ATLAS, the IT unit for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has spent the past year configuring a Moodle environment to work as an LTI tool integrated into the vendor-provided LMS platform adopted by the University’s central IT unit. This initiative has allowed faculty to continue providing high-quality educational materials designed in Moodle, while satisfying students’ and administration’s desire for the campus to use one central LMS. LAS faculty on our campus have appreciated Moodle’s flexibility and customizability for nearly two decades, and have found other LMSs unable to meet their pedagogical needs.
With a successful initial deployment, ATLAS is now committed to optimizing this Moodle environment to meet users’ needs over the long term. Instructor feedback of the tool has driven ATLAS’s development over the past year, including improvements to the user interface, roster and group handling, grade syncing, notifications, and more. ATLAS staff on both the user support and DevOps side of the project will share milestones, challenges, and their roadmap for future improvements.