 I'm Bob Puffer from Luther College. That's a little college in a little town in northeast Iowa. So at least we could drive here. I'm going to talk today about morsel, and you're going to hopefully ask a bunch of questions. I integrate three different applications using Moodle with Google Drive and other aspects of Google Apps for Education. And the two first ones, we've had morsel in production for four years, and the two others have been in production for a lot longer. But to give you a little background, in order to integrate them, you need to use an API that Google provides. And they provided an API when they had Google Docs, and that's what we used. And then in April, they deprecated Google Docs and went to a Google Drive API. And the Google Drive API is much more efficient, except that they forgot to write any documentation for it. So it's a little bit difficult to figure out sometimes. I had to upgrade the first two applications first because of their use in my college. And morsel was the last one. So this is not a complete upgrade yet. There are some parts that don't work, but most of them work, and enough of them work for me to give you a good idea of how it works. This is morsel. Actually, this is my car that I used to market morsel. It's easy enough to spot going around campus. And of course, they have to look at my license plate, and then they have to ask, what is morsel? And I have to tell them. Actually, not. Morsel's a block. This is a diagram of what morsel does. And we'll start with number one. The first thing it does when it's initiated, and it's not initiated until an instructor goes into their course, it creates a course user in Google and using the short name of the course. And what that does is it gives us a lot of flexibility to work with the drive files, folders. It also gives us a lot of flexibility while it gives us a calendar right off. And the calendar, number two, creates and maintains course rosters in groups. So everything that we do on either side is always synchronized, and we don't have to worry about permissions for documents or folders or anything like that. If this teacher shares something to the morsel folders that are created, all of the participants in the course automatically get their permissions for it. Right below number two, you see that the course instructors own all the resources. One of the things it also does is it'll email to all the students using Google or Gmail so that you've got a really good audit of what you've done. The last thing it does is it synchronizes, I'm sorry, I should really point out these legends here. Katie, which is what we call Moodle, and Norse apps, which is what we call Google apps, because we're a Norwegian school. And then the red lines are all for all courses, and the white lines are faculty options. OK, so we synchronize all of the Katie and Norse calendar. We synchronize all of the permissions based on the enrollees. We create a student read-only folder and the student writable folder for collaboration. With regards to the calendar, because it's on a Google calendar, students can see all of their Moodle calendar from any device like a phone. We also send them out notices on any activities one day before the activity and two hours before the activity. Looking at the future, I'd like to see enough work being put into Morsell to possibly derail some of the work that Google is trying to pull off with their classroom. They have a lot of integration with their own products, and we can match that if we have the development power. An idea came to me from UCLA on embedding Google docs into Moodle pages, where the real-time collaboration would take place inside Moodle. So I've been testing that out, and I think that's going to work. I've always wanted to create assignment drop box folders for the students to further integrate that. And a lot of my faculty would really like that, but there just hasn't been any time to do that. And I'm the only developer at my school. Dr. Puss is a very popular application, and we could certainly integrate some of the functionality of Dr. Puss. And then any of your ideas, maybe somebody out there in the audience is going to ask me a question or give me an idea for stuff. Right now, there's collaborators that are interested in Morsell UCLA and University of Minnesota. And we are probably looking for more, because it's a project that deserves to grow. And it didn't grow under my supervision or tutelage. It took me about one man year to develop it, but I haven't put 32 hours a year into maintaining it since I originally developed it. All right, so demonstration. So that mode, come over. I should tell you another thing about this demonstration. I'm going to demonstrate some parts, and they're all local to my machine, because that's where all of the development has been taking place. And then I'm going to take you out to another test server that we've got, where the calendar work is being done. And because I have an associate or a student developer that's working on the calendar portion of it. And she just completed that. I just didn't have time to integrate it into my stuff. So you come to the block, click on Morsell files, and up comes the right folder and the read folder. You also get your own Google Docs. If you logged in and got up here, you'd see your Docs up here. You would never be able to see anybody else's Docs in here. What we recommend to our faculty, and they usually follow this advice because it makes it so easy, is once the folders are created for their course, they can share the resources they want in those folders. And that way, if they don't upload stuff directly to the folder and give the course ownership of it, they can reuse it and reuse it and reuse it each year. So that's a pretty popular suggestion. So if I go into the read, incidentally, this happens to be the woman at the second table over there, Christine Molder. This happens to be a class she taught last spring. So I've got all these resources in here. And you can see I've already put some of my other stuff up there in the read folder using this while I was testing right up to the last