Are you looking to use Moodle for teaching internet deprived learners? Do you want to teach students without incurring any substantial infrastructure cost? Majority of learners now comes with their own devices like Tablets, Smartphones, or computers. How you can save your infrastructure cost when you are running on a shoestring budget and looking to use Moodle for a small group of learners?
The solution is MoodleBox – A Moodle platform on Raspberry Pi:
MoodleBox is a vagrant local development environment which provides Moodle on-line learning activities and file sharing through Raspberry Pi devices. In August 2016, I posted about the forum discussion about Moodle Box which has now come alive as the MoodleBox Project.
The Idea behind the project began in the French community forum discussion about the construction of a Moodle platform on a local computer, to provide an LMS in regions without any network infrastructure. The idea quickly moved towards building it with Raspberry Pi and make it accessible via Wi-Fi.
MoodleBox provides an internet independent Moodle environment that allows you to create a local network that anyone can connect to via Wi-Fi using a smartphone, tablet, or computer. When connected to a wired network connected to the Internet, it also gives access to the Internet. The platform is best suited for small number of learners not more than 20.
MoodleBox can be a very powerful device especially for teaching students in distant locations. The total hardware cost required to built it is less than $100. All you need is the following stuff to make your MoodleBox ready:
- Raspberry Pi 3,
- Power supply,
- MicroSD card, 32 GB (minimum),
- Raspberry Pi case (not essential, but very useful to protect the Raspberry Pi 3)
There is a Moodle plugin to manage the settings and configuration of Moodlebox. Check out the plugin here.
Are you interested in using MoodleBox? Check out these setup instructions for using it – https://moodlebox.net/en/using/. For complete details check out the official website here.
We take internet connectivity as granted but think about those students who are not able to learn due to poor or negligible network connectivity. Have you ever felt the need for using Moodle to teach such students? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
[ulp id='ntmi4JeMQ49mpBRm']
