[Moodle] OT intranet gateway

[Michael Walker]

>>> WEIR Andrew<WEIR at thomascarr.vic.edu.au> 06/15/07 09:54am >>>

>The college has decided to implement a content management system as the first step to a full LMS however we have run into an issue where by due to cost it is prohibitively expensive to by licenses for every student to use the system. To over come this the students use the guest access and staff use there own password protected accounts.

>What I would like to know is if anyone has used? Is using ? Or has heard of any Gateway tool that we could put between this system and the internet to force students to log into using there current School accounts which them lets them see the guest account.  This also prevents Google from indexing the CMS.

We use a program called Moodle (www.moodle.org). It is a fully fledged LMS with the ability to add modules for anything that you may want that it doesn't currently do. It has a large and growing user base and the developers seem to be quite good at regularly introducing new and useful features.

Our staff are mostly using it as a CMS although a few have taken it to the next step and using many of the other features such as forums, journals, discussion, podcasting and so on to stimulate learning. The philosophy behind Moodle is quite good but best explained directly at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy

As for connecting to existing user management systems, we currently use LDAP authenticating against Novell eDirectory which seems to be reasonably effective. The only times we've been caught out is that each user in eDirectory has to have been correctly set up with first and last name and email address otherwise it tries to get them to update their details which we have blocked.
However there seem to be a number of other methods supported to authenticate users from other sources, it would depend on how you currently have things set up with your school network. However I would imagine LDAP would work no problem with Windows AD as well.

In terms of price you may be best off consulting the site but we found it very cost effective per student and staff member across our site.