What we found was a surprisingly easy way to connect the two systems, and in a way that was respectful of the Moodle experience.  Our Live@Edu services all came with powerful programming interfaces, making it easy to control them from Moodle's equally powerful programmable interfaces.  All we needed to do was 'glue them together.'  So we set out to do that.  But before we started, we sat down with educators to get a sense of what they were doing in their Virtual Learning Environments.  We really wanted to understand how they were using Moodle, and what problems they were trying to solve. 

You see, we didn't want our Live services to get in the way of the learning outcomes that Moodle has worked so hard to develop over the past 10 years.  Moodle has a strong following because it focuses on the learner, which ultimately makes educators happy.  So, we wanted to help make things better, not get in the way.

With that backdrop, we put together a few designs and prototypes, ran it by some of our best thinkers in the education teams at Microsoft, and then it became pretty clear what we ought to do. We needed to make the Live@Edu experiences fast, simple, and as unobtrusive as possible. We also needed to make it configurable by an administrator, even if that administrator was not super technically savvy. We also realized early on that we should make our work as easily available as possible. So we worked with our legal team, and with their help, we decided to make the source code for our plug-in freely available, and under the GPLv2 license.

Moodle administrators can install this plug-in to allow teachers and students to sign in to their Moodle sites using their Windows Live IDs—essentially a single sign-on solution that helps teachers and students manage their multiple accounts and passwords. This plug-in makes it easy for schools to integrate their Live@Edu accounts with their Moodle installations.

Aside from single sign-in, we think another great feature for teachers is the ability to send alerts to their class. Students can subscribe to alerts and have them sent to their e-mail, mobile phone, or both. The teacher just clicks ‘Send an alert’ and the students get the alert. It’s a great way to shoot a message to all your students at once. In some markets, that message can even get delivered over a Text Message right to a student's phone if they have that phone linked to their Windows Live account. That particular feature got a lot of our early testers excited since a lot of students today are glued to their mobile phones.

It all came together in the Spring of 2009.  When we sat down with students to test the experience, we started to get pretty excited.  We were hearing that the Live@Edu features were a welcome addition to Moodle, and that our approach to make it an open source project would help educators and IT Administrators use our work as a basis for their particular environments.   So we decided it would be worthwhile to make this our first launch and to simultaneously launch www.educationlabs.com, a community-oriented website as a home for our projects. 

If you like what you see, and you haven't signed up for Live@Edu, it's pretty easy to get going on that also. Just go to http://my.liveatedu.com or ask your school IT Administrator to go there and get you signed up. We think you'll love the features, and if you use Moodle, your IT Administrator can embed our Moodle Plug-in to get the whole system working end-to-end. Drop us a line if you have any trouble getting going on Live@Edu and our Moodle plug-in.

So there you have it: our very first Education Labs release, and one that we hope will underscore our commitment to the broad education community. We're looking forward to your feedback and comments.

Oh, by the way, we also put together a short video with our friends at Channel 9. It should give you a good tour of the plug-in and how it works. 

Education Labs release Windows Live Moodle Plug-in

So, please let us know what you think about this project. What do you like about this prototype? What don’t you like? What do you wish we could add to it to make your day-to-day work easier?

One final tidbit: while this first project release is for an entire institution, we will have future releases that a student or teacher can install and try on their own—independent of their school.