T.H.E. Journal reports that Google Apps Education Edition is coming to a Moodle near you! Google Apps comprises email, calendar, document-creation, website-creation and messaging tools, provided free-of-charge for educational institutions. Moodle, of course, is the most widely-used (and Open Source) elearning platform.
Through the integration, users loaded into Moodle will be automatically loaded into Google Apps Education Edition, "providing users with Web-based e-mail, document authoring, spreadsheets, presentations and sites, all integrated with their online learning platform," explained Moodlerooms' West Coast Managing Director Michael Penney.
"From a teacher's perspective, this provides an easy way to assign students to collaborative tasks without having to worry about the students having different operating systems or incompatible software or being unable to access an online system. From an IT staffer or CIO's perspective, this provides an integration tested with large-scale data loads and built on industry standard SAML 2.0 and OAuth protocols for secure single sign on and information transfer."
The Moodle community is to handle the coding of the integration, with Google taking responsibility for 'funding, direction and guidelines'.Google is a high-profile supporter of Open Source Software (OSS), with an Open Source at Google blog, free hosting for OSS via Google Code, and paid-for internships relating to OSS with the Google Summer of Code.
Submitted by Doug Belshaw on Fri, 20/02/2009
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