Office 365 Moodle Integration Project - OneDrive

Our initial work with Microsoft Open Technologies has progressed, and we now have an integration with OneDrive for Business. In this post, I will describe and provide brief demos of how Moodle and OneDrive for Business can work together.

At its basic level, the OneDrive for Business integration is a repository plug-in. It is built to work closely with the OpenID Connect authentication plug-in that provides the Office 365 account connection. It provides two levels of repositories to every user. It provides access to each user's private files area, and it provides access to a course shared area for every course a user is enrolled in.

I'll start by looking at the personal space. Below is a screen capture of the Moodle file picker using the Office 365 OneDrive repository.

What I can see here are two folders in OneDrive. The "My Files" folder is my personal space in the OneDrive for Business application. The "Courses" folder contains subfolders for each of the Moodle courses I have access to. "My Files" displays all of the files and directories I have in my OneDrive for Business folder. The image below shows the contents in the Moodle file picker.

Looking at my OneDrive interface, I see a similar structure as below.

Note that the folder structure and contents mirrors what I saw in Moodle. If I add or change the contents of my OneDrive folder, it will likewise  be reflected in the Moodle file picker. This is what we expect from a Moodle repository plug-in. :)

If I add files to my OneDrive, I will see them when I look at "My Files" in the Moodle Office 365 OneDrive "My Files" area. Likewise, if I upload a file from Moodle into the "My Files" area, I will see it in my OneDrive folder. In the Moodle file picker image of "My Files" above, note the "Upload New File" control. Using that, I can select a file from my local machine, and upload it directly into my OneDrive folder via Moodle, where it will be available to both OneDrive and my Moodle files.

The "Courses" folder also uses my Office 365 account. It provides course-level shared access to files for all of the Moodle courses on the site that I have access to. A separate folder is created for each course, using the Moodle course names. To do this, Office 365 for Business uses Sharepoint, and specifically, Sharepoint sites. Below are two images showing the same course level directory on Moodle and on Sharepoint (OneDrive).

The integration uses Moodle capabilities to control access to the files in both Moodle and Sharepoint/OneDrive. By default, the teacher roles in a course are given read and write access to the course folder, while students are given read only. Moodle synchronizes these access permissions to Sharepoint to control it in the Office 365 realm as well.

Showing the path through Office 365 to the Moodle course files is difficult with screen snaps, so instead, below I have included a small video showing the path through to the course files.

We're very close to releasing all of this work to the community at large. And we're very excited to find out how its received. In future posts, I will discuss the technical solutions underneath the hood in more detail.

If you want any more information on how you can benefit from these developments, contact Remote-Learner at moodleo365@remote-learner.net.