Can anyone point me in the right direction for Moodle + Elgg integration? Please!
I have Moodled and Googled and all references are at least 5 years old.
John
Maybe you could try the elgg forums. I've not heard of any modern integrations with elgg in at least the last 5 years.
Thanks Dan,
My research shows no development with Elgg and Moodle, which I conclude Elgg is dead in the water as a repository or SSO. Asking leaves no stone unturned. That leaves Mahara, which also has minimum development. There is a portfolio that the Canadians use and I can look at.
Thanks again
John
Hi John
Yes, we 'jumped ship' from Moodle-Elgg to Moodle-Mahara a few years back. In part, because Elgg development seemed to move in a business rather than educational direction, around version 1.0.
The most recent development work with Moodle-Elgg, that I am aware of, is by Solution Grove. See e.g.
http://www.solutiongrove.com/blogger/2010/01/20/elgg-plugin-moodle-network-mnet-support
But this is only for Moodle 1.9 - Elgg 1.6. Still, might be worth getting in touch with them, in case they have anything in the pipeline.
Hi John,
Not sure I agree that Mahara has minimum development, there has been a fair amount of activity in the last month: https://gitorious.org/mahara/mahara/commits/master
Also, the Mahara team have reacted very quickly and worked with us in Moodle core to resolve Moodle/Mahara integration problems (see firefox bug 815446 for example).
I've tested out "Mahoodle" (Mahara 1.6.2 + Moodle 2.4) too. It was a bit hairy to set it up and iron out some of the wrinkles but an experienced admin shouldn't have any insurmountable problems with it.
Hi John
What is it that you actually want to use Elgg for? Are you wanting to add social network groups to Moodle? I was having a conversation last week about why try to replicate social network functionality in Moodle when all your users are already on Facebook. May be better to "go to where the fish are" and do some nice integration with Facebook instead. But there are also alternatives like Buddypress. It would be interesting to understand what it is you are trying to achieve.
Hi John,
You've raised a point that comes up quite often in discussions of this topic. Firstly, we'd have to examine the claims that many on the laissez faire side of the fence make:
- Are all our users really on Facebook? Do others prefer Google+, or Yahoo! Groups, or Tuenti, Identi.ca, etc.?
- Are all our learners comfortable with putting their learning activities onto a public forum for all eternity controlled by a 3rd party that may have interests that conflict with their own?
- Are they willing to put time and effort into online learning activities that cannot be effectively moderated, archived and assessed by the school/organisation/institution that they're learning with?
- What assurance can you give to learners and teachers that inappropriate behaviour can be effectively audited and that access to learners' data can be kept adequately private and protected?
For more privacy, practical and ethical issues, please see: http://blog.matbury.com/2011/12/11/a-thorny-issue-protecting-teachers-and-learners-right-to-privacy/
In my opinion, it would be a good idea to augment and further develop Moodle's core social and collaborative tools to make them more usable and more appropriate for building online learning communities. One of the issues to address is for learners to be able to back up and restore their data from one elearning platform and/or portfolio to another, i.e. to have ownership of their data and for it to be useful for longer than just the period of a course at one school/organisation/institution. This is one of many stated reasons for the increased interest in Moodle + Mahara integration.
I agree 100% with matt on 2 points. Not everyone should be forced to facebook for a social tool, i think its a fine extension for those who are. In the k-12 realm it is unrealistic to ask all users to be on facebook.
I also believe if moodle added social/grouping/file sharing independant of a course structure it would be very valuable in my organization.
Although I don't believe a social networking ala edmodo or facebook is a requirement for an LMS. My organization just put out a RFP and will likely adopt schoology because the want one and lack another solution for it.
Unfortunately that want is winning out over owning your content, open source, cost and all the other great reasons to use moodle and put it at the core of your ecosystem.
I've got back into Elgg recently - and it's better than I remember 18 months ago.
In fact, I've got it running at quite a reasonable speed on a Raspberry Pi !
I'm hoping to look at how to integrate (at some level) Moodle and Elgg, because I really don't want to use Mahara (e-portfolio aspect is not as important to me as the social-networking aspect).
Will report back here as I get more involved in the Elgg area
Hi Stuart,
I like Elgg and users who are already used to SN services should feel right at home with it but also enjoy the more coherent navigation and ability to find "their stuff", which SN sites typically hide under layers of menus.
Ideally, I'd like to see Moodle adopt/develop its own SN type functionality, i.e. take the features from SN services that appear to be the most conducive to social and cognitive engagement and cook them into core Moodle. Things like finding out what your classmates have been up to since your last login, who has graded/liked your contributions and posted any comments about them, email notifications, and a way of collating and displaying that information that makes sense and allows users to participate in social activitiess more readily, instead of having to purposefully hunt them down, as seems to be the case now.
My point is that instead of trying to blindly copy or clone what SN sites are doing, we should be thinking about what we want to encourage learners to do in order to augment their social interaction and therefore their cognitive engagement. Would anyone like to start up a list? Might be worth looking here too: http://communitiesofinquiry.com/ although it's somewhat dated and predates the explosion of SN sites.
Any news from your (Moodle - Elgg) integration work Stuart ?
Thanks,
-michel
I got Elgg running through LTI with Moodle (2.6) eventually with one minor issue
I used the LTI plugins from learningapps, but found that the authentication wasn't working quite right on my set up - as I didn't really have chance to investigate in depth, I also tried the Elgg single sign on with moodle plugin and that 'cured' the authentication issue in the LTI link (I'd be very willing to agree that the real cause of it not working in the first place is a fault in my set up rather than in the LTI plugins! I just dont know yet what that fault was/is).
Would love to hear more from other people about usage and success stories with Elgg, particularly with Moodle (or other LMS) integrations.
Richard
Thank you Richard, I will test it in the coming week and let you know how it goes.
Many thanks,
-michel