Microsoft Education Labs has a free Office Addon for Moodle. This addon allows teachers or the owner of a Moodle course to upload documents to their course and access Moodle documents from within Office. Once the addon is installed to Office two items are added to the file menu: Open from Moodle, and Save to Moodle.

 The user configures the address of their Moodle server and logs in with their Moodle login. After this the user can access Moodle files from Office. 

 The addon works with Office 2003 and 2007 and Moodle 1.8.x and 1.9.x. The My Courses should be installed for the addon to work. No additional Moodle modules are required for the addon to work.

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The Certificates module for Moodle will allow granting certificates based on completion of a Moodle activity.It allows uploading graphics and setting the style of the generatied certificate. Once a user has met the minimum criteria they can download a PDF and print their certificate.

There are several options for setting criteria for granting a certificate. These include overall course grade, time spent in the course, and ability to require one or more activities be completed, optionally with a minimum grade for the activities. Any of these requirements can be combined to determine when a student receives a certificate.

 Images can be uploaded to style the borders and include a watermark if desired. A signature image can be included, and of course, a logo can be uploaded.

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(photo by Kasaa)

We were recently tasked with an Elgg project that requires forum discussions to behave like mailing lists.  There's already a community contributed plugin that does something similar but doesn't quite meet the client's required specifications, notably with regards to permissions.

During the initial design, the client mentioned that we should think about reusability since the system might require other functionality that makes use of incoming emails in the future.  So instead of just coding a plugin that will take care of discussions via email I decided to write a plugin that can handle incoming emails in a generic way and then trigger plugin hooks.  The different plugins will then be responsible for implementation on how to handle the incoming email.

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We added a new post_status method to Moodle's mnet enrol library that allows us to push updates from Moodle to ELGG. Once we had this function enabled we modifed a few of the Moodle features to call this function to update the eportfolio. These included course enrollment , successful completion of a questionnaire, earning a certificate, and posting to a forum. A simple function call for each action is all that is needed. To find the correct place in the code, I noticed add_to_log was called with similar information for the different actions so I added the code for Elgg posting in the same places. Since the users are already authenticating using MNE, we can match the corresponding user on Elgg so that the status goes to the correct student's River.

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(photo by oooh.oooh)

We recently posted about our project that implements Single Sign-On between Moodle and Elgg using Moodle Network (MNET). We wrote an Elgg plugin that extends the mnet-lib PHP library as part of this implementation.  This early version of the plugin allows Elgg to function as an Identity Provider (IdP)  so that its users can SSO to moodle.  The current implementation assumes that ELGG is the authorative system. It doesn't have the capability to act as Service Provider.  We expect to be doing a great deal more work to extend this plugin in its early stages so stay tuned!

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Recently I had a project to integrate Elgg and Moodle. In an earlier post I discused the single sign on feature where users could login to Elgg and be automatically signed into Moodle when they clicked the link to Moodle pages.

In addition I needed to make the themes for Elgg and Moodle match. This is quite challanging. As of Moodle 1.9 course layout still uses some tables which make duplicating a similar layout to Elgg difficult.

In addition I had to make the top navigation/toolbar match between Elgg and Moodle. This was interesting because the menus in the toolbar were generated dynamically by Elgg based on the user identity. To accomplish this I created an AJAX based solution using the Yahoo UI library. I created a custom Elgg view that just provided the toolbar without any additional content. This was added on the fly to the top of the Moodle pages for a seamless experience.

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We recently connected ELGG and Moodle using the Moodle Network feature. This provides an API to allow single-sign-on between multilple servers. This can include multiple Moodle server, or other servers that support the MNET API.

For this project we needed ELGG to be the primary authority so users would sign into ELGG first, and be able to access Moodle by clicking a link that would provide the proper information to Moodle to log them into Moodle. 

To the end user the integration is seamless. They click a link and the Moodle site can appear as integrated into the ELGG site. This requires some fiddling with the HTML and CSS to get Moodle and ELGG themes to be consistent. I address this in another post.

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I have been exploring making a new theme for Moodle. There are already some good resources on creating a new theme in the Moodle documentation. These cover customizing the CSS to make changes to most parts of Moodle.

I did not find any good docs on actually changing the templates for Moodle. In the current Moodle 1.9.x design the index page and other course pages don't entirely share layouts. In addition Moodle 1.9.x uses table based layout so styling the boxes can be a little tricky.

The first problem I had was getting the spacing between the columns on the home page and the course pages consistent. Course pages have a container in the middle column that you can style, but the index page does not. It has a div that does not have a css id or class. 

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(photo by martin.canchola)

In a not so recent article, it was mentioned that based on a study, online learning tends to be better than the conventional in-person or classroom teaching.  Students in an online learning condition performed better than those receiving in-person instructions. 

Learning Management Systems are widely used in many different countries.  To add to that, the social networking technology also has its share of rapid growth.  These combined allow students to teach each other and share resources online. But according to Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program, "The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways."  "People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom.  But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity.  Learning has to occur in a community."

