To sit on the porch of Danabaai. The serenity, the laid back life of the people of the Southern Cape, the see, to fish to drink a home brew beer, SIGH! soon!

There is so much that needs to be done before the break. The CPS (class room performance system), was the most demanding part of my year, and it is not completely rolled out yet. We are making some advances though and JB have suggested a way to aggregate data from the lecture rooms. If lecturers do their bit and make sure that data are uploaded centrally I will be able link CPS data to Moodle. If Atharo agrees it would be possible to use her skills development module in Moodle as an interface to this data. We just have to convince E-learning Division that we need to set the skills module as a module that is accessible to all students in the faculty. I will speak to Herbert and see if I cannot get him to agree, then we can include all the e-learning applications into the skills development module, Atharo will probably not mind.

I asked Atharo to get a formal notification from E-learning Division that the pilot project may be run in 2007. They supplied it, stating that only projects that are under their auspices may be run. What happened to academic freedom in Faculties and Schools? Why is Faculties not encouraged to take responsibility of their own e-learning? Quality assurance in the Medical School was always the Medical Schools responsibility, why should the e-learning component of teaching in the School be treated differently? Why do they not give proper notification?

It seems that I have slipped in through the backdoor again. I hate this feeling – a strong emotion. I am never part of anything, yet everyone wants to have an opinion about what I should do! E-learning Division has given Atharo the go-ahead to run a pilot on Moodle in 2007. I am grateful but I have reservations – why should I be grateful? They make it seem as if we are indebted to them while we are just trying to do what is best for our students. The challenge is to turn the backdoor into an atractive gateway.

If one looks at all the email from Moodle discussions it seems that there are quite a lot of current issues. I am convinced that Moodle will be a better environment than WebCT but I will need to get a better understanding of Moodle than I have at present. I did manage to create a block that can submit information to external validation pages. The ability to post information from Moodle to external pages is great.