If you are using Moodle for your school or company, it is now possible to include Drillster’s adaptive technology into your own Moodle environment. This will enable you to:

• Include drills as Moodle activities
• Keep track of the progress of your users
• Provide a seamless login and account creation

Drillster has developed a Moodle plugin in co-operation with the Moodle specialists at Avetica and OpenEdu. By installing the free plugin, you can connect your Moodle instance with your Drillster accounts.

Prerequisites

Two things are required in order to connect Moodle to Drillster:

• Moodle version 2.4 or higher – The plugin has been developed for Moodle version 2.x.  Apparently, it is possible to install the plugin in a Moodle 1.9 environment, but it will not function properly.
• Drillster Education or Business license or Premium account – The connection between Moodle and Drillster makes use of Drillster’s group functionality, which requires a paid account. Also, the plugin is able to automatically add user accounts to groups in case no corresponding Drillster account exists for the Moodle user. For premium accounts the maximum group size is limited. For license accounts, no limits on group sizes exist.

Additionally, the Moodle user must have internet access from the browser that is used to access Moodle. The Moodle instance itself does not necessarily have to be publicly available, as long as in the browser both Drillster and Moodle are accessible. Obviously, the Moodle server must have outbound internet access as well in order to reach Drillster.

Installation

Installing the plugin is a two-step process. First, you will need to register an application within Drillster. Since you will be connecting your Moodle instance to Drillster (and not some generic Moodle instance), you need to tell Drillster about your Moodle instance. The second step is to actually download and install the plugin into your Moodle instance and allow it to exchange credentials with Drillster.

Registering your application in Drillster

The Moodle plugin will be interacting with Drillster on behalf of your Drillster user account. In order to make use of the content and groups configured for your organization, it is important to link the plugin to your organization’s main Drillster account.

• Log in to Drillster with your organization’s main account.
• Proceed to register a new API application. You will be presented with the following form:

• Name: Fill in any name that is easy for you to remember. This is how your Moodle connection will show in the list of applications authorized for your account. For example XYZ College Moodle.
• Icon: The icon is an optional image to help you recognize your own app. No other users will see the icon.
• Description: An optional description of your connection to Moodle. You could use something like: Moodle plugin for XYZ College.
• Redirection URI: This is the URI of the Drillster plugin at your Moodle instance. This will usually be in the format http://moodle.example.com/mod/drillster/update_token.php, where moodle.example.com is the hostname of your Moodle instance. Also, make sure the protocol in the URI (HTTP or HTTPS) is correct.
• Application URL: The base URL for your Moodle instance. For example: http://moodle.example.com/.

This will result in the following:

The details you are looking for are the Client ID and the Client secret. You can copy and paste these values to a safe location, or keep the page open in a tab while you complete the connection between Moodle and your Drillster account. Don’t worry if you lose the information – you can always retrieve the details by going to the developer apps list.

You can disregard the URLs listed here.

Downloading and installing the plugin in Moodle

The plugin software is available from https://www.drillster.com/info/integrations/moodle

• Unzip the file into a temporary folder.
• Find the folder drillster (in mod) and upload the entire folder (including subfolders) to /mod/ on your web server.
• Click on Notifications in the site console, and Moodle will automatically install the plugin.
• Select any course, enable changes and you will be able to add the Drillster module.