Join the dots

A plugin for Moodle that isn’t? How does that work then?

Well its a plugin that isn’t since it is actually a plugin for MS Office, there is no Moodle code side changes required. This has been sending the Moodle Twitterverse into paroxysms of excitement for the past couple of days so I thought I’d better get on board and have a look at it, particularly since it is a great idea and builds on the work that Microsoft have already done integrating MS Live Services with Moodle, so here goes…

I’ve seen the screenshots and description already done (very well mind you) over at Moodle Monthy, so I’ll not rehash old content, I’ll just share my experiences instead.

First up, for those who haven’t seen it before, there have been WebDAV extensions available for Moodle for ages which neatly get around the somewhat clunky internal Moodle file management tools. You can map a network drive on your computer using a number of tools to show your course files area within Moodle, and bingo – drag and drop functionality, multiple file uploads and all the other stuff that you can’t do within the Moodle interface. This new plugin though does take one more step out of the equation by allowing you to open files directly in Word et al, or to save directly into your Moodle course files area, which is a fantastic idea for those who rely heavily on Office, andeven though I’ve got a slight problem with how it works I will say that I think its fantastic that Microsoft are engaging with the Open Source community and I hope this plugin helps make the life of loads of Moodlers easier.

So, the problems as I see them.

Firstly, and the biggest one by far, is that the plugin seems to build its list of courses from the ‘Courses’ block, which presents (I think) a few problems. Firstly, and as Moodle Monthly already pointed out, if you are a site Admin then it won’t work, as you see a list of categories instead of courses. For me this is painful since I am an Admin in many Moodle sites, so the plugin is pretty well worthless unless I log in as a teacher, but since teachers are the main users for this then I can deal with that. What really bugged me was the message I got when I logged in as a teacher to one of our sites, tried to access my courses, and got the message shown here…

A problem. Or perhaps just my problem.

This made me wonder what specific conditions were needed to make it work. So the site I was logged in to uses the ‘My Moodle’ view, which is a common thing for our larger clients, so if I add the ‘courses’ block while logged in as a teacher then would it work? Try – no good – until I worked out that I needed to dump the connection in Word and re-add it, then it picked up my courses and was happy as a clam.

My learnings from this? As long as you have the Courses block showing in your ‘home page’ view, regardless of whether its running in My Moodle or ‘standard’ view, it will work, provided you are not an Admin and provided you have the Courses block showing before you create the connection – if it doesn’t show then you’ll need to delete the connection and re-create it. I’d say this is going to serve the majority of people for the majority of the time, but I can foresee a whole bunch of Help Desk calls from clients who do not have the Courses block showing on the Front Page or My Moodle view asking why they can’t see any of their courses listed from Word, which probably means its time for me to head off and give them a demo right now…

The other problem has already been raised elsewhere and will no doubt be met with shrieks of horror in the Mac community, namely that afaik the plugin only works on Windows versions of Office. As much as I enjoy teasing all the Apple sheep in my life while they spend their days queueing outside Next Byte waiting for the next amazing shiny thing to be released, if I was them then I would be plenty sore about not being able to use this plugin, so hopefully the folks at MS will get a Mac version released soon.

In summary? Really neat non-plugin for Moodle that will no doubt make life easier for a whole lot of Moodle users, but with the biggest caveat being that you must have the ‘Courses’ block showing on your Moodle site for it to work. Without doing Moodle code side changes though I assume that this is the only way that a non-plugin like this could work (but I’m willing to be proved wrong by and developers out there), so kudos to the folks at Microsoft for releasing this. See, not being evil can be fun too!

Enjoy!

PS Please don’t hate mail me Apple peeps, I love youse all, I just don’t get that excited about my hardware and OS. And I like to use weird stuff like Flash on my mobile devices.