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Moodle localization. Regional cooperation and towards official Serbian language pack(s). Branka Ignjić , Živana Komlenov Department of Mathematics and Informatics Faculty of Science University of Novi Sad. Introduction. Moodle is… a free e-Learning platform (Course Management System)
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Moodle localization Regional cooperation and towards official Serbian language pack(s) Branka Ignjić, Živana Komlenov Department of Mathematics and Informatics Faculty of Science University of Novi Sad
Introduction Moodle is… a free e-Learning platform (Course Management System) designed to help educators create instructionaly sound online courses Moodle has… • Open Source license • modular design
Statistics over 30.700 registered sites (from 191 countries) more than 12.800.000 users about 1.690.000 teachers > 60 sites with more than 20.000 users Site with most users is moodle.org: ≈ 288.000 users and 40+ courses
Statistics Country sites
Need for localization Usage of Moodle in Serbia is rapidly growing. Computer illiteracy is note too rare among students (schools, universities), as well as poor English language skills. System itself is created to make localization simple, still a huge job. Problems which appear are not technical. There is a special interface for translating strings and help files.
Previous relevant lang packs First official version – Dragan Simić, Banja Luka, Bosnia Partial translation for moodle 1.5 - Miloš Bajčetić, Belgrade Bosnian language pack (incomplete) Croatian language pack (incomplete) Grammar–sensitive language pack – Bojan Milosavljević, Kruševac (experimental)
Current lang packs Translation of interface for Moodle 1.6 – Živana Komlenov Accepted as the official UTF-8 Serbian language packs (August 2006): Cyrillic& Latin + Bosnian (Cyrillic, local version - a dialect spoken in Bosnia)
Fine-tuning & updates Serbian language packs are regularly updated (basic strings + interesting third-party modules). Translation of help files has been started last winter. During DMI’s elective e-Learning seminar, Nikolina Lacković and Branka Ignjić translated 168 help files for Moodle 1.6 and wrote a localization guide (in Serbian).
Extending localization team • Recently formed localization team: • Miloš Bajčetić and his students (School of Medicine, Belgrade) • Bojan Milosavljević, Kruševac • Živana Komlenov, Gordana Rakić, Ivan Omorac and Branka Ignjić (Faculty of Science, Novi Sad) First localization meeting: Novi Sad, July 17, 2007 => Complete 1.8.2 interface + more than 50% of help files New gatheringsare planned Meanwhile, collaboration is continued online
Localization Web site http://perun.im.ns.ac.yu/SrMoodle
Regional collaboration Živana was invited to participate at first Croatian localization meeting as well (June 30, Zagreb). This workshop was powered by HrOpen (Croatian Society for Open Systems and Internet) Chief organizer was HrOpen’s chairman, Kristijan Zimmer, (employed at Information Support Centre, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing).
Regional collaboration The meeting was lead by Jasmin Klindžić, who maintains the biggest Moodle site in Croatia, with more than 3.500 students and over 200 teachers at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences inZagreb. Miloš Bajčetić joined Živana at this meeting, together with a dozenMoodlers from several Croatianuniversities.
Further work Maintenance of Serbian language packs Solving language tangles (main problems: lack of adequate IT terms in Serbian, grammatical errors) Joint activities in the region (grammar-sensitivity issues) => Reorganization of language packs to handle cases, genders, etc. properly Possible hiring of lecturers (funding?)