The glue has just become superglue.

As I have written before, I am more and more convinced that the glue that is holding together all of the small pieces of online learning has to be as flexible and universal as Moodle. While I wasn’t convinced that it had to be Moodle vs. something else, I am becoming more and more convinced that this is the right direction for the many connected and authentic learning experiences I expect to have in the future.

Today’s reason is that Moodle has an incredibly easy to impliment solution for synchronous events. As many schools and districts are looking around for synchronous tools to buy like Elluminate, Adobe Connect, iLink, and others, the unassuming little open source solution called DimDim quietly integrated with an LMS so seamlessly that you do not even have to set up accounts.

I was able to get this solution to work in literally ten minutes (and most of that time was just transfering the DimDim files over to the moodle folders). If you are interested in experimenting with having live sessions within your own moodle classrooms and 20 seats is enough for your purposes, this is a free and easy way of doing it:

Step 1: Download the moodle/dimdim integration package here.

Step 2: Follow the instructions for uploading  and configuring the files on moodle here.

Step 3: Set up your own meeting in a classroom or on the front page of your moodle, by simply inserting a new activity and then putting in the configuration of the meeting you would like to have. (As you can see below, you have a lot of options to turn on or off.)

Once everything is set up, you get a link to your webmeeting that looks like this:

I can’t even believe how easy it was to provide a synchronous tool to anyone who wants it, all without having to create accounts or adjust permissions.

While, this isn’t the killer app that does it all and it doesn’t make large class sizes any easier, the simple ability for any teacher at any time to set up their own learning events that can be recorded for later use is just one more reason why we need to be gluing everything that we can to Moodle and making the community better in the process.

The Killer App: Google Apps and Moodle Integration?

Even though I haven’t used Moodle as much as WordPress and Wikispaces in my own teaching and learning, I have installed it enough times to know what it does well and what it does not do so well.

Moodle does a very good job of monitoring students, giving assessments/grades, providing content, and doing discussion forums. It does not do a very good job of synchronous collaboration, wikis, email, or any of the other things that Google Apps does an amazing job at. I guess that is why Moodlerooms decided that it would be a great idea to get the two projects together and create an easy way to do single-sign-on.

I am amazed at the potential for something like this. Imagine being able to log into your classes, your e-mail, your sites, and your docs all at one place. Well, after much working on my own installation, I would like to provide a simple how to for making this process happen in your Moodle instance:

Step 1: Download Moode-Google Integration “plugin”

Step 2: Unzip the files into your moodle installation.

Step 3: Follow these instructions for the moodle side:

1. Login to Moodle as an Administrator
2. Click Notifications to update block tables
3. In the Site Admin menu, select Users. Next, select Authentication and click Google Authentication.
   
4. Enter your Google partner page domain name.

Step 4: Create the Private and Public Keys for Moodle and Google Apps

Open up Terminal and enter in the following two strings:

• openssl genrsa -out rsaprivkey.pem 1024

• openssl req -new -x509 -key rsaprivkey.pem -out rsacert.pem

The first command creates the private key that is stored only on Moodle and the second command creates the public key that is stored on both Moodle and Google Apps.

Step 5:

• Upload Private Key (rsaprivkey.pem) (if you don’t have access to Terminal, visit Google Documenation Regarding Key Generation) to Moodle
  
• Upload the SSL Signing Certificate (rsacert.pem) (again, if you don’t have access to Terminal, Google Documenation Regarding Key Generation ) to Moodle
  

Step 6:

• In a new window open Google Apps Control Panel page as admin (http://google.com/a/yourdomain.com)
• Click the Advanced tools tab.
• Click the Set up single sign-on (SSO) link next to Authentication.
• First check the Enable Single Sign-on box.
• Now insert this url into the Sign-in page URL text field.
  http://YourMoodleDirectory/login/index.php
• Insert this url into the Sign-out page URL text field.
  http://YourMoodleDirectory/login/logout.php
• Insert this url into the Change password URL text field.
  http://YourMoodleDirectory/login/change_password.php
• Upload the Verification certificate to Google (X.509 certificate containing the public key). This is the rsacert.pem file that you uploaded to Moodle already.

Step 7:

• Click the User Accounts tab in Google Apps.
  
• This displays existing users as well as a message that says “You can create up to ### user accounts for this domain” If you are using the Google User Sync block for account management, this number must match the number of accounts you plan on creating. Request more accounts if you need them by clicking the “request more” link on this page.
• Click the Settings link. Check the box to Enable provisioning API (otherwise users will NOT be updated).
  
• Click Save Changes.
• Click on Advanced tools in Google Apps one more time
• Click on “Manage OAuth Access”
• Upload your (X.509 certificate containing the public key) here too. This is the rsacert.pem file that you uploaded to Moodle already.
• Then copy to your clipboard (Control+C/Apple+C) the OAuth consumer secret

Step 8 (in order to get Gmail to fully talk with Moodle):

• Enable all of the google blocks in your Moodle Instance by logging in as an admin and then adding them to the front page.
• Open up the blocks admin (under modules) and click on the Gmail block.
• Paste the OAuth Consumer secret into the field that asks for it.
• Click Save Changes
• Click on the Google User Sync block in the blocks admin menu.
• Fill out your admin information for Google Apps

I think that is pretty much it. Once I did all of those things, I was able to create users in Moodle and have them transfer over to Google Apps. I was able to log into docs, sites, gmail, etc directly from the Google Apps block in Moodle.

As excited as I am that I was actually able to get it to work, I am more excited for the possiblity of stopping the excuses that many people have in either not implimenting a LMS because it doesn’t have a collaborative suite built in or not implimenting Google Apps because it doesn’t work within their LMS. I would like to get to a point where people only are talking about the learning possibilities, not the pitfalls of the technology.

(Also, let me know if I have screwed up in any way on this how-to. I would post it on a wiki for others to make it better, but since I don’t know where the Moodle wikis are, I will wait until someone illuminates me.)