How to Integrate Moodle LMS with Office 365?

Information and communication technology (ICT) has become of paramount importance to schools and universities. Many educational institutions that have been using learning management systems (LMS) such as Moodle for a long time are looking for innovative solutions to integrate them with cloud solutions to transform educational content delivery and administration.

Many school districts, universities, and educational institutions are opting for cloud-based productivity solutions such as Microsoft 365/ Office 365 for Education, that are transforming the learning landscape. Institutions are looking for solutions to integrate their existing systems with these packages. In this article, we will focus on how to integrate Moodle with Office 365.

What Are the Advantages of Integrating Moodle with Office 365?

Integrating Moodle with the Office 365/ Microsoft 365 suite provides teachers and students a more productive experience.

Here are some of the advantages of integrating Moodle with Office 365.

• Institutions will have a single integrated hub for organizing students’ activities, assessments, communications, assignments, conversations, and courses, that would otherwise be distributed across disparate systems.
• With single sign-on (SSO), the integration between Moodle server and Azure AD and Teams in Microsoft 365 Education will ensure that educators and course participants can now browse the course modules in a single tab without requiring physical access to the Moodle server or additional credentials.
• Moodle courses at schools, universities, and other educational institutions can include Office documents that can be accessed using any device and even be edited offline.
• Moodle calendar entries will appear in Outlook for students and staff and can be accessed even with their mobile devices.
• Students can use OneNote to submit their assignments in Moodle.
• OneDrive can be used to store Moodle course documents, with which students and faculty will have scalable and globally accessible storage in the cloud.
• Learning can be enriched by embedding interactive online lessons that use Teams, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, and other content within the Moodle platform.

How to Set Up Office 365 Moodle Integration?

Moodle can be integrated with Office 365/ Microsoft 365 Education using a wide range of plugins, many of which are open source. The process involved in integrating Moodle LMS with Office 365 is stated below.

• Register the Moodle instance in Azure AD using the OpenID protocol.
• Ensure that Moodle can access appropriate Microsoft applications such as SharePoint Online and Exchange Online.
• Subsequently, the applications have to be configured to grant specific permissions, such as the ability to read/ write calendars, site collections, user files, etc.
• Add Office 365 users who need access to the Moodle content by synchronizing Moodle server and Azure Active Directory.
• Use a dedicated account/ an admin account to perform non-user-specific operations, such as synchronizing Moodle with SharePoint.
• Admins can provide further customizations, such as deploying the Moodle Assistant Bot to Azure that can be used for delivering notifications and providing answers about courses, assignments, grades, and other information in Moodle.

Apps4Rent Can Help with Moodle Microsoft 365 Integration

Integration on-premises Moodle server with Microsoft 365 for Education can transform the learning experience of students. However, the integration process, can itself be challenging, depending upon the functional requirements even with the wide range of open-source plugins available.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner in several competencies such as Collaboration and Content, Cloud Platform, and Cloud Productivity, and a Tier 1 CSP, Apps4Rent can provide appropriate Microsoft 365 for Education licenses, provide managed Azure services for Moodle Server hosting, and assist with Moodle Office 365 integration. Contact Apps4Rent cloud architects, available 24/7 via phone, chat, and email for assistance.