In higher education, Virtual Learning Environments (such as Moodle) are the best online tools to support courses and to administer access and security. The Central European University uses Moodle (1.9.12) at. We found that the basic functions are rather easy to use by both professors and by students. Moodle however, does not represent an all-around solution. It is almost perfect for managing and tracking content, and for basic activities (such as forum, assignment), but in the rapidly developing area of online tools and multimedia content, no VLE is able to handle all legitimate expectations. We use 3rd party software to cover some missing functions such as video processing or plagiarism detection. Even when the tools are available, they are just not user friendly enough (default file upload method, wiki, quiz).
Plugins and integration are really practical solutions, but convenient only in cases when they serve the whole user base: you have to install them and they will clutter the user interface.
Fortunately, online solutions can supplement the system without any necessary installation. If we want to avoid the unrealistic complexity of the system, we can always “link in” other tools when and if their access control allows it (share with a link). Most of these services are free and require registration only from the professor – students are able to use them without any further requirement.
There are a lot of handy tools which can supplement Moodle, such as Google Drive (file sharing, shared documents, forms, calendars), and other tools for scheduling, and collaborating. In this talk I will present some of these collaborative tools and their usage in Moodle.