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Infinity Learning Solutions today unveiled a cloud computing solution for Moodle using the Amazon Web Services platform.

 

Officials say that it’s included a streaming video lesson authoring and delivery system, and optional single sign-on integration with DigitalChalk in the offering. Along with the Moodle offering, ILS is rolling out single sign-on to DigitalChalk, company officials say.

 

The existing customers of DigitalChalk can now add single sign-on and Moodle integration to their local intranet directory services and other enterprise applications, according to the company. Instructors will now have the opportunity to provide the flexibility to connect Moodle resources into streaming video lessons with addition of Moodle capabilities to DigitalChalk.

 

Also, standard Moodle courses can now include video lessons with access control and tracking capability, company officials say. There is also an opportunity to get video transcription and closed captioning done automatically when the instructors upload their lesson media with the fall 2008 release of DigitalChalk, they say.

 

Gaining fast popularity in the university learning management system market, Moodle is second only to Blackboard/WebCT now, according to the company. Concerned about vendor lock-in and Blackboard’s aggressive defense of its LMS patents, various learning institutions are turning to Open Source solutions such as Angel and Moodle. Blackboard pledged in 2007 not to pursue patent infringement cases against schools or against open source solutions. Spurred by this pledge, several universities have started actively contributing to the Moodle code base, which has further accelerated feature availability and interoperability.

 

With an experience managing wide scale solutions on the Amazon Cloud, the ILS Moodle solution provides schools and universities with a partner in the learning market, according to the company.

 

“This is the first Moodle offering on a cloud computing platform that we are aware of,” said Troy Tolle, Chief Technology Officer at Infinity Learning Solutions. “Many community colleges and universities lack the resources and infrastructure to rapidly roll out a full featured Moodle solution. Taking advantage of cloud computing opens up new possibilities for these institutions,” Tolle said. “The ILS solution offers schools a low cost, high availability option for deploying Moodle. By taking advantage of dynamic server scaling based on load demands, the AWS hosted Moodle service can rapidly react to large swings in load. The Amazon Simple Storage Solution (s3) gives us virtually unlimited storage capacity for our larger customers.”