Extending Moodle Across the Institution:
Integration Strategies and Methods
Academic Technology, San Francisco State University
Andrew Roderick, Technology Development Manager
Clifford Tham, MOODLE Developer
Daniel Koepke, Software Developer
Workshop Agenda
•
•
•
•
Introduction
What Is Integration? Worldview
Case Study – Lecture Capture
Integration in Practice
Open Discussion, Questions, Comments
About Us
• San Francisco State
• 1,500 faculty and 30,000 students
• Commuter campus
• Moodle since 2007
• Branded as iLearn; customized
• Moodle 1.9.9 in Fall
• 2,400 courses
Who Are You
• Your name
• Your institution
• Your role
• Why are you here?
• Favorite classic rock song?
Why Integrate?
An Integrated World
•
•
•
•
Blackboard buys Elluminate, Wimba
Moodlerooms releases Joule
API’s now a selling point
Key purchasing decision
(“will it integrate with my existing environment”)
“Should I be integrating?” is now
“What should I integrate?”
Our Worldview
• Choose the best options for our users
• Build, buy, and/or download
• Focused is better than monolithic
• Experience, functionality matter most
• Is it nice to use?
• Does it do what people need it to do?
Design the Experience
•
•
•
•
•
Understand your environment
Think about the gestalt
Pick your pieces carefully
Don’t just choose what’s available, easy
Don’t let technology dictate the choices
Take control of your design!
Do Not Want!
Integration
• Wire together the pieces we have
• Loose coupling
• Choose what to expose, what to hide
• Façades hide seams between systems
• Not all or nothing: might make it seamless
for students, but show the software to
faculty
Integration with the LMS
• Bring content and functionality into the
learning context
• Courses
• Activities
• Not just about delivery of static content
• Expose content’s functionality
• Expose content to LMS’s functionality
How About A Case Study?
Case Study – CourseStream
How it works
• Faculty presents lecture
• Lecture is processed into multiple
formats (rich media (flash), video only,
audio only)
• Faculty distributes content
Case Study – CourseStream
Workflow w/o Integration
• Faculty login to Echo360 system
• Copy links
• Distribute – via email, web page
• Other options include rss, publisher
plugins
Case Study – CourseStream
Integrate into LMS (Moodle)
• Users already using
• Simplify faculty workflow
• Hide multiple systems faculty don’t need
to know about
• Automate distribution
Case Study – CourseStream
Echo360’s Moodle Publisher Plugin
• Publishes to Moodle Calendar
• Out of course context
• Out of faculty’s control
• Calendar may not be heavily used
component
Case Study – CourseStream
Integrate into Moodle
• Put it further into context of the learning
experience
• Give control back to faculty
• Allow faculty to integrate into teaching
• Focus on teaching and course design
instead of technical details
Case Study – CourseStream
SF State’s Echo360 / Moodle Integration
• Resource
• Block
• Management Component
• Administrative Component
Case Study – CourseStream
Use Case
Place in topic w/ other resources
Place all in one topic
Block, populating auto
Block, by topic
Reuse
Case Study – CourseStream
Removed faculty’s necessity to
acknowledge the existence of echo360
server
Simplified Workflow
Still allowed faculty flexibility
Faculty can focus on course design
Design of Integration
Resource – Method of
distributing content
(PDFs, MP3, DOCs,
Web Page, Text Page)
Blocks – Method of
delivery content,
activities secondary to
course materials
Management Interface – Method of distributing
content (PDFs, MP3, DOCs, Web Page, Text Page)
Resource
Seamlessly integrate
lectures into course
design using the
Echo360 Resource
Resource
Integrate lectures into course design
• By topic/theme
• By chronology
• By course materials
– Quizzes, Lectures, Assignments, etc
Block
Group several lecture
captures together and
present as one unit with
the Echo360 block
Creating / Editing a Block
Display all lectures
from one Echo360
course
Select format to
distribute to students
Choose the order in which
lectures appear for students
OR, Choose which
lectures to include in
the block
Block
• Group
• Reuse / Repurpose
• Contextualize
Managing Your Lectures
View all the captured
lectures available to your
Moodle course
Managing Your Lectures
View list of lectures
available for use
Rename
lecture
captures
View and manage the captures
available for your Moodle course
Preview lecture format
without placing in course
View lecture
capture metadata
Managing Your Lectures
•
•
•
•
Preview lecture without placing in course
Lists lectures that are available for use
Rename captures
View capture metadata
Integration is like Watercolor
Integration in Practice
•
•
•
•
What to integrate?
How to integrate?
Application readiness
Moodle readiness
What to Integrate?
• Prioritize real, known needs
• Improve the things people already do
• Software people already use
• Why does it make sense…
• In the LMS context?
• In your environment?
• To your users?
What to integrate? Getting Input.
•
•
•
•
Needs assessments/task analysis
Governance
Usage/Impact
Applicability to teaching and learning
tasks
How to Integrate?
• Link to or embed
• Content, functionality, interactivity
• Many integrations will mix-and-match
• Façade for display, common functionality
• Jump into application for more
• Where does it belong in Moodle?
• Resources, blocks, activities, etc.
Application Readiness
• What does the application provide?
•
•
•
•
Application Programmer’s Interface (API)
Syndication (Atom/RSS)
IFRAME
Link
• Authentication/authorization
Moodle Readiness
• Moodle provides most extensibility with
• Blocks
• Resources
• You may need to change core code to
handle more advanced cases
• Moodle 2.0 changes things up
• Repository API, more
Taming Moodle
Option 1
•Limit changes to modules, blocks
•Avoid changes to core code, work around obstacles
Option 2
•Make wholesale changes to Moodle
•Re-architect many underlying structures
Best Option
•Minimize changes to core code, but change what is necessary
for your campus
•Balance between changes to core code and foregoing usability,
maintainability
What to Turn Off in Moodle
Integration examples
• Available API or Custom (roll your own)
• SIS, Authentication, other institutional
data
• Syndication
• Repository
• Application
How Much Is Too Much?
Issues to consider:
• Interface
• Multiple integrations doing the same
thing (ex: repository + library)
• Technical (scalability, performance)
• Security