problem of the long loading time is gone.

I am not aware of having changed anything as my desktop was not in use when I was travelling and I also did not change anything in Moodle. So I cannot really say what the cause of the problem was.

Needless to say that I am happy it works and that I can proceed with using Adapt for developing the course.

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