Towards PLEs through Widget Spaces in Moodle

Bringing flexibility and extensibility into Learning Management Systems is crucial because it gives teachers and students a free choice of technologies and educational materials they want to use for their courses. This paper presents a solution by enabling widgets (OpenSocial apps) within Mood le. Our first Moodle plugin allows teachers to freely choose a set of tools they want to use in their courses, although students cannot change widgets proposed by teachers. Additionally, the plugin enables the flexible interaction interfaces inside Mood le and improves the interoperability of Mood le with other Web platforms. The environment was evaluated with students within several courses. Even though the environment was perceived as useful by students, they lacked their own personalization. The second Mood le plugin described tackles this problem.