Abr 12 2008
Why Webservices in Moodle?
The number of organizations that use Moodle as their LMS (Learning Management System) is greater every day. From k-12 schools to universities and companies the adoption of Moodle as e-learning platform is growing at a crazy pace. This is great both for the Moodle software and for the community. But as more users and institutions come into the MoodleVerse, more new ways of looking at education and requirements for an LMS are set on the table. And Martin Dougiamas and the Moodle Community can keep only one roadmap .
Lets remember that Moodle, build on philosophical principles on pedagogy (Social Constructionism), typically comes into the educational spaes by the hand of the teachers with the will to innovate. When the nw LMS is proposed from ABOVE, usually goes towards things like Sakai, if we are lucky and go FLOSS, or things in the propietary market that we will not name, period. Right now the Moodle policy is to build on stability, reliability and integration with the needs of the institution. And this is a good thing, cause is the way that the ideas bred in the Moodle communty can spread to as many educational environments as possible.
But still there are plenty of Moodle adopters who have crazy ideas that we’d love to see out there. Moodle’s M stands for Modular ( Martin recognizes that on a first stage it meant Martin’s 
) so Moodle can be extended through activity modules, blocks, course formats, hacks, plug-ins, etc. The Moodle contrib is full of that (more than 330 actually). But we do now from on experience that is hard to develop a Moodle extension, open source it, give support to the users, maintain it and, specially, to keep up with the evolution of Moodle ( that in last 3 years has been crazy: look at the Moodle core in Moodle 1.4 and what’s rigth now in Moodle 1.9… ) Still one of the keys of the success of Moodle is the possibility that gives of being extended, cause every big organization wants its information system to adapt (not to adapt the organization itself, like when one implements things like SAP). But organizations need to keep upgrading their customizations to the Moodle version… and lots of these developments never are published, and lots of members of the community are reinventing the same wheel over and over again. 
And every day appear new connected devices (mobile devices, micro-laptops such as the OLPC, consoles like the Wii, cook gadgets like th iPhone and even virtual artefacts like Virtual worlds like Second Life (to give a not so good example)). All of these artifacts can be possible points of access to the Moodle courses, and even can become scenarios to new learning experiences… more exciting and innovative than the very Moodle itself.
And we want all of these to talk with Moodle and with the Moodle activities…
Moodle needs a stable core API that alows the developers to write activities and extensions that survive the Moodle evolution, so they can be ported from one Moodle version to the next… giving the organizations a garantee of their investment in time, brainpower and off course money. And needs easy ways so external appilcations and devices can talk with it in an easy to develop and secure way…
Our challenge is to create a kick ass webservices echosystem that Martin Dougiamas will love to put into Moodle core rigth away. That’s (one of ) our errand.
DFWikiteam out
[...] ya se comentó en el porqué de los webservices en Moodle, los webservices permiten que un cliente se conecte a Moodle y pueda acceder a un conjunto de [...]