Services

Moodle is a Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management system (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It has become very popular among educator around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic web site for their students. The focus of the Moodle is always on giving educators the best tools to manage and promote learning.

Course Management System (CMS)

Moodle is an open source course management system. It is used by thousands of educational institutions around the world to provide an organized interface for e-learning, Moodle allows educators to create online courses, which students can access as a virtual classroom.

Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It has become very popular among educators around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic web sites for their students. To work, it needs to be installed on a web server somewhere, either on one of your own computers or one at a web hosting company.

The focus of the Moodle project is always on giving educators the best tools to manage and promote learning, but there are many ways to use Moodle:

Moodle has features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and hundreds of thousands of students, yet it can also be used for a primary school or an education hobbyist.
Many institutions use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses (known as blended learning).
Many of our users love to use the many activity modules (such as Forums, Wikis, Databases and so on) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around their subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition), while others prefer to use Moodle as a way to deliver content to students (such as standard SCORM packages) and assess learning using assignments or quizzes.

Madarisna is only solution introducing Cource Management System (CMS) and Learning Management System (LMS) in Arabic. Initial task of service is available to higher secondary school and later the service is extended to primary & secondary school as well. Highly professional teacher are managing the content for above courses based on the education standard of Sultanate of Oman.

Madarisna is a course management system designed to help educators who want to create quality online courses it is used by thousands of educational institutions around the world to provide an organized interface for e-learning, Madarisna allows educators to create online courses, which students can access as a virtual classroom.

Overview

Goals are to reduce admin involvement to a minimum, while retaining high security

Supports a range of authentication mechanisms through plug-in authentication modules, allowing easy integration with existing systems.

Standard email method: students can create their own login accounts. Email addresses are verified by confirmation.

LDAP method: account logins can be checked against an LDAP server. Admin can specify which fields to use.

IMAP, POP3, NNTP: account logins are checked against a mail or news server. SSL, certificates and TLS are supported.

Students are encouraged to build an online profile including photos, description. Email addresses can be protected from display if required.

Every user can specify their own timezone, and every date in Moodle is translated to that timezone (e.g. posting dates, assignment due dates etc)

Enrolment

Teachers can add an “enrolment key” course to keep out non-students. They can give out this key face-to-face or via personal email etc.
Teachers can enroll student manually if desired.
Teachers can unenrol student manually if desired, otherwise they are automatically unenrolled after a certain period of inactivity (set by the admin)
External database: any database containing at least two fields can be used as an external authentication source.
Each person requires only one account for the whole server - each account can have different access.
Meta courses can group together related courses so participants can interact with each other.

Roles

Roles for specific participants can be defined for each course.
An admin account controls the creation of courses and creates teachers by assigning users to courses.
Course creators can create courses, teach in them, and assign others to teacher roles.
Teachers are a role in a specific course.
Non-editing teacher roles are available for adjuncts, and part-time tutors.

Course Management - Overview

A full teacher has full control over all settings for a course, including restricting other teachers.
Choice of course formats such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focussed social format.
Course Themes. A course can have its own theme of colors and layout.
Flexible array of course activities - Forums, Quizzes, Glossaries, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, Workshops.
Groups - teacher(s) and students can be placed in one or more groups .
Recent changes to the course since the last login can be displayed on the course home page - helps give sense of community .
Most text entry areas (resources, forum postings etc) can be edited using an embedded WYSIWYG HTML editor.
All grades for Forums, Quizzes and Assignments can be viewed on one page (and downloaded as a spreadsheet file)
Full user logging and tracking - activity reports for each student are available with graphs and details about each module (last access, number of times read) as well as a detailed "story" of each students involvement including postings etc on one page.
Mail integration - copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be mailed in HTML or plain text.
Custom scales - teachers can define their own scales to be used for grading forums and assignments.
Courses can be packaged as a single zip file using the Backup function. These can be restored on any Moodle server.

