Solution Grove - Mapping Moodle Courses to Elgg Communities [Part 1]

Mapping Moodle Courses to Elgg Communities [Part 1]

As part of Solution Grove's ongoing improvements to its Moodle-Elgg-LAMS integration demo site [http://www.solutiongrove.net], I was tasked to implement a one-to-one correspondence between Moodle courses and Elgg communities, using the e-portfolio block which I previously wrote about in these posts [1, 2]. What this means is that instead of the Moodle e-portfolio block fetching general activities from Elgg, it gathers posts, comments, and the names of newly shared files from the members of an Elgg community that corresponds to the Moodle class. This diverts a little from original behavior which required an Elgg object to be "favorited" before it showed up in the Moodle E-portfolio block.

The end result is a custom e-portfolio block that presents the following user experience:

Capability to "create" an Elgg community from within a Moodle course if there's none yet (teachers only)
Capability to "join" the Elgg community from within a Moodle course during initial access (enrolled students only)
A modified list of activities that shows only the items from members of the associated Elgg community
Direct links to the user's Elgg e-Portfolio and also to the corresponding Elgg community page from with the Moodle block

You can check out this implementation by visiting our Moodle-Elgg-LAMS demo site [http://www.solutiongrove.net]

This work involved changes to both the Moodle block and some additional code on the Elgg side to create and manage the Moodle Class-related communities. Part 2 of this post will cover the technical details and links to where the code can be downloaded.

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