Your Colleagues at the Joint Information Systems Committee May Be Able to Give You a More

Enterprise Integration of Portals and Learning Systems: A Reply

Background

On 27 November 2004 James Martland posted this question on the Moodle.org Forum:

Am hoping that someone may have traveled along the same route.
We are working with a College of Further Education. What they want to do is to use Moodle as their VLE (possibly in parallel with something like OSPI to run students' portfolios)
They want to run the above within a suitable overarching CMS - they've been having a look at uPortal for example.
The main thing is that there should be a common log in and that the CMS application should sit nicely around Moodle and anything else.
Their intention is that all the Colege documentation, course details, student details, calendars and so on should be handled by the SMS with Moodle doing the learning delivery.
Has anyone found a good way of doing this? Or perhaps a pointer to a suitable Ed. Portal/CMS?

The issue of enterprise integration has become important to many colleges and universities. There is an implicit belief that no one software supplier can supply the suite of software necessary to support the core mission—teaching, learning, and research—and administration.

Because of what has happened since November, I thought this answer to his question would be useful to others as well.

The Response to Martland

Your colleagues at the Joint Information Systems Committee may be able to give you a more authoritative and current answer about the integration of uPortal, Moodle, and LAMS. There are a number of projects that are leading to complete integration to meet the requirements you described.

uPortal and Moodle Integration

The ESUP-Portail project ( in France has implemented JA-SIG’s CAS single signon in Moodle as well as uPortal (Common Authentication Service was developed by Yale University and has become a JA-SIG supported product). The ESUP Portail project developers are technically savvy and understand user requirements well. Their work is available and can be implemented immediately. (See romuald lorthioir’s 2 December 2004 response on the Moodle Forum).

Toward WSRP-based Integration

The University of Wisconsin developed an Alti-Lab 2005 demonstration of Moodle and Web Services as part of the tool portability work. This is described by Learning Technology Standards Observatory saying: “Demonstrations were available of Blackboard, Sakai, WebCT and Moodle Learning Management Systems (LMS), each inter-working with two assessment tools (Perception from Questionmark and SAMigo from Sakai) and ConceptTutor from University of Wisconsin - Madison. The TIF has been developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium as an efficient, reusable mechanism for integrating LMS platforms with third-party tools, thus allowing institutions to extend the functionality they can offer learners. alt-i-lab is organized by the IMS Global Learning Consortium in collaboration with a number of affiliate organizations. alt-i-lab 2005 (June 20th - 22nd) was hosted by digital South Yorkshire, attracting over 200 attendees from 14 countries to Sheffield, UK.”

Yesterday the University of Wisconsin’s Dirk Herr-Hoyman said he would be preparing a brief report on uPortal and Moodle integration. This should be available shortly. If developed, this would implement Moodle as a WSRP portlet within uPortal—a project suggested last year by Moodle partner Bryan Williams of remote-learner.net and Sam O’s 2 December 2004 response on the Moodle Forum. uPortal developer Michael Ivanov confirms this is “reasonable” even though uPortal is written in Java and Moodle in PHP. I believe you will see Moodle as a WSRP portlet by February 2006 when the ITC MoodleMoot takes place in Savannah, Georgia.

Moodle and LAMS

Moodle-LAMS integration has been completed by the two organizations. Although Ken Udas claims only a “tangential role,” this work was initiated by Open Polytechnic New Zealand with leadership and support from the New Zealand Ministry of Education and the New Zealand National Library. Because the U.K. Department of Education and Skills has been a strong supporter of the pedagogy so well delivered by LAMS, you may find the Moodle-LAMS integration useful and some of your students will find it familiar.

And the Libraries and Source Materials

JISC has supported the WSRP portlet development. Access to UK library resources has been demonstrated by the University of Hull and its partner institutions in the CREE project ( These portlets, likely to be further refined with experience, will be especially important for students that do not have a major research library nearby. Expect to see JORUM develop WSRP portlet access as well.

Access to these resources can be facilitated by the Shibboleth federated authentication; there are several projects to accomplish this so students in the U.K. would have access to JISC-provided resources from a uPortal portlet without any additional signon. According to Steve Carmody at Brown University, expect Internet 2, the source of the Shibboleth specifications to address the portal user requirements soon ( However any of the JISC projects could become an immediate basis for a production capability.

Open Source Portfolio, Sakai and uPortal

The portfolio software that you identified—the Open Source Portfolio—is available as a Sakai tool and may be integrated with uPortal by the Sakai/uPortal work. r-smart published a report on OSPI “The Open Source Portfolio Version 2.0: Based on the Sakai Framework still available at the old OSPI Website . (I have not had the opportunity to ask r-smart’s Chris Coppola about uPortal implementation, but r-smart has been very response about integration).

The Sakai Project and uPortal are integrating using WSRP. There are three approaches being tested. One of these will be available in Sakai 2.1 expected in November. This work is being done by Vishal Goenka of SunGard SCT and uPortal’s Michael Ivanov under Charles Severance, University of Michigan, Sakai Chief Archiect.

Because the University of Wisconsin has demonstrated effective integration of Moodle using Web Services (XML, SOAP messaging, and soon WS-Security) and because Groups and Permissions in uPortal is separate from the uPortal framework, Michael Ivanov has suggested that this makes Groups and Permissions—the essence of “context”—available to any portlet or separate application. This means only one link or upload between the student system to populate the data—course enrollments, etc.—needed for both uPortal and the learning systems. This expands the benefits of integration (and reduces operating and maintenance costs).

Summary

It is unlikely even now you will find complete enterprise uPortal and Moodle integration as you asked. You can immediately implement the approach used by ESUP-Portail using the software they developed, and take advantage of forthcoming integration efforts.

To assist in planning, note the links between what you need and the work that JISC and DfES has done. (JISC is moving key research projects into development and performing the high-level integration—first with authentication that is needed to share library resources and publications—and then implementing what was called the e-Learning Framework. The e-Learning Framework services are being widely adopted in Europe and now in the U.S. Follow this closely).

I hope this provides some context for the complex task you have of integrating software at a specific college. In a few more months perhaps we can even better answer your question.

Jim Farmer116 August 2005