New for 2013/14: LSE for You/Moodle Integration

Over the past few months the Centre for Learning Technology (CLT) and the Enterprise Development Team have been working on a joint project to better integrate LSE for You with the School's Virtual Learning Environment, Moodle. Whilst the integration encompasses a few different areas the main aim of the project has been to allow the automatic propagation of student course choices from LSE for You to Moodle, and we are happy to announce that this functionality will be released for the 2013/14 academic session.

How it works

When a student chooses or drops a course through LSE for You (or via any other LSE process) that change is stored ready to be processed. These changes are then collected in batches according to a schedule, messages are created that express these changes in XML and these messages are then published to a queue on a message broker, ready to be picked up by Moodle. The content of the messages not ony includes the change itself but also the relationships between the different entities involved, for example a given class belongs to a course which belongs to a programme. Using this information, along with a unique integration code assigned behind the scenes to Moodle courses, a custom-built Moodle plugin finds the correct Moodle course that this change corresponds to and enrols (or removes) the student from that course. If the change involves a piece of teaching, for instance if a student joins a seminar group, this sub-group of the course is created as a Moodle Group within the course - this allows content to be tailored to different subsets of students within the course (e.g. information for students in seminar group 3 can be revealed only to those specific students if desired).



Further information

If you would like further details of this project or have questions about how it will affect you, please contact CLT (clt-support@lse.ac.uk) or the Enterprise Development Team (it.servicedesk@lse.ac.uk).

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