A number of third-party learning platforms are integrated into VCC Moodle. For example, content developed in other learning management systems or provided by text book publishers can be incorporated into your Moodle course as e-texts or interactive activities and may pass grades to your Moodle course gradebook. This integration can ease access for your Students and help to consolidate their learning experience.
The article KB1318 - Using external courseware in your Moodle courses lists all the external tools that are integrated into VCC Moodle.
Be aware that eLearning Support doesn't support those remote platforms - we only support VCC Moodle's technical connection to them. If you encounter an issue or error related to your remote provider account or to the student-facing content provided through it, you must resolve it yourself with help from the vendor's technical support or representatives. eLearning Support cannot access your remote vendor account - only you or your vendor's support team may do that.
Check your External Tool activities before opening your Moodle course:
If you will be connecting your Moodle course to a remote platform using an LTI External Tool, you must ensure that your course is connecting to the correct vendor product and edition, using your vendor account.
Related External Tool activities in Moodle:
- Cengage, Electude LTI, Elsevier Evolve, Pearson LTI, Wiley Assignments, Wiley Resources
LTI-based external tools can use a pairing process that relies on the Moodle course's Shell ID number (the five digit number in your course's Moodle URL) being registered with selected content in the vendor's back-end database. In LTI parlance, your Moodle course gets "paired" to the remote content that you select from the remote provider.
Add your External Tool(s) after course content has been imported
If you inherit a course from a previous term that already contains LTI links to external tools, and have imported that content into your new Moodle shell, the original pairing will likely no longer work because your new Moodle course shell has a different Moodle Shell ID than was originally used for the imported external tools. The best approach is for the pairing to be done AFTER the Moodle content import has completed place.
This example uses Pearson MyLab as the remote provider, but could refer to any other LTI External Tool available in VCC Moodle:
Teacher John will be teaching a new offering of Teacher Mary's Writing course. In in the previous term, Mary's old Moodle shell had a Moodle Shell ID of "12345", and was paired to her Pearson Business Writing textbook through her MyLab Teacher account.
When Teacher John starts teaching a new section of the Writing course, he imports Mary's old course into his new shell. His copy of her old content now lives under his new Moodle Shell ID number "23456". The Pearson content he just imported from her previous shell had been previously-paired under a different Moodle course shell ID, so it's now not paired under John's new course shell ID number.
So, as part of preparing his course content, Teacher John should delete the previous Pearson activities that had been imported from Mary, and recreate them under his own Pearson login, selecting the Pearson content he has in his own MyLab account.
Getting Help with External Tools
Initial Integration Support:
VCC eLearning Support primarily provides help with integrating External Tools into Moodle, or with confirming that they're integrated correctly. We can work with the external tool provider's technical support, to provide logs or other evidence, mainly to validate that the Moodle-Tool connection is functioning properly.
Support and Training inside Remote Tools:
Your remote learning platform will have some form of Instructor and Student help available within it. The vendor usually offers their own troubleshooting articles, training materials, or mini-courses, on their own support sites. Contact your vendor customer service representative for more help. For errors received from the external platform, or related to your external platform user account, you should rely on the Customer Support services available from the vendor/tool provider directly.
The article KB1318 - Using external courseware in your Moodle courses lists all the external tools that are integrated into VCC Moodle. Each Tool has a link to its own instructions and vendor documentation, including how to access their customer support and training resources.
Issues with WeBWorK courses
WeBWorK courses are added to our Moodle courses using the External Tool activity, and by selecting a pre-made WeBWorK LTI tool from the list.
To ease integration, a new WeBWorK LTI tool gets created by eLSupport for each new WeBWorK course requested using the WeBWorK course request form.
Related External Tool activities in Moodle:
Add your External Tools after course content has been imported
If you plan to import content from a previous Moodle course, it's best to complete that import first, before adding an External Tool to integrate a WeBWorK course. If you add the External Tool first and then do the import, the import process could delete your WeBWorK external tool.
WeBWorK Enrollment: Adding extra instructors to your WeBWorK course
Usually, your Moodle Students can enroll in your WeBWorK course automatically, by clicking on the external tool. Instructors however, may need to be added manually.
Ensuring visibility of Homework Sets and Quizzes
Once users get enrolled in a WeBWorK course, they sometimes do not have access to the Homework Sets they need. WeBWorK's "Homework Sets Editor" allows an Administrator or Professor (Teacher) to add users to the needed Homework Sets.
Getting Help with WeBWorK
WeBWorK is a free, open-source system for delivering individualized homework problems over the web. It's used by colleges and universities across the world and supported by the National Science Foundation and the Mathematical Association of America.
Inside WeBWorK, help can be found on each page under the "(?)" icon at the bottom of the left-hand menu.
eLearning Support will assist VCC Instructors with WeBWorK issues and training. There are no centralized support or training mechanisms available for WeBWorK, and no customer support services, but it is well-documented by a variety of online sources.
For tutorials on using WeBWorK at VCC, start with the eLSupport article KB1255 - WeBWorK: Getting Started and work through the rest of the articles linked from it.