Assignment Module

Assignments can be specified with a due date and a maximum grade.
Students can upload their assignments (any file format) to the server - they are date-stamped.
Late assignments are allowed, but the amount of lateness is shown clearly to the teacher.
For each particular assignment, the whole class can be assessed (grade and comment) on one page in one form.
Teacher feedback is appended to the assignment page for each student, and notification is mailed out.
The teacher can choose to allow resubmission of assignments after grading (for regrading)
Allowing resubmissions can allow the teacher to progress monitor student projects/assignments as they evolve.
Advanced assignments can allow multiple files to be uploaded. This could keep together preplanning maps, outlines, research papers and presentations. (Not for beginners)

Chat Module

Allows smooth, synchronous text interaction.
Includes profile pictures in the chat window.
Supports URLs, smilies, embedded HTML, images etc.
All sessions are logged for later viewing, and these can also be made available to students.

Choice Module

Like a poll. Can either be used to vote on something, or to get feedback from every student (eg research consent)
Teacher sees intuitive table view of who chose what.
Students can optionally be allowed to see an up-to-date graph of results.

Forum Module

Different types of forums are available, such as teacher-only, course news, open-to-all, and one-thread-per-user.
All postings have the authors photo attached.
Discussions can be viewed nested, flat or threaded, oldest or newest first.
Individual forums can be subscribed to by each person so that copies are forwarded via email, or the teacher can force subscription for all.
The teacher can choose not to allow replies (eg for an announcements-only forum)
Discussion threads can be easily moved between forums by the teacher.
Attached images are shown inline.
If forum ratings are being used, these can be restricted to a range of dates.

Glossary Module

This is one of the modules that best illustrates the way that Moodle can fundamentally improve upon the experience of a traditional classroom.
When students contribute to a course in a public place like the glossary, their ideas are given weight and attention and often result in a greater pride or ownership of the assignment.
Allows participants to create and maintain a list of definitions, like a dictionary.
Student entries can be previewed by instructors before publishing.
Entries can be searched or browsed using alphabet, category, date, and author.
A glossary of terms can be easily referenced by students.
Almost any module of Moodle can be set to hyperlink - automatically - to any word or phrase that is stored in or added to the glossary.
Glossary items can be grouped in categories.
Participants can comment on glossary entries.
Entries can be rated using teacher-defined scales.
Glossaries can be easily exported and imported via xml.
Glossaries can be fully searched.
Glossaries can be viewed with different display formats.

Lesson Module

A lesson is a series of pages which can be presented in a linear fashion, like a slide show, or in a non-linear, branching manner, or in a combination of the two.
Navigation through the lesson can be straight forward or complex, logical or random.
Pages can allow students choices through answers to teacher directed questions or descriptions.
Each choice can be associated with jumps that link to other tables.
Offers different scoring and grading potentials.
Interfaces with Grade and Glossary modules.
Lessons can build upon each other through conditional dependencies upon one another
Question pages include Multiple choice, Multi-answer, T/F, numeric, short answer and essay.
Pages can be imported either as questions in a variety of formats or from Power Points.
Student attempts, time limits, minimum score and retakes can be set.
Page content is HTML compatible, with a full set of edit tools for the teacher.
Students may see progress bars, running score, reinforcement to student questions.
Password, start and end times, and other restrictions can be placed on students.

Quiz Module

Teachers can define a database of questions for re-use in different quizzes.
Questions can be stored in categories for easy access, and these categories can be "published" to make them accessible from any course on the site.
Quizzes are automatically graded, and can be re-graded if questions are modified.
Quizzes can have a limited time window outside of which they are not available.
At the teacher's option, quizzes can be attempted multiple times, and can show feedback and/or correct answers.
Quiz questions and quiz answers can be shuffled (randomized) to reduce cheating.
Questions allow HTML and images.
Questions can be imported from external text files.
Quizzes can be attempted multiple times, if desired.
Attempts can be cumulative, if desired, and finished over several sessions.
Multiple-choice questions supporting single or multiple answers.
Short Answer questions (words or phrases)
True-False questions.
Matching questions.
Random questions.
Numerical questions (with allowable ranges)
Embedded-answer questions (cloze style) with answers within passages of text.
Embedded descriptive text and graphics.

