Just a brief update today! A few weeks ago I posted a little teaser image for our upcoming platform: History SPOT. I had hoped then that we would be launching within a fortnight but it was not meant to be. The problem is not content – that is already uploaded and ready to go. The problem is a technical one with the platform itself.
To make sure that History SPOT provides us with the greatest scope for future adaptation and expansion and to ensure that it can deliver our current requirements we made the decision to utilise platform systems that best suited each aspect of our content. The result was a three-fold development which would seamlessly merge together as one platform. In brief these are:
Drupal (Content Management System) – Podcasts/live stream
Moodle (Virtual Learning Environment) – Research Handbooks/Training Courses
Mahara (e-portfolio system) – Collaborative and interactive elements
To ensure that these three systems work well together and to enable us to moderate user content we realised that we would need to ask users to sign up for a free account and link the systems together using a single sign-on. ULCC (University of London Computer Centre) have been working on the single sign-on for us and we very much hope that it will soon be ready and we can launch. It has, however, proven more difficult to achieve than either us or ULCC originally envisaged.
Tomorrow I will provide you with some screen shots from History SPOT and a little more detail about what you can expect once it is up and running.