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About two weeks ago, a client raised an issue with their moodle installation.  The client wanted course teachers to be able to take LAMS activites instead of just being allowed to author them.  Then just this week, another client wanted to suppress the emails sent to course teachers when a student answers a quiz activity in moodle.

Both these issues are related in a way since the code logic that determines who can take a LAMS activity and the code for who are notified of quiz submissions both rely on checking moodle roles and capabilities.  If you're familiar with moodle, then you'd be aware of the different roles that can be assigned to a user both on the site level and on the course level.  What some people miss is that there are capabilities as well that's assigned to each of these roles.  In order to resolve the issues that the clients raised without modifying the code, I needed to override these role capabilities so that they would behave as to how the client wants them to.

I'll outline here the steps of what you need to do to change the default roles capabilities in case you are faced with a similar problem.

To change the top-level role capabilities:

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(photo by mahara.org)

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(photo by LAMS Int.)

21 July 2008, Sydney, Australia & Boston, USA

LAMS International Pty Ltd is pleased to announce that Solution Grove, Inc has become the first USA partner for LAMS. The partnership will see LAMS being actively promoted in United States, both as a standalone solution and as an integrated module with other learning platforms.

Solution Grove provides hosting, support and services for open source learning solutions in the United States. Solution Grove's existing customers include MIT Sloan, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Massachusetts General Hospital and many educational organisations. Solution Grove will actively promote LAMS to the e-learning community in United States including governments, schools and universities.

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(photo by LAMS Foundation)

In an earlier post, I wrote about how to properly integrate Adaptive Curriculum Activity Objects inside Moodle.   After having success with that, the client now needs to have the activity object as part of a LAMS sequence. 

The approach I came up with is to have the URL to the scorm activity created as a resource in the LAMS sequence.  This particular client's LAMS server is in a different domain and port than the Moodle server and it doesn't satisfy the requirements of JavaScript's Same Origin Policy.  This restriction presents a minor issue when launching the resource in a framed LAMS window. The only way to integrate it properly within LAMS is to have it launch in its window.

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(photo by Adaptive Curriculum sample screenshots)

Solution Grove has a client who wanted to try out Adaptive Curriculum's (AC) Activity Objects (AO) inside Moodle.  This initially sounded trivial since they provide SCORM compliant packages and I thought it was easy as just creating a SCORM activity for the AO.  It turned out that AC's AOs are not standalone and they require authentication when installed on third party servers.  Their objects use standard SCORM API calls for getting the user and session information then use these values to authenticate.  The first part's the easy one since I don't need to write any code for that because Moodle already has API for SCORM 1.2.

The problem I encountered was that the authentication method used by AC needs to be run in a stateless manner through a server-to-server HTTP post using the user and session information that originated from the third party server (in this case, the moodle installation). This presents a problem for server-to-server communication because in moodle, the session id for the user is stored in a cookie and we will only be able to get that cookie if the script is run in the browser where it was issued.  At this point, we are now in contact with AC to ask a few questions so that I can proceed implementing a code to support their AOs.

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(photo by freeparking)

In order for us to track a one-to-one relationship between a Moodle course and an Elgg community we first need to create a mapping table.  The table definition I used is as follows:

															<TABLE NAME="block_eportfolio_course_map" COMMENT="">
	<FIELDS>
	<FIELD NAME="id" TYPE="int" LENGTH="10" NOTNULL="true" UNSIGNED="true" SEQUENCE="true" ENUM="false" NEXT="courseid"/>
	<FIELD NAME="courseid" TYPE="int" LENGTH="10" NOTNULL="true" UNSIGNED="true" DEFAULT="0" SEQUENCE="false" ENUM="false" PREVIOUS="id" NEXT="eportid"/>
	<FIELD NAME="eportid" TYPE="char" LENGTH="128" NOTNULL="true" SEQUENCE="false" ENUM="false" PREVIOUS="courseid"/>
	</FIELDS>
	<KEYS>
	<KEY NAME="primary" TYPE="primary" FIELDS="id" COMMENT="Primary key for block_eportfolio_course_map" NEXT="courseid"/>
	<KEY NAME="courseid" TYPE="foreign" FIELDS="courseid" REFTABLE="course" REFFIELDS="id" NEXT="courseid_uniq" PREVIOUS="primary"/>
	<KEY NAME="courseid_uniq" TYPE="uniq" FIELDS="courseid" PREVIOUS="courseid"/>
	</KEYS>
	</TABLE>
	

Since our code already supports single sign-on, we just add to that to track whether an Elgg community needs to be created.  Let us reuse the signupredirect.php page and just add an extra variable that tells the system to create a corresponding community.  The significant section is as follows:

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(photo by maxinstosh of flickr)

I attended the 2-3-98 Open Discussion on Technology in Education conference last week. In many cases, Open Source is becoming just another option when evaluating software for use in education. Of course, there are still objections from some, but more and more software in compared on the solution it can provide, without regard for the license. One day of the conference was devoted to Moodle, and it was clear that Moodle was regarded as a superior solution by those that chose it. There was not any bias in choosing open source or proprietary solutions noted by those that chose Moodle. That is, they chose Moodle for the the features it provides.

