Moodle and Shibboleth

Moodle and Shibboleth

by Martin Dougiamas -
Number of replies: 5
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Yesterday I was given a very nice demo (by the smart people at MAMS) of a stock Moodle 1.5 installation running in a federated Shibboleth environment.

Even though I helped work on the Shibboleth module, I had never actually seen it running before. Mamatheka

Now I've seen Shibboleth in action I can really see the potential: it's very cool ... I think we'll start seeing this new capability in Moodle being used for a lot of exciting things.

If you know nothing about this, Shibboleth allows a secure single-sign-on across all sorts of sites (which now includes Moodle). We could technically open up all our Moodle sites to each other and allow authenticated users from one site to access any other.

In reality it'll mostly be used to allow access between smaller groups of institutions, but I'm starting to think about some sort of shibboleth.moodle.org for casual use. Vica
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Moodle and Shibboleth

by Lukas Haemmerle -
Yes, Shibboleth has quite some potential and I definetely can recommend you to try some demos (e.g. http://www.switch.ch/aai/demo/ contains links to other demos and the SWITCH live demo with technical explanations). As you noticed, jumping from one e-learning platform to another (e.g. from Moodle to Ilias to Blackboard to xy) is one thing that makes Shibboleth so attractive. However, Shibboleth is not only limited to e-learning stuff. Also libraries or web-shops (e.g. the Apple Store Switzerland) are also quite interested in authenticating users with Shibboleth for various reasons.

Concerning the shibboleth.moodle.org idea one must keep in mind that one problem is that there are several so-called Shibboleth federations which all use Shibboleth but may use different Shibboleth attributes. Although there are thoughts about a "federation of federations" that would bring all Shibboleth federations under one common denominator, these ideas are still relatively vague.

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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Moodle and Shibboleth

by Colin McQueen -
Not sure if this has been posted up here before. Becta are piloting Shibboleth Authentication in the London Grid for Learning area (LGfL). The aim is to establish this method of AAA for secondary (and primary?) schools in the UK so that online content can be accessed anytime anywhere by pupils as long as their parent (origin) institution has licenced that content. Having Moodle "shibbolized" should help with its spread into UK schools. Maybe some provider using Moodle may want to get involved in further pilots?

See http://getconnected.ngfl.gov.uk/index.php?s=workshops

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In reply to Colin McQueen

Re: Moodle and Shibboleth

by Ian Usher -
Hello and all I can say on this subject is big grin!
Our Moodle servers (both our BucksGfL one and the school Moodles are hosted by Atomwide who are
  1. likely to become a Shibboleth compliant provider
  2. heavily involved with the LGfL (see post above) as they provide video conferencing for the LGfL and deal with all the associated authentication issues there
which sounds promising to me. We've got things currently set up so that it's possible for schools users to have single sign-on for
  1. their email account
  2. their own school Moodle
  3. our county-wide Moodle
  4. our Macromedia Breeze server
on the Atomwide user database. We haven't implemented 2 and 3 widely yet, but it's looking v promising, as the user database is likely to become Shibboleth compliant 'soon'.
If it would help, I could ask Atomwide some more about their Shibboleth developments and mention it at the Moot in Oxford... when I believe I'm s'posed to say something! wink

Any queries, drop me an email...
cheers
Ian.
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In reply to Ian Usher

Re: Moodle and Shibboleth

by Colin McQueen -
I'd certainly be interested in hearing more of the LGfL developments. Is there any integration or "shibbolising" of MIS sytems at all?
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Moodle and Shibboleth

by Markus Hagman -

Martin good to know you have now seen shibboleth in action. It was pretty hard to explain in white paper at first. ;)

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