Integrating SharePoint and Moodle: Moodle Webparts for SharePoint 2007

As a school we have decided to evaluate Moodle for a VLE for our school.  The main reasons we have done this is because of the course builder with built in quizs and SCORM builders.

I have to say they are very well built.  They are not page viewers like some companies make for their SharePoint webparts but these are written to look at the Moodle database and give you the information presented in a proper ASP webpart.  I’m very pleased to see this happen.

What caught my eye straight away and credit to the writer of this is the office presence by the names of the course.  One of the web parts is the moodle courses which lists all the available course and as you can see it (screen shot below) has the teachers name and then the office presence.  I think it is a shame that in Moodle itself doesn’t show this – because if the pupil was accessing the course, doing some work and they had an issue they could see the teacher straight away and ask them any questions.

In this post I’m going to mainly list the webparts with a screen shot – I’ve already started on another post to do with the install of them and I will also do a post on how to publish Moodle, SharePoint and the Moodle WebApps from the same URL through ISA.

Moodle: Welcome

Moodle messages is the built in online chat available in moodle.  Here you can see the message someone has sent you while you were away – the text they sent is ‘testing’

Moodle: Courses

In the Filter Option in this webpart you can select from My Course, Upcoming Courses and All Available Courses

Moodle: Online Users

Again this is more powerful in SharePoint than in Moodle as you can see their Office Presence as well.

Moodle: My Assignment

Moodle: Document Exchange

I do like this web part.  On the left you have your Moodle course, on the right hand side you have your SharePoint Document library.  This web part will allow you to transfer documents between both products.

There are some other webparts but they are very similar, depending on the user.

Here is the full list of the X Moodle WebParts

• Moodle: Courses
• Moodle: Document Exchange
• Moodle: Messages
• Moodle: My Assignment
• Moodle: My Courses
• Moodle: My Supervisied Assignements
• Moodle: My Teaching Courses
• Moodle: News and Announcements
• Moodle: Online Colleagues
• Moodle: Online Students
• Moodle: Online Users
• Moodle: Welcome

In the next few weeks I’ll do a post on how to install moodle and the webparts on a Windows System with SQL Server and also another post which I have been asked to do on how to publish it all through ISA on a single URL.