Resource Module

Supports display of any electronic content, Word, PowerPoint, Flash, Video, Sounds etc. that are stored locally, or remotely.
Files can be uploaded and managed (zipped, unzipped, renamed, moved, etc..) on the server.
Folders can be created and managed on the server and linked to.
Internal web pages (html formatted) can be created with WYSIWYG editor and linked to.
Internal text pages (no formatting) can be created and linked to
External content on the web can be linked to or seamlessly included within the course interface.
External web applications can be linked to with data passed to them.
Linked MP3 audio files will display with elegant flash player.

Survey Module

Built-in surveys (COLLES, ATTLS) have been proven as instruments for analysing online classes.
Online survey reports always available, including many graphs. Data is downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet or CSV text file.
Survey interface prevents partly-finished surveys.
Feedback is provided to the student of their results compared to the class averages.

Wiki Module

Wiki is a web page that anyone can add to or edit.
It enables documents to be authored collectively and supports collaborative learning.
Old versions are not deleted and may be restored if required.

Workshop Module

Allows peer assessment of documents, and the teacher can manage and grade the assessment.
Supports a wide range of possible grading scales.
Teacher can provide sample documents for students to practice grading.
Very flexible with many options.

Knowledge Gate For Information Technology (kginfotech) has emerged as one of the pioneering IT solution providers in Sultanate of Oman. It has become one of the key players in the GIS / Fleet management Industry after its launch of first FMS solution “Hud Hud” in 2005.

A geographic information system (GIS) integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing analyzing and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information.

The GIS services offered by the company can be placed under the following headings.

1. Spatial data creation / Spatial data conversion services

AFTICOM as a part of its Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) project has developed an impressive Geographic Information System (GIS) set up of its own. AFTICOM’s GIS lab possesses the state of the art Computer Hardware, GIS Softwares and highly qualified manpower.

1.1 Vector Data Creation

AFTICOM offers Vector data creation services to all its customers. Vector Data Creation in GIS parlance refers to the development of Spatial data / Map data from source maps i.e. Paper maps, Satellite Imageries, Engineering drawings etc.

1.2 Vector Data conversion & Vector Feature extraction services

AFTICOM also offers vector feature extraction from topographic maps, satellite imageries etc. Vector layers like roads, rivers, land parcel boundaries, buildings, contours; administrative boundaries etc are extracted in vector formats. This vector format data can be provided in any of the popular GIS data formats as well as in suitable projection. In addition to this, AFTICOM offers data conversion services in itself to the interested clients. All the industry standard formats such as ESRI ArcInfo export (Eoo); ESRI shape files (shp) ; Intergraph / Microstation Design (dgn); MapInfo (TAB) MapInfo (MID/MIF), AutoCAD (DWG/DXF), DTED, STDS, VPF etc are included.

1.3 Raster data Processing, registration and ortho - rectification

AFTICOM offers services in Image rectification, resampling, colour balance, noise reduction and geo-referencing. In addition to these, AFTICOM also offers Mosaicking and Satellite data Interpretation services. AFTICOM has expertise in dealing with vector data extraction from high resolution Satellite imageries such as IKONOS, LANDSAT, IRS, SPOT etc.

2. GIS Training

AFTICOM have required requisite facilities for imparting GIS training. The courses offered would be focussed on providing hands-on training with real data on one of the most popular GIS software in the Industry, the MapInfo Professional. These courses range from an Introduction of Geographic Information system (GIS) and its relevance in different spheres of life, Data Creation, Data Interpretation & analysis as well as the Presentation of the final data output. These courses are suitable for college students studying for undergraduate and post graduate course in subjects like Geology, Environmental Sciences, Civil Engineering, Forestry etc. AFTICOM also offers a basic course of GIS to suit school students, which would give an introduction of Geographic Information System to them.

3. GIS Consultancy Services

AFTICOM offers a wide range of various GIS consultancy services such as User needs assessment study, GIS database planning and design, Hardware & Software survey required for the project, GIS data survey, Acquisition of GIS data, software and hardware, GIS system Integration, GIS database maintenance etc.

4. Customised application development

AFTICOM with its highly qualified programming team can design customised application based upon specific client requirements. AFTICOM offers its services in designing and building desktop as well as Web based customised GIS applications in a variety of programming languages.