Friday 16 February 2018

A MOODLE Course for Driving Schools, based on Google Maps API (Draft)

I had no time to complete the work on this subject, that had been accepted for presentation at eLSE 2018.

If anyone is interested in continuing, with me, the research and development of an elearning system for driving schools, please let me know.

Following is the abstract of the planned paper.

This paper will present a prototype of a MOODLE course that supports driving lessons by showing street views of selected routes, allowing uploads of recorded driving sessions and editing maps with notes and instructor feedback. The purpose of the course material is twofold: to allow the learner to prepare before the driving lesson by studying the route and his/hers previous performance on this same route, in advance, and to give means to the instructor to offer feedback by editing information on the map of the route.

A review of relevant mobile applications that are already available, using GPS to track car movement, will be done and analyzed. The technical challenges of the implementation: using Javascript within Moodle pages, obtaining and using Google API credentials, uploading the course in the Moodle Cloud, recording video from the car and adding information to maps will be presented in details.

Taking into account different learning style models, the suitability of several Moodle activities and assignment types will be discussed and compared. Questions like how, by whom, and when is the route for a driving lesson chosen will be raised, and tentative answers will be provided. How to use recorded sessions for feedback and adapting content of future lessons will be discussed, too.

Conformance to SCORM specifications will be addressed as well, and the advantages of implementing a standalone application will be discussed from this point of view. An architecture for the standalone application will be proposed and the pros and cons of its implementation in a couple of frameworks (Java, Angular) will be highlighted.