Elluminate Builds Bridge to Moodle

• By David Nagel
• 02/12/08

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Collaborative technology developer Elluminate has brought its Live! virtual classroom software to the Moodle platform. The company released a piece of software Tuesday called Elluminate Bridge for Moodle, which is designed to integrate Live! into the open-source learning management system.

Elluminate Live! is an e-learning, conferencing, and online collaboration tool designed for use in education, providing support for a variety of learning management systems, including Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, WebCT, and eCollege. It includes features like note taking, two-way interactive video (up to 640 x 480), archiving and automatic indexing of e-learning sessions, various tools for teachers (timers, pop-up announcements, sorting of participants by hand raising, etc.), whiteboarding, and various other collaboration tools.

Elluminate Bridge for Moodle, which itself is being released as open source, is designed to "seamlessly add synchronous distance learning and collaboration into coursework." Built on the Elluminate Bridge Toolkit, it also supports communications between Live! installations running on disparate platforms.

For K-12 institutions, Bridge for Moodle is now being included in Elluminate's free Live! Lite promotion, which allows schools to use Live! Lite Edition itself free for one year. The software is similar to the full version of Live!, providing a variety of collaborative technologies, including chat, audio, whiteboard sharing, moderator tools, and other features.

Moodle is one of the most popular learning management systems out there. The open-source LMS, as of this writing, had nearly 16.7 million users participating in nearly 1.7 million courses at more than 38,000 registered sites, according to Moodle's published statistics.

As we previously reported, Elluminate is also bringing its Live! collaboration suite to the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment, an open-source learning management system. The move is part of a new alliance with Unicon, a company that specializes in providing support and services for open-source software to education. Sakai integration is expected to be completed and available for the public in spring 2008.

Bridge for Moodle is available for download now.

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About the author: David Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's online education technology publications, including THE Journal and Campus Technology. He can be reached at [email protected].

Proposals for articles and tips for news stories, as well as questions and comments about this publication, should be submitted to David Nagel, executive editor, at [email protected].