Àgora

Àgora is an on-line service integrated in the Catalan Educational Telematic Network (XTEC) offering two types of educational platforms for schools:

• Àgora Nodes: a public web portal with intranet features based on WordPress and BuddyPress
• Àgora-Moodle: a complete Virtual Learning Environment based on Moodle

Àgora has also a management module called Àgora Portal, addressed to school admins and based on Zikula

The service has currently about 1.500 instances of each platform running on an infrastructure that has only one software installation (replicated on several web servers behind a load balancer), shared by all schools. Each school has its own database and disk space for data storage, thus greatly simplifying the system maintenance while allowing to have its own independent platform.

School admins have full permissions to publish, create and edit sections, classrooms or any other type of content. They can also manage user accounts and grant permissions to teachers, students and parents.

Àgora Nodes

The main components of the Nodes platform are:

• WordPress, the world's most used Content Management System (CMS)
• BuddyPress providing a school private social network, tools for team collaboration and document management.
• A selection of WordPress plugins, some of them adapted for specific requirements.
• New plugins developed for Nodes, like a booking system for managing classrooms, equipment and other school facilities.
• A specific WordPress responsive theme that gives a common visual look to all school sites, customizable with several color combinations and school logos.
• A set of web templates, each one with a structure of pages, categories and layouts specially designed for primary, secondary, rural, adult and languages schools.

More information and a showcase of school sites can be found at: http://agora.xtec.cat/nodes/ (in Catalan)

To learn more about "Nodes": Nodes, reinventando la web de la escuela (in Spanish)

Àgora Moodle

The open source Virtual Learning Environment Moodle has been used for a long time in Catalan schools. Àgora offers to each school a complete Moodle platform including:

• A huge collection of Moodle plugins suitable for primary and secondary schools.
• Some plugins specifically designed for other projects developed by our team, like JClic or Geogebra
• The Marsupial Moodle plugin, designed to facilitate the communication with digital textbooks provided by some publishing houses.
• A direct connection with Alexandria, the repository of Open Educational Resources (OER) created and shared by catalan teachers.
• The Moodle course format Senzill per temes, especially indicated for primary schools and developed by the Ministry of Education of Andorra.

Technical details

The source code repository is organized in git submodules. The steps to reproduce to obtain the full source code are:

• Git clone the desired module. You can choose between:

  • Àgora-Nodes: git clone https://github.com/projectestac/agora_nodes.git
  • Àgora-Moodle: git clone https://github.com/projectestac/agora_moodle2.git
  • The full Àgora platform: git clone https://github.com/projectestac/agora.git

• Launch git submodule update --init --recursive to initialize all the submodules. Please be patient, because this step can take time.

• To update the repository content with the latest version of the software, launch anytime: git pull --recurse-submodules

See INSTALL.txt for installation instructions.

License

Àgora is build entirely with open source software. Each component is released under its own license terms, usually GPL 2.0 or GPL 3.0.

Common parts and specific modules are relased under the terms of the EUPL-1.1

Contributors

Developers:

• Toni Ginard (aginard@xtec.cat)
• Pau Ferrer (pferre22@xtec.cat)
• Sara Arjona (sarjona@xtec.cat)
• Xavier Meler (jmeler@xtec.cat)
• Víctor Saavedra (vsaavedr@xtec.cat)
• Albert Pérez (aperez16@xtec.cat)
• Jaume Miró (jmiro227@xtec.cat)
• Fèlix Casanellas (fcasanel@xtec.cat)
• Jaume Fernández (jfern343@xtec.cat)
• Aida Regi (aregi@xtec.cat)

With the support of:

• Francesc Busquets
• Eduard Cercós
• Mònica Grau
• Pablo Mariña
• Jordi Vivancos

AGORA uses code from the following projects:

• Moodle: Learning Management System (http://moodle.org/)
• Nodes: CMS for Education & Social Network based on Wordpress & BuddyPress (http://agora.xtec.cat/nodes)
• Intraweb: CMS for Education based on Zikula (http://projectestac.github.io/intraweb/)

AGORA includes external resources like:

• Abecedario: True Type Font (revised version)
• /course/senzill/pix/f/flash.png: CC (by-nc-sa) http://barrymieny.deviantart.com/
• /course/senzill/pix/f/zip.png: CC (by-nc-nd) http://thvg.deviantart.com/

Special Thanks:

• Catalan schools involved in the project
• Albert Gasset
• Govern d'Andorra
• UPCnet
• Itteria