This module is resulting of more than 8 years of R&D and was initially built for the Intel's worldwide Teach Advanced Online (TAO) program, before being reused at French Education Ministry in the Pairforma@nce moodle based program.
It was initially developped to provide a resource sharing facility between moodle 1.9 courses, as the resource and files architecture was much less optimized than in Moodle 2.x and upper versions. Migrating to moodle 2.x opened a big debate on how worth was the pursuit of the development on this concept. In spite of some other ways of reusing resources and files in several courses in moodle, we finally decided to keep the concept alive for the following reasons:
There is no other resource and file component in moodle that manages the complete set of standard metadata schemas.
There is no other provision in Moodle to get a resource pool that can be exposed to external harvesters using standard metadata exposition methods such as OAI-PMH.
Other ways of rusing a resource is provided by pragmatic “tricks” such as publishing from a user attached file area, but there is no institutionnaly defined “common” document space.
External document applications (such as Alfresco, Nuxeo, Dropbox) can provide the exposed standards, but:
Some small sized organizations cannot afford mastering the administration overhead of such tools.
Moodle is not aware of externally managed metadata, and cannot develop high integration level using metadata.
External dedicated document applications may be oversized and overfeatured regarding the local need of managing an educationnal document subset.
For all these reasons, the Sharedresource module is the basic element of a complete resource library facility that will result of the cooperation of several other components:
-
The
Sharedresources block : Conversion accessories between sharedresources and other resource storage types in moodle.
-