Extending Moodle: Plugins and LTI

(Time to Read: 4 mins.)

Mod­ern com­plex plat­forms are usu­al­ly made up of com­po­nents — parts that per­form spe­cif­ic tasks and com­mu­ni­cate with oth­er parts using com­mon pro­to­cols. Moo­dle is an exam­ple of a com­plex, open plat­form, made up of many dif­fer­ent parts con­tributed by many dif­fer­ent authors. It has numer­ous inter­faces that allow new com­po­nents to be incor­po­rat­ed. It’s archi­tec­ture is open, pub­licly-avail­able, and designed to be extend­ed.

The advan­tage of all this design open-ness is to make it eas­i­er for new fea­tures to be added from a robust ecosys­tem of third-par­ty Moo­dle devel­op­ers. The devel­op­ers work­ing at Moo­dle HQ don’t have to think of all the new ideas or to devel­op them them­selves, but their part­ner devel­op­ers and many enthu­si­as­tic mem­bers of the Moo­dle user com­mu­ni­ty can con­tribute code, test, or pro­vide doc­u­men­ta­tion (so long as they fol­low the rules of Moodle’s devel­op­ment stan­dards and appli­ca­tion inter­faces).

Using Moodle Plugins

New fea­tures can be added to Moo­dle using Moo­dle-spe­cif­ic cus­tom code exten­sions called plu­g­ins. Plu­g­ins are pro­grams that fol­low Moodle’s API stan­dards and only work in Moo­dle (or a par­tic­u­lar ver­sion of it). A plu­g­in may have been cre­at­ed by Moo­dle HQ devel­op­ers, or by out­side devel­op­ers who are part of the Moo­dle devel­op­er com­mu­ni­ty. Moo­dle ships with a hun­dred plu­g­ins installed pro­vid­ing fea­tures at all lev­els of the sys­tem, from back-end data report­ing, to user-fac­ing fea­tures that improve Moodle’s appear­ance or per­for­mance. There are hun­dreds of oth­er plu­g­ins avail­able in Moo­dle HQ’s online plu­g­ins data­base.

Two of the most vis­i­ble exam­ples of Moo­dle plu­g­ins are Kaltura and H5P:

• Kaltura is a large video man­age­ment sys­tem which inte­grates with Moo­dle in at least six dif­fer­ent places with­in the Moo­dle envi­ron­ment: a user-spe­cif­ic “My Media” page, a course-spe­cif­ic Media Gallery, and var­i­ous course-spe­cif­ic resources and activ­i­ties that let you present videos or col­lect them as assign­ment sub­mis­sions.
• H5P con­nects as a Moo­dle activ­i­ty type, fea­tur­ing its own author­ing envi­ron­ment. H5P activ­i­ties also pub­lish grades to the Moo­dle course’s grade­book.

In a nut­shell, Moo­dle plu­g­ins are writ­ten only for the Moo­dle envi­ron­ment, fol­low­ing Moodle’s API stan­dards to inter­op­er­ate with Moo­dle in a deep­er way, often inter­sect­ing with or impact­ing mul­ti­ple aspects of Moodle’s func­tion­al­i­ty in order to meet users wher­ev­er they’re work­ing.

Because of their embed­ded nature in the Moo­dle sys­tem, plu­g­in upgrades and instal­la­tions are a very struc­tured and vet­ted process at VCC. If some­one asks for a new plu­g­in to be installed in Moo­dle, VCC’s Moo­dle admin­is­tra­tor will review the plu­g­in for secu­ri­ty, suit­abil­i­ty, and sound­ness, and will check with oth­er tech­ni­cians for any bugs, risks, or known issues. Plu­g­ins are vet­ted in a care­ful way, and at any giv­en time there will usu­al­ly be a back­log of plu­g­in instal­la­tion requests at VCC.

About LTI Connections

LTI stands for Learn­ing Tools Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty, an estab­lished third-par­ty stan­dard for cre­at­ing con­nec­tions between learn­ing sys­tems. Every dif­fer­ent LMS plat­form (Moo­dle, Bright­space, Can­vas, etc.) has its own unique design, code­base, and API stan­dards for its devel­op­ers to access and devel­op sys­tem func­tions. A sys­tem exten­sion built for Can­vas won’t work in Moo­dle.

Most major edu­ca­tion­al book pub­lish­ers pro­vide their own online envi­ron­ment which sup­ports cre­at­ing or using course mate­ri­als derived from their edu­ca­tion­al books. When you license the use of a text­book, you often get access to a dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment with learn­ing mate­ri­als or quiz data based on your licensed text­book. (The Pub­lish­er wants to make it eas­i­er for you to use their con­tent.)

If every LMS is not nec­es­sar­i­ly com­pat­i­ble with the oth­er, or with pub­lish­er web­sites, how can you get their con­tent into your Moo­dle course? Con­nect­ing from an LMS like Moo­dle to those remote pub­lish­er web sites is most often done using LTI pro­to­col. You can cre­ate an LTI con­nec­tion between remote envi­ron­ments to gen­er­ate a link to remote learn­ing mate­ri­als inside your Moo­dle course, with­out the Stu­dent need­ing to login to the oth­er sys­tem.

In the basic dia­gram below, the “Learn­ing Plat­form” would be VCC Moo­dle, and the “Learn­ing Tools” would be the service(s) host­ed at the ven­dor’s remote plat­form (e.g. a web­site that runs their own ver­sion of an LMS).

Which services can you connect to?

Con­tent pub­lish­ers like Pear­son, McGraw Hill, or Else­vi­er pro­vide their own LMS-like envi­ron­ments for host­ing course­ware. Oth­er LTI can also be used to con­nect Moo­dle to out­side LMSes that are not owned by book pub­lish­ers (e.g. the WeB­WorK math home­work sys­tem).

This KB arti­cle describes all the remote learn­ing tools that VCC Moo­dle can cur­rent­ly con­nect to:

• KB1318 — Using exter­nal course­ware in your Moo­dle cours­es

Summary

The end result is that Moo­dle remains base­line deliv­ery plat­form which can be expand­ed to incor­po­rate learn­ing objects from oth­er sources to meet a vari­ety of needs, media pre­sen­ta­tions, inter­ac­tion types, or gen­res.

Relat­ed Resources:

• Gran­u­lar Grad­ing: The Pow­er of Plu­g­ins
• https://lingellearning.com/lms/what-is-moodle-lti/
• https://docs.moodle.org/401/en/LTI_and_Moodle
• https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_architecture#Moodle_as_a_modular_system