Nextcloud integration in Moodle 3.6: Open source supporting open source

December 5, 2018 By Júlia Verdaguer

As we explained in our previous post, Moodle 3.6 has come with many improvements and new features that expand the possibilities of our learning platform. Today we focus on Nextcloud integration and find out more about this community-developed integration that brings two open source projects together.

What is Nextcloud?

Nextcloud is a self-hosted file sync and online collaboration platform. It is 100% open source and allows home and enterprise users to create a private, self-hosted, personal cloud to store and share files, communicate (chat, video calls, comments) and collaborate on documents. Nextcloud supports the OAuth 2.0 protocol, which means that users can log in to Nextcloud from external services, like Moodle, without compromising their user information or password, and exchange data with one another.

What does this mean for Moodle users?

Users can now sign in to their Nextcloud account from within a Moodle course and attach or share a file that they are hosting there, for example when posting in a forum. Similarly to file sharing from Google and Microsoft OneDrive, when embedding or sharing a file from the Nextcloud repository the user can make a copy of the file or create an access controlled link to it. Watch our video on Nextcloud integration on youtube to know more!

An open source project from the Moodle community

Before the Nextcloud integration functionality became part of Moodle core, Moodle users could upload files from their Nextcloud accounts storage directly into Moodle using a community developed Moodle plugin named ownCloud, developed and maintained by a team of students from the University of Münster, lead by Jan C. Dageförde and Tobias Reischmann, technical leads of the University’s Moodle-based e-learning platform.

Read about what drove Jan and his team to work on this integration and their journey to achieve it in this interview over at the Nextcloud website.

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Moodle 3.6 is available for download at download.moodle.org!