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Infinity Learning Solutions announces a cloud computing solution for Moodle using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. Included in the offering is an optional single sign-on integration with DigitalChalk (http://www.digitalchalk.com), a streaming video lesson authoring and delivery system also available on AWS.
“ Taking advantage of cloud computing opens up new possibilities for these institutions. ”
Moodle (http://moodle.org/) is rapidly gaining market share in the university learning management system (LMS) market and is second only to Blackboard/WebCT. Many learning institutions, concerned about vendor lock-in and Blackboard's aggressive defense of its LMS patents 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. The Blackboard pledge has spurred several universities to begun actively contributing to the Moodle code base, further accelerating feature availability and interoperability.
"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," said Tolle. 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."
Along with the Moodle offering, ILS is rolling out single sign-on to DigitalChalk. Existing DigitalChalk customers can now add Moodle integration as well as single sign-on to their local intranet directory services and other enterprise applications. The addition of Moodle capabilities to DigitalChalk gives instructors the flexibility to connect Moodle resources into streaming video lessons (http://www.digitalchalk.com/misc/overview-of-digitalchalk-system-and-pricing) and standard Moodle courses can now include video lessons with access control and tracking capability. With the fall 2008 release of DigitalChalk, instructors will also have the option to get video transcription and closed captioning done automatically when they upload their lesson media.
"We anticipate some schools will use Moodle in the cloud for their primary e-learning platform and others with existing Moodle implementations will view this as a great solution for redundant fail-over and load management," said Tony McCune, VP of Sales. "The really nice thing about AWS is that you can maintain a very low-cost presence until your demand grows. Schools with tight budgets can support the peak needs of their students without maintaining a large capacity, expensive infrastructure on campus."
The ILS Moodle solution provides schools and universities with a partner in the learning market that has experience managing wide scale solutions on the Amazon Cloud. ILS is also offering additional support services such as Blackboard to Moodle migration.
