SWF-Activity-Module

Important:

Uploading content for the SWF Activity Module requires FTP access to /moodledata/repository/ If you do not have FTP access, ask your IT support about setting up an account for you or giving you access to an existing account. A good free and open source FTP client is FileZilla.

The SWF Activity Module is a Moodle plugin for deploying multimedia Flash learning apps, also known as Flash templates. Teachers and course content developers can use the SWF Activity Module to deploy any Flash apps, including but not limited to those that use external data and media in order to function correctly. It also allows Flash apps to communicate with Moodle for purposes such as passing learners' grades into Moodle's grade book.

This module is especially useful for deploying M3U (playlists), SMIL, XML, and MPEG-7 multimedia learning interactions where using Moodle's built in file management system would be impractical. Large numbers of files can be uploaded and managed via FTP clients and the module provides a system of URL linking that is predictable, so you can write them into SMIL, XML, and MPEG-7 files, and portable, so you can transfer/redistribute multimedia interactions from one Moodle to another with the minimum of time and effort. Doing any of these with Moodle's file management system, even with external repositories, requires exponentially more time and effort.

The SWF Activity Module can support a number of popular Flash based media players and comes with the JW Player 5 (not free) and the free and open source Strobe Media Player (SMP) pre-installed. The SMP is part of the Open Source Media Framework: http://sourceforge.net/projects/osmf.adobe/

There are demos of the SMP in action on the SWF Activity Module demo course here: http://matbury.com/moodle/ (Allows guest access).

If you would like another free and open source media player included in the SWF Activity Module standard distribution, please let me know in the comments section below.

It includes one example Flash learning app, the Concept Map app: http://matbury.com/wordpress/call-software/ A word search app is also provided separately for testing and demonstration purposes. You're free to use the word search in courses if you wish. Matt Bury has a selection of Multimedia Interactive Learning Apps (MILAs) designed to assist and augment Second Language Acquisition (SLA) especially in EFL, ESL, ELF, and EAP contexts: http://matbury.com/wordpress/call-software/

Sufficient documentation, source code and examples are provided on this project site so that Flash developers can easily write or adapt applications to work fully with the SWF Activity Module. See the project wiki pages for further details.

See demos of the latest version on my R&D Moodle: http://matbury.com/moodle/ (Allows guest access).

Free and open source projects compatible with the SWF Activity Module:

• Preloader app: https://github.com/matbury/SWF-Preloader
• Concept Map app: https://github.com/matbury/SWF-ConceptMap
• Debugging app: https://github.com/matbury/SWF-Debugger

Other useful projects:

• Free and open source Flash, Actionscript, and Haxe IDE (for editing and compiling Flash apps, similar to Adobe Flex/Flash Builder): http://www.flashdevelop.org/ (It's excellent!)