Moodle

Moodle is an open source course management system that is also parlayed as a learning management system or a virtual learning environment.   In reality Moodle is a content management system writtne in PHP which has all of the functionality if many PHP online collaboration and development tools available in open source.

The Moodle platform creates a community of users that can communicate with its various levels of citizenry using email, forums, blogs, task managers, chat rooms, and online educational routines.  For the educational community, Moodle offers a fully integrated platform that lets administrators and teaches communicate and manage course activities among themselves and to the students who take online courses through the Moodle network.

This platform can be used within a school or within an entire school district to manage courses and activities across multiple locations in a central location.  The platforms allows members to communicate with each other using either email, forums, or chat which in turn increases productivity through mutual collaboration while extending courses to students that can be worked on independently within a classroom atmosphere.

Moodle

After a few weeks of using Moodle, an open-source and therefore free VLE, it finally took over from WebCT and we all breathed a sigh of utter relief. To entirely misquote Steve Jobs, using Moodle really is like drinking a glass of ice cold water in the dark depths of Hell.

Moodle vs Blackboard 

Moodle vs. Blackboard Learning Management System: An Evaluation – Moodle is the industry-leading, open source learning management system and it is gradually taking marketshare from Blackboard due to its scalability, dramatic cost savings, and robust features.

Open Source SSO

Open Source SSO is project that provides the core identity services to simplify and implement a transparent single sign-on (SSO) as a security component in a network infrastructure. OpenSSO provides the basis for integrating diverse web applications that might typically operate independently with a disparate set of identity parameters which and are hosted on a variety of platforms such as web and application servers.

This project is based on the code base of Sun Java System Access Manager which was developed by Sun Microsystems.  

Glassfish is Open SSO’s  preferred deployment container The general idea os the SSO is to provide an tiered relationship between the different functions and applications acrros an enterprise network.  The tiered relationship bascialy creates separate and isolated functional areas.

In a typical arrangement, multi-tiered application have a client tier, a middle tier, and a data tier (or enterprise tier).  The client tier consists of a client tier which makes requests to the middle tier. The middle tier’s comprises of the business functions which handle client requests and process application data, and then storing it in a permanent datastore in the data tier. 

This means that the middle tier holds the business logic of the application and provides the framework for conversations with the client.  From a users perspective this is comprised if the web tier which handles the interaction between the client (e.g. the individual workstation) and the business tier (the business application itself) which collects input from the client, generates content, controls the flow of the screen or pages (the application flow), maintains the user session, and performs basic logic to hold data temporarily, and then forwards the completed data to the enterprise tier for permanant storage of information for use by other systems.

Open Source SSO

Specifically, the WinSSO plugin had a few problems with the interceptor implementation as it would also only allow SSO when a user was in the KnowledgeTree database and it did not work for Kerberos authentication. … Every open source project lives mainly from its community. With a thriving community OSS projects will undoubtedly succeed. It is imperative that everyone that uses and enjoys KnowledgeTree contribute their ideas, bug fixes, documentation, translations, etc.

Google Open Source Blog: New Functionality for Moodle

Our Open Source Programs Office sponsored the work and the result is an Open Source single sign-on integration between Moodle and Google. The best part is the extensibility features allow any educational software vendor to take a  similar approach to provide user directory synchronization, single sign-on, and user data integration.

Secure Internet Single Sign-On (SSO)

Written for anyone interested in understanding how secure Internet SSO works, this white paper explores the limitations of current SSO implementations outside of a single security domain (including identity and access management systems and open source development)  and introduces standalone secure Internet SSO as a solution.