Today, Microsoft announced the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle, a free download released under the General Public License v2 that integrates Microsoft's Live@edu services such as email, calendar, instant messaging and search directly into the Moodle experience.
What's even better is that this new, integrated experience is accessible via a single sign-on, which lets teachers and students access the resources and services they need to efficiently communicate, collaborate and learn.
Moodle is a free open source course management system that teachers use to create online learning websites for their classes, and has some 30 million users in 207 countries.
The plug-in and its feature set was designed as a result of extensive feedback from teachers and institutional IT leaders, and licensed in a way that is consistent with the practices of the open source community - freely under the GPL v2.
The news of the release of the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle under GPL v2 follows hot on the heels of Microsoft's release yesterday of 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community under GPL v2.
This means that teachers and institutions can download the plug-in under a widely used open source license agreement and under the same terms that Moodle itself is licensed.
This approach underscores Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and open standards, as well as to collaboration so as to help customers, partners, educators and students across the world be successful in a heterogeneous technology world.
With the Live Services Plug-in, educators can email class notes and lecture slides to everyone in the class as well as send alerts regarding homework assignments or quizzes - all from within the same environment.
Students can also utilize Bing for search, check their calendar, send an email or just an instant message - without having to manage multiple accounts in multiple systems. They can do it all right within Moodle. They can also check unread emails using advanced features like keyboard shortcuts to check email quickly for example between class periods or just before lectures start.
The Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle will be part of a growing collection of solutions available from the Microsoft Education Labs.
For more on this news, you can read the blog from L. Michael Golden, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Education Products Group, as well as what Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas has to say about the plug-in.