Expanding the Open LMS Elearning Ecosystem: 9 Integrations That Support Your Instructional Goals

When selecting a learning management system (LMS) provider, every institution or organization delivering educational programs should prioritize flexibility and customization. Your LMS provider should guide you and explain all available options, helping you tailor the educational experience to align with your specific vision and goals.

A full-fledged eLearning ecosystem requires more than just your LMS, and it must be possible to easily and effectively integrate external tools with your platform to expand your capabilities. In this article, we explore the diverse array of third-party tools waiting to be explored with Open LMS.

9 Ways You Can Expand Your Ecosystem With Open LMS

Every learning environment has unique needs, and Open LMS goes beyond offering a comprehensive suite of built-in features to also provide a wide range of integrations with other systems, standards, and services. This enables you to select the options that best align with your specific strategies and educational practices:

1) Integrate Accessibility

While the interface of educational platforms can be compliant with the WCAG 2.0 standard, it's crucial to note that content isn’t necessarily 100% accessible. To approach this higher level of compliance, you can aim for an AAA certification in that standard.

If AAA accessibility is your goal, we recommend the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit. This accessibility plugin allows you to analyze the accessibility level of your content. It also suggests improvements, and can even automatically generate accessible versions of your content, including audio and braille outputs.

2) Add Ecommerce Functionality

Open LMS offers a comprehensive ecommerce solution to empower educational institutions and businesses to directly boost their revenue. But if you don't need advanced capabilities, you can still integrate with external payment gateways for a more straightforward setup.

While not yet widespread, payment gateways hold significant potential to benefit virtual learning environments in both corporate and educational settings. Businesses can leverage them to resell their training materials, catering to both other companies lacking in-house programs and individuals seeking to upskill for career advancement. Likewise, educational institutions can extend their reach by offering their most popular courses to individuals outside their degree programs.

Open LMS recognizes this potential and integrates seamlessly with popular payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe.

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3) Enable Proctoring of Your Examinations

The need to verify the identity of learners, particularly in virtual environments where impersonation is easier, has given rise to various proctoring tools. Open LMS seamlessly integrates with a number of prominent options in this space, including:

• Sumadi
• Smowl
• Proctorio

4) Offer Quick and Secure Account Management With Single Sign-On (SSO)

When institutions already utilize email systems through corporate platforms such as G-Suite or Office 365, SSO integrations prove highly convenient for administrators and users alike. SSO can facilitate access to your LMS using corporate email credentials, eliminating the need for a separate LMS account.

5) Understand Student and Content Performance With Learning Analytics

Analytics plays a crucial role in the decision-making process. The data that analytics provides helps you identify patterns in key areas such as individual learner behavior, providing objective data for precise solutions rather than assumptions. For instance, by analyzing data, you can uncover how quickly workers start producing results after finishing a training program. Additionally, you can pinpoint which courses are most commonly taken by your top performers.

Open LMS offers integration with IntelliBoard for this task. It provides real-time tracking, enabling early detection of issues and streamlining rapid intervention.

6) Expand Your Options for Synchronous Learning

A synchronous approach involves having learners and instructors in both physical and virtual spaces, gathering and interacting in real time. Ensuring that all participants get the same quality of experience regardless of their method of attendance is critical. Thankfully, there are technological solutions to this problem, allowing teachers to ensure attendance and engagement.

For example, we offer the Class plugin for Microsoft Teams and Zoom, providing various functionalities including:

• Automated attendance tracking for learners
• Detection of students' attention to the screen
• Logging of student interactions
• Learner control over whether their peers can see their camera (while remaining exclusively visible to the teacher)
• Creation of breakout rooms with the option to monitor activity

We also offer integration with BigBlueButton, designed specifically for virtual educational environments, and Google Meet, providing a familiar experience for those already using Google’s infrastructure.

7) Reduce Admin Time With a Student Information System (SIS)

Using Open LMS’s exclusive Conduit module or a generic API you can integrate your platform with an SIS. All the information recorded in these systems can be directly migrated to the LMS, allowing you to streamline administrative tasks.

For example, if the SIS indicates that 1,000 new students have enrolled, the LMS can automatically create their user profiles. Furthermore, if the SIS specifies the courses these students are enrolled in, the LMS can identify and allocate those courses from its course library. This process can be applied to any information set to trigger an action.

Our Conduit module offers several advantages over a standard API. It provides up to three levels of automation: manual, semi-automatic, and automatic. Additionally, it generates reports detailing all actions performed by the module.

8) Explore the Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI tools have been at the forefront of the technological conversation in recent years and this will likely continue in the years ahead. Remaining ahead of the curve, Open LMS has already been successfully integrated with:

• ChatGPT: A widely-renowned chatbot capable of assisting in various complex tasks, including the creation of course content and assessments.
  
• Teachermatic: An AI platform designed exclusively for educational content. When provided with a desired topic, the app generates diverse lessons, activities, exams, and even a rubric and work outline for the instructor.

Both tools help streamline teaching tasks, and materials can be quickly generated and validated before being put to use.

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9) Stamp Out Academic Misconduct With Anti-Plagiarism Tools

Plagiarism has always been a concern for educational institutions. With the rise of AI, it's crucial for universities to redefine their understanding of plagiarism, which now includes submissions entirely generated by chatbots like ChatGPT.

To address this, we offer two tools:

• Copyleaks: An anti-plagiarism solution that recognizes AI outputs in 30 languages, including Spanish and Portuguese. It also provides traditional anti-plagiarism checks for academic work.
  
• Turnitin: A well-storied anti-plagiarism software that has been in development since the 90s, Turnitin now incorporates AI recognition for English texts.

Why Choose the Open LMS Ecosystem?

The primary advantage of Open LMS is our open-source nature, enabling us to swiftly generate integrations with new technologies. When a trending tool emerges, you can rest assured that someone in the Moodle™ community is already working on its integration.

This process saves significant amounts of time, as our in-house developers can build upon this collaborative effort rather than starting from scratch. Once a solution is created and shared with the community, we engage in a large-scale feedback process, identifying potential issues and their solutions.

If you seek a reliable, comprehensive, and continuously evolving eLearning ecosystem, Open LMS is undoubtedly the way to go.

You can also learn about several of Open LMS’s built-in features in the companion article, “Building a Powerful Elearning Ecosystem With Open LMS at Its Core.”