Moodle meets Google Apps

I know I said last week that I was done with Google articles for a while, but this one is worth reporting. Moodle is an open source learning management system that is gaining widespread popularity. It's functions are nicely summarized on the Moodle website:

The focus of the Moodle project is always on giving educators the best tools to manage and promote learning, but there are many ways to use Moodle:

• Moodle has features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and hundreds of thousands of students, yet it can also be used for a primary school or an education hobbyist.
• Many institutions use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses (known as blended learning).
• Many of our users love to use the many activity modules (such as Forums, Wikis, Databases and so on) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around their subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition), while others prefer to use Moodle as a way to deliver content to students (such as standard SCORM packages) and assess learning using assignments or quizzes.

Essentially, Moodle is an open source Blackboard on steroids.

As regular readers will know, Google Apps is my cloud application of choice and I will be rolling it out for teachers, students, and staff this summer. It makes sense, though, that a learning management system (like Moodle) and tools for creating and sharing content (like Google Apps), both of which exist happily as web-based applications, should work together.

According to the Google Enterprise Blog,

Moodlerooms, a SaaS provider of Moodle, just launched an application built on the Moodle platform that lets school admins bring Moodle and Google Apps together with a single sign-in. So now, students who told us they didn't want to sign in to multiple environments – like an LMS to get their course content and a productivity suite like Google Apps to actually do their work – have the answer they've wanted.

Although it isn't yet a perfect integration, the single sign-on certainly makes interacting with both systems more seamless for students.