LMS | News

Cengage Will Partner with Moodlerooms, Unicon for Tighter Integration

• By Mike Hohenbrink
• 10/19/11

Cengage Learning has announced it will partner with Moodlerooms and with Unicon on open source learning projects. Both partnerships are designed to increase functionality for the respective learning platforms through Cengage's new service, Mindlinks.

Cengage will integrate its digital material with Moodlerooms' joule beginning with the next release, which is scheduled for December. The collaboration will utilize Mindlinks, which allows integration of Cengage's digital learning suite with a learning management system (LMS) by means of portable, two-way links between the LMS and a Cengage product. The partnership will affect "more than 48 million Moodle users around the world," according to Lou Pugliese, chairman and CEO, Moodlerooms, in a prepared statement.

Mindlinks will work with any LMS, but the partnership between Cengage and Moodlerooms will offer additional functionality for users of Moodlerooms' open source elearning platform and Cengage's Aplia, CourseMate, CengageNow, and MindTap products.

In partnership with Unicon, Cengage will work to improve interoperability of their resources with the open source courseware management platform of the Sakai project. The companies will collaborate on IMS learning tools interoperability (LTI) standard implementation in use by the Sakai community. Under the partnership users of the Sakai courseware management platform will take advantage of Mindlinks to allow full integration with the Cengage digital learning suite. Additionally, the source code that is developed through the partnership will be made available under an open source license to the Sakai project.

"The Sakai Foundation is pleased to have Cengage Learning and Unicon contribute this work to Sakai CLE," said Ian Dolphin, executive director of the Sakai Foundation. "LTI is a particularly important standard for the future of Sakai. The fact that Cengage Learning is working through the standards process and partnering with a trusted Sakai Commercial Affiliate like Unicon to work with the core Sakai developers and contribute the code as open source is a strong indication that they understand how to collaborate with higher education."

Key features of the increased functionality with both learning platforms will include:

• Single sign-on;
• Links to resources; and
• Gradebook integration with real-time support.

"One of the greatest benefits of our MindLinks integration is the ability for us to work with LMS providers in order to utilize the best platform features, while integrating our content and solutions into an environment in which their customers are most comfortable," said Bill Rieders, executive vice president of Global Strategy and Business Development, Cengage Learning.

For more information about Cengage Learning, visit cengage.com. To learn more about Unicon or Moodlerooms, visit unicon.net or moodlerooms.com.