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LAMS - The Learning Activity Management System is one of the open source eLearning systms we support.  They recently met with One Laptop per Child people (OLCP).  LAMS learner runs fine on the XO laptop (pictures here) and they are developing a version to go on the servers that will be at each school.

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(photo by 2-3-98 Conference)

2-3-98 Conference: An Open Discussion on Technology in Education will address Open Source in Higher Education, and include a second day Moodle Moot. I'll be attending the conference June 19 & 20, 2008 as SUNY Delhi. SUNY Delhi is  using Moodle for their unversity LMS.

One of our clients, Stephen Wilmarth, from the Center for 21st. Century Skills will be giving a presentation on how they are using Moodle to conect high school students in CT and in China!

This should be a good opportunity to both learn more about Moodle, spread the word on LAMS and ELGG integrated with Moodle in an amazing setting. According to the web site: "Delhi, NY is nestled in the Catskill Mountains in a land of wooded hills and fertile green valleys with streams, covered bridges, well-tended dairy farms and beautiful vistas. Join us in a great setting for a great conference!"

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(photo by Elgg Social Networking)

The highlight of Chapter 1 of Elgg Social Neworking is a concise features list - What can Elgg Do?

• Blogging
• File repositories for individauls and communities
• Podcast support
• Full access controls
• Supports tagging
• User Profiles
• Full RSS support
• RSS aggregator
• Create Communities
• Collaborative community blogs
• Create friends' networks
• Import content
• Publish to blog
• Thorough pricacy controls
• Multilingual
• Branding/Customization
• OpenID
• Import/export friends with FOAF

In addition to introducting the features, Chapter 1 covers the basics of social networking as a foundation for understanding Elgg. However, this is probably not how most of our educational users come to Elgg. My observation of educational users is that Elgg's first role is as a simple ePortfolio, then to support blogging for reflection. 

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(photo by Amazon)

Elgg has a new book!

We are currently using Elgg as the ePortfolio and social networking tool of our Personal Learning Environment. My plan is to review the book and highlight the sections in each chaper that are most useful for people using our integrated system.

Preface: 

I am writing a lot of marketing material these days as we launch our PLE product.  Thus I have a huge respect for how hard it is to describe these rich complicated systems simply.  Here is a quote:

Elgg provides each user with a personal weblog, file repository (with podcasting capabilities), an online profile, and an RSS reader.  Additionally, all of the user's content can be tagged with keywords - so they can connect with other users with similar interests and create their own personal learning network. However, where Elgg differs from regular weblog or commercial social network (such as MySpace) is the degree of control each user is given over who can access their content.  Each profile item, blog post, or uploaded file can be assigned its own access restrictions - from fully public to readable only by a praticular group or individual.

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(photo by by Bramus!)

A very interesting post caught my attention.  There's an easier and faster way to add Google Analytics to Moodle.

If you have no server access and can't add the Google Analytics code directly on the source code, Eamon of rElearn.ie has found an alternative solution for this.  It is simply done by adding an "HTML block" and pasting the Google codes.

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(photo by Moodle Tutorials)

Are you a Youtube junkie?  Almost every internet users (if not all) have come across or used this video-sharing site.  Moodle users and/or developers would have most likely used Youtube for a share of its tutorial.  But look no more.  Moodle Tutorials is the answer.

I was reading GHOP when I found this site.  It pretty much is a clone of Youtube and its functionalities.  Young students have uploaded them to the site and more are definitely coming.

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(photo by solutiongrove.net)

Any idea what a whiteboard is?

Interactive whiteboards are used in many schools as replacements for traditional whiteboards or flipcharts.  They provide ways to show students anything which can be presented on a PC.  In addition, it allows teachers to record their instruction and post the material for review by students at a later time.  This can be a very effective instructional strategy for students who benefit from repetition, those who need to see the material presented again, for students who are absent from school, for struggling learners, and for those who review for examinations.

For Moodle, you may try a third party whiteboard software.  You can use it either as a single component or as a component of online interactivity suite.

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This is a double learning experience for me. It is a reflective on the reading for this week's class, Chapters 1-3 of The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, and how it relates to my project, which is a business plan for our MEL product.  It is also my first video of this type as I continue to try to keep up with the average high school student level of video production!

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(photo by freeparking)

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

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(photo by oooh.oooh)

A few weeks ago, I posted how Solution Grove implemented Moodle to ELGG Single Sign-On.  That was only the first phase.  The client also needed it to seamlessly auto-create users on ELGG using credentials from the user's Moodle account.  We searched for a solution for this and found his ELGG-WebCT integration solution from Aperto Elearning Solutions.  Even though the other component was WebCT, it was still interesting to us as the concept is similar - the user is automatically created on the ELGG side.  Solution Grove emailed Aperto and their contact person was kind enough to point to us the Aperto download server, where the code can be downloaded, and added a few tips in the email as well.

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(photo by oooh.oooh)

The assumption is that Moodle and ELGG were already properly installed and is confirmed to be working.

Here are the steps: 

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(photo by David Delgado)

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