Intergrating Moodle

While at the JISC Programme meeting in March I spoke to Jonathon who has done some moodle integration for his JISC project. He was able to point me in the right direction as to how integration can be achieved.

As some of you will know the documentation for moodle can be a bit flaky and in my experience you often find that some terms are used for one or more things and this is the case for creating extensions for the system. Jonathon pointed me at NEWMODULE which allows you to create a plugin. However the word module is used repeatedly in VLE development and education. So when I had been originally looking for this ability I had been snowed under with information on setting a new module (in academic terms) rather than creating a plugin or widget.

However, I am now at my next hurdle. We have the method to achieve some basic integration, but there is no defined plan of what we will be doing with it. So the next stage is to work out what we will want the widget to do. But there is also another hurdle lurking in the background. Once we know what we want to do, and have an idea on how we are going to develop it, we will need access to a test environment (ie a copy of moodle somewhere). Once these obstacles are over come then I think that we will be well on our way to providing some integration for VLEs, we will then just need to look at the others.