Access to secured courses on demand

Access to secured courses on demand

by Keith Heinrich -
Number of replies: 10

Folks

I am contemplating development of on-demand single instance course login functionality. The purpose is for providing access to a course for a user who will have paid online so they can immediately access a course rather than wait for admnistrative intervention. Integration with oscommerce is also a strong possibility.

I anticipate a unique key generated for each purchase which then provides access for a specified period of time. The user should be flagged as having access to the course until expiry but the key should not be able to be used again.

I recall discussion on this topic in the past and wish to review any interest and/or progress on the subject before proceeding.

Any comments??

Thanks

Keith

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In reply to Keith Heinrich

Re: Access to secured courses on demand

by Sue Edwards -

Hi Keith,

I'm doing exactly that -integration with OSC. While I was playing with Moodle, I figured to put a 'Buy Now' button on the course info screen. I then linked it to the product in OSC. So I know that worked fine. But am in the same boat - how to generate a key for the Moodle course they've bought? That will probably have to come from OSC once they've completed the sale - and I'm not yet sure how. But to keep giving the same key to everyone - well, you can see what could happen - and it would need admin intervention to unenroll people from courses they shouldn't be in.

I'm not a programmer, so I'd expect that altering Moodle for unique keys (if that's at all possible) would be beyond me. But I'd love to find a solution to this.

Maybe the key to each course could be someone's login plus the course key? Maybe that could work? Then OSC could generate just the course key with instructions to put the login in front of it to get to the course?

Cheers...
Sue

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In reply to Sue Edwards

Re: Access to secured courses on demand

by Keith Heinrich -

Sue

Whatever is built will be properly integrated into Moodle and may well be an ecommerce block in the end. I will revisit the payment options as these are part of the solution as well.

The mechanics of building a key and validating are pretty straight forward. I have a few different ideas as to how that can be accomplished. Nailing the requirements down before I start designing and coding is the critical piece.

You are right about the administration component. That is an area that will require some thought.

An open interface to oscommerce is a key criteria to ensure integration. Again, I have some ideas, but will wait until the wish list is developed.

Keith

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In reply to Keith Heinrich

Re: Access to secured courses on demand

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Did you know Moodle already supports this?  It's all in the "enrollment" plugins.

There is one for Paypal already but you can use it as a model for developing similar functionality for any online payment processor that is able to send data back to the originating web site after a successful transaction.
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Access to secured courses on demand

by Keith Heinrich -

Hi Martin

I was aware the functionality existed in Moodle but am looking to extend the functionality somewhat so that a customer user can easily purchase a course in oscommerce and then take the course immediately.

The easiest 'solution' would be to link a course url in oscommerce to Moodle with a user  account for each and the transaction processed from within Moodle. That's a bandaid and not terribly transparent.

A properly engineered and executed solution requires synchronisation of accounts on both systems so that a user can transparently create a new Moodle account from oscommerce or or validate an existing account, process the transaction from oscommerce and then go directly into the course from oscommerce once the transaction is validated. oscommerce already supports multiple payment options so these could potentially be used as well.

This is I believe well beyond the scope of core Moodle functionality. Moodle provides the required functionality already anyway but not the hooks for integration so far as I can see. That is the gap I am looking to fill. This is more an oscommerce extension than a Moodle extension although elements of the Moodle Paypal module could be used as part of the Moodle end of the process.

At this point, I am only canvassing requirements.

Regards

Keith

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In reply to Keith Heinrich

Re: Access to secured courses on demand

by Sue Edwards -

<<The easiest 'solution' would be to link a course url in oscommerce to Moodle with a user  account for each and the transaction processed from within Moodle. That's a bandaid and not terribly transparent.>>

Keith,

I'm doing this exactly the other way around. I'm sending people to the moodle site first to get info about the courses, then will put a button somewhere to link them to the OSC product. (All still under development at this stage.)

I guess I could do it both ways! Good idea!  

Considering I'm doing things the opposite way to you, would it be as easy to create the user account in Moodle first and somehow pass the variables to OSC?

Just by the way, I'm planning not to give users the enrolment key. I'm happy to enrol them myself. I suspect it's more secure that way. But I could be convinced otherwise, if the process was fully automatic. I may even set up accounts myself on Moodle so I can manually synchronise the info in OSC to Moodle. Not sure about this yet.

Cheers...

Sue

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In reply to Keith Heinrich

Re: Access to secured courses on demand

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Ah, OK. Your initial post basically describes the Paypal module, that's all (ie the access is instant and fully automatic). I'm not very familiar with osCommerce at all, but it would be great to be able to leverage all the other processors it provides access to.

There are two hooks that are relevant:

  1. Under "Authentication" in Moodle >> Admin >> Users one of the options there is "External Database" ... so you can easily hook onto some external table for the user accounts as long as contains at least username and password fields.

  2. There is a similar option under "Enrollments" so you can also allow other external database tables to control the enrollments in Moodle courses.

Hope that helps ..   perhaps Moodle needs an osCommerce enrollment module to make it easier to link to an osCommerce site?
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Access to secured courses on demand

by Sue Edwards -

Martin, I know you're addressing this to Keith, but I'm interested as well. Unfortunately my OSC is on another domain (and I think a different server in my ISP's group of servers), so what you've suggested may not work - I'm not familiar with security issues here. But I could be persuaded to move my shop to the same domain/server if these issues had a solution like you suggested above. Unfortunately the "hook" part is beyond my capabilities.  

Certainly OSC has a login and password.

Cheers...

Sue

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In reply to Sue Edwards

Re: Access to secured courses on demand

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Hi, Sue.

It depends on how the server holding the OSC databases is set up.  For example in Cpanel you can easily specify which servers you allow access from.  If it allows connections from the Moodle server then no problem:  Moodle can access other databases on any server. 
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Access to secured courses on demand

by Keith Heinrich -

Martin

I guess that what I am doing is a prelimary scoping study for an oscommerce module. Interest has been low and given that the Paypal module works and Paypal now support Australian dollars, I will put this idea to the side for the moment.

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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Access to secured courses on demand

by Dannis Educational -

We have found moodle to be perfect choice for online continuing medical education in my country. Unfortunately we are unable to implement the Paypal payment platform as it is not available in our country.

We have however been able to obtain the use of Voguepay payment platform which is not supported by moodle. What we want to achieve is for medical doctors to pay for online medical education services. We want to install a "subcribe now" button on the course registration page so that students are enrolled immediately after making payment. Your help would be appreciated for us to achieve this purpose.

Cheers

PS... Other integration tools available on Voguepay include Joomla,Wordpress,Drupal,WHMCS, Woocommerce, OSCommerce,Prestashop and Magento. Will any one these be better or easier to implement into our moodle site?

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