Blocks

Sorry for the lone parenthesis (?).

The display in the eportfolio menu seems to be drawn from the most recent first comment on a public post in the associated Elgg installation (probably by a participant in the course).

Can the code be altered to include all recent posts and comments by all participants of the course? This would be a useful feature from my perspective. Much more useful than file exports.

Mark, the main point of the integration between moodle and elgg is for authentication. Depending on your actual usage scenarios, moodle and elgg are quite orthogonal.

I know moodle is moving more into the social sphere with blogs, but currently elgg is meant to be a student centered space, while moodle fulfils the actual elearning component.

Also, don't forget that you can have elgg as an overarching social system that more than one moodle can plug into. This means you could have an elgg that gets users fed to it from all moodles within a school district.

In keeping moodle and elgg as separate spaces, this also means that accounts, once created in elgg, can be kept across any number of moodles, and for a longer period than just attendance at once school, they can span a student's whole academic life.

On to the actual integration.

Yes, the file sharing is quite basic at the moment. However, it was written in such a way that it's just a matter of adding a couple of module functions to whatever activity module you want, to allow it to expose files to export. If you have good ideas about how you'd like it extended, feel free to write a patch

Also it's worth mentioning that there's a whole raft of issues here around plagiarism. Currently with the assignment module integration, you can only export files once the assignment is closed, and the submission has been graded. Even so, many institutions will choose not to use it because they reuse assessment structure across semesters/years/class intakes.

The integration may not fit your usage scenario. That's ok, part of the whole thing with using open source is that you have the choice. You can use parts of it you find useful, or not if you want. It certainly fits our scenario in NZ for the NZVLE project, where we have a number of tertiaries (so far I think there's just tertiaries, but potentially highschools too) who have their distinct moodles plugging into it for authentication and user accounts. As users go through their school/university life (and transfer between different institutions), they can use the same account at the same external portfolio system that isn't aligned with their institution.

Maybe that clears up some of the expectations. At any rate, in the spirit of open source and collaboration, if you have programmer resource available to add functionality to the moodle/elgg integration, the code is there in contrib as a starting point

Hi Mark,

I have to confess... it's a bit hard to put all our work up for people to use for free, and then be asked "is that all?". So I don't know really what the answer to your question is.

However, I've worked with Penny in the design and implementation of Elgg/Moodle integration. We did quite a bit of work in the plan and design, and we had goals... and constraints. Here's a bit of a list:

• Single Sign On. It works. (Niiiiice, I say).
• Signup to Elgg can be restricted to come from Moodle. This is really important for institutions that want to run Elgg as a portfolio or a social environment. Elgg is under their control in terms of access and account creation can be tied to existing and valid Moodle accounts. Assumes valid students have Moodle accounts somehow (via a suitable auth plugin, for instance).
• A powerful non-course-centric blog that is more Blog-like.
• In general, an environment that is themed separately from Moodle to show it is a clearly different "social space".
• One Elgg can be used as a service for many different Moodle installs. This is what runs behind http://myportfolio.ac.nz/ . In this context, Elgg is on one hand portfolio, and on the other social space. Arguably the portfolio is nascent, but the social space is very developed (that's what Elgg is).
• Some limited integration to transfer your content around. A bit more about why it is limited...
• It raises concerns: as Penny mentions above, teachers will want to control publishing of stuff submitted to courses.
• It is hard to transfer content "transparently" across servers. And we need it to run across servers. We got this sorted out well (sftp, keys, the whole thing), but it took quite a bit of work.
• It is hard to transfer module-specific content. A lot of stuff in Moodle is "content" that only the moodle module knows how to lay out. How do you export your quiz answers without the quiz engine? Wiki pages without the Wiki engine? All of this needs quite a bit of coding per module.

As you can see, resources are scarce -- we are under pressure to achieve a lot with very little time. So we are forced to be ruthless in our decisionmaking here.

Our Elgg-Moodle work hasn't finished, not has our interest and involvement in portfolios and social spaces. We keep working on it, but bear in mind it is not a mature space like LMSs (not everyone agrees what a portfolio is) and Elgg is not as mature as Moodle is.

It's all evolving, and we keep working. And we want feedback -- so thanks for your comments.

However... there is a lot of noise and we have to focus on the useful feedback. Armchair criticism scores much, much lower than practical usage stuff we can fix in small steps.

Come tell us something like "I am using it with a bunch of (teachers/students/researchers/hamsters) and we found feature X useful and feature Y not so practical". Or stuff like "specific bug Z gets really in the way".

Helping is not just for programmers -- it is for people ready to get involved and spend quality time working things out. It not trivial to provide constructive criticism that is practical and useful to us. We work in short, simple steps, aiming for concrete goals; we release early and often.

This is the first of what I hope will be a long series of "release early and often" Moodle/Elgg combos. It works and achieves all the (humble) goals we set out to meet. Colour me satisfied with that at least

But I agree with you, there's a lot more to be done, and there's room for people to help shape where this goes.

Hi, I'm trying to do some Moodle-Elgg integration and I found several posts about the subject .can someone tell me the proper way to do integration

Do you have some updated information on how to do this??

Thank you so much for your time and help.