At the University of Illinois’ College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, we’ve spent the past year building a 14-node Moodle cluster optimized for use as an LTI Tool integrated into the vendor-provided LMS platform adopted by our campus’ Central IT unit. This initiative has allowed us to continue supporting historical faculty investment into high-quality curricular and assessment material designed in Moodle while satisfying administrative desire for one central LMS in which to run all courses. We have found that students and faculty were pleased with the initial deployment of this project. Faculty greatly appreciate Moodle’s flexibility and customizability: allowing us to add features without needing to research and procure new standalone LTI tools for every novel activity they want to provide for students. Students have long requested one LMS for the campus that hosts all their courses. With a successful initial deployment, we are now committed to continue optimizing this Moodle environment to effortlessly provide teachers with their Moodle activities in the central LMS for future terms and to attract new faculty who are familiar with the Central LMS but not yet with Moodle’s capabilities.
Some feature additions and configuration optimizations we’ve made would be of value to anyone using Moodle as an LTI Tool in any platform; some would be of use to anyone using the particular platform that we’re integrated with, and for some to be useful, both the same platform and shared assumptions about how individual Moodle courses relate to individual platform courses. In our case, we enforce a strict one-to-one relationship from Tool course to Platform course to prevent any possibility of private student data leaking across class rosters. That policy allows us to make substantial optimizations in how the LTI enrollment plugin works, among other benefits.
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