Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A discussion paper
Niall Sclater, October 2010
Google Apps for Education is becoming a key way for students to interact and share content. Moodle
is the Worlds most popular learning management system. Many institutions have both platforms
available for students but integration, if any, is often limited to single sign-on between the two
systems. There are various potential benefits of integrating Moodle and Google Apps more closely
e.g.:
Providing a more integrated (and hence less disjointed and confusing) experience for students
Students being able to view content from their LMS/VLE in a more customisable, personalised
environment e.g. using iGoogle
Teachers being able to create innovative learning activities using rapidly evolving functionality
not available in Moodle but able to present it within a Moodle site
There are various ways in which Google Apps and Moodle could be further integrated:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Examples of the first five of these are shown in the following diagram and elaborated further below.
Calendar
Docs
1,2
3,4
Study Planner
Forum
More complex examples could involve Moodle updating content in an app using the Google Apps
API.
Google Apps - Moodle integration possibilities
2
Lewis Carr from Leeds City College details the Moodle Meter facility he
created using the Google Charts API which measures the activity levels of his
Projects users.
Scenario 2
Scenario 3
Scenario 4
Projects
Eileen goes into Moodle daily but doesnt use email much.
She finds it useful to see when there are new messages
waiting for her in the gmail block on her module website.
Scenario If there is one she clicks to view her gmail in a new
6.1
window.
Moodle-Google provides a gmail block and a Google Apps block (simply linking
to docs, calendar etc) within in Moodle.
Projects
Moogoogle is another initiative which has created a block within Moodle with
links to gmail, calendar, docs etc. Information on this project is not current so it
may be discontinued.
7. Deeper integration
Full investigation between the two platforms has been investigated by the OU Moodle development
team. If Moodle could be implemented on the Google Apps Engine this might be feasible however
there are several serious technical hurdles to this taking place. The most significant is that Moodle is
written in PHP, Google Apps in Java. There is currently no way of emulating PHP in Google Apps. A
rewrite of Moodle to fit this platform would be a mammoth engineering task and result in a long term
burden of maintaining the two versions in parallel.
The most significant project tackling integration between the two platforms has
been a joint effort between Google and Moodlerooms called Moodle-Google. The
main features are common authentication and the Apps blocks within Moodle
Projects
detailed above. The software does not appear to have been updated since May
2010.
Rashan Anushka from UCSC has developed a Moodle GApps integration code
package for joint administration of accounts in Google and Moodle and common
email handling between the platforms. He plans to add email list management and
integration with docs, calendar etc.
Gahoodle is another project supposedly looking at single sign on and deeper
integration between Google, Moodle and Mahara but there is no evidence of
current activity.
While full integration is highly problematic there are clear advantages for the OU in progressing some
of the developments outlined above. One obvious use case is the replication of the tutor group (and
sub tutor group) structures within Google Apps. Documents could then be shared by tutors with their
students or students could connect more easily with those in their tutor groups.