minute. And you can upload files directly to the read-only folder. You can't upload to the root. You'll see you don't get any of those options there because we don't want you to upload to the root because we'll never get to it. This user is non-existent. So we'll go to the read-only folder and we'll take one of Christine's works here. Maybe I'll put my learning analytics on there. That seems to be the catchphrase of the conference. All right, so it says it linked it. We'll go back and check. I can show you this too. When you open it up, Google will have converted it. Of course, it's not a very big spreadsheet. Oh, you know, I closed the wrong window. I think I need to open closed window or to close tab. Some of these, depending on the file type right now, some of them will open in a new tab and some of them won't. They'll open directly in this window and some will actually create a pop-up. So I'm researching how I can guarantee that they all open up in a new tab. Nervous. Go back to the read folder and connect to another. Learning analytics must be off by one. I didn't see this happening before, but anyway, I think you can probably get the idea back to testing, I guess. You go into Google Drive or Google Docs storage. I happen to be logged in as Katie Admin. That's what I'm called sometimes. However, these are documents from my own document storehouse because Katie Admin doesn't have any of his own documents. Poor guy. Okay, now it says it. Link that. And we have learning analytics. Looks like what we've discussed. We also, oh, one thing I forgot to mention, we also do morsel sites for Google sites and we do that in a Wiki template because that's how the faculty that have used it wanted it. That would be the most popular thing for them to use it for. So that gets used for collaborative writing. Let me take us out and show you what morsel's block is really supposed to look like. That's with the integrated calendar. So these events that are created on Moodle, if they're given any kind of a start date, stop date, due date, they can be created out in Google also. And you would have access to it if you were a course participant and you would get notifications when the event was due. I think that's about it, except for questions. Hello, okay. Bob, I've seen this once before but I saw something different this time that made me wonder, I think a real key functionality that we would look for is the ability to insert into the course or somewhere within the course a link to a Google doc, which is what you did at the top level. Could what you did be moved into a repository type scenario? Yeah, I had the repository working and I had the mod working on the Google docs. I just haven't gotten to those two. They're a little bit more complex. And with everybody upgrading this term, that's been taking a lot of my time. But I expect that we're gonna have a morsel repository and that you can grab stuff from the file picker rather than exclude the interface that is kind of on the side and a little bit dated. So can you answer two questions related to your setup? Permissions in this sense are limited to anybody that's in that group. You've created a group with people enrolled that are only in the course, correct? Or are you pulling those? I actually, I found out that Google does not update drive permissions when you update a group. If you assign a group to own or to have permissions for a document and you change members, Google doesn't update it. If you've shared it with that group? Right, yeah. You add members, you take them back. At least at the time when I was developing it, that was the instance. It could be different right now, but so I go out and get each individual participant and make sure that they've got permissions. Okay, and does the instructor have the ability to rescind those permissions at the end of the semester? Sure, sure. Is that easy for them to do? They could suspend all their users. Okay, I think I have one more question, but I'll come back to it. Okay, so when you do move over to repository parts, so will they be able to upload directly into the Google Docs by passing the Moodle system as in if they go to upload file that they could choose to upload it into there? So if they submit... It had the same functionality as the block and that interface too. I can upload files and when they get uploaded, they get uploaded to Google and you have the option to link them too at that time. But yeah, they go right into the folder. Okay, so it's just aliasing back to the latest version of that file. It isn't going to any of the previous versions or have you thought about handling that aspect of it yet? You can give it an e-tag if you have any concerns about that, but it always gives you the most recent version unless you ask for a different one. Okay, okay. One of the advantages of this is that it does not bring any material into Moodle. Sorry, I'm going to go over here now. When Tuoh came out, the promise was that repositories were going to hold all of the files and all the resources and that's just really not how it turned out. When they did Google Drive, they actually copy or export the item into the Google file system and this does not do that. One other advantage is that it takes care of permissions. On the Moodle Google Drive repository, if a instructor shares or brings a file in, he has to give permissions on the Google side or he has to have worldwide permissions or he can go with anyone who has the link permissions. But anyone who has the link permissions is a lot less secure and our faculty weren't happy with that. So when Tuoh came out, that's when I started working on this because I thought we could probably do better. Were you talking about the Google Docs repository? I'm talking about, yeah, when you set up a Google Docs repository for yourself. My understanding in that was that it copied an actual physical copy of the file as an RTF for .xls and put it, it copies it and puts it in the course so that it's no longer dynamic. It's not a static document and that's why it's worthless. Yeah, that's another advantage that I really hadn't ever come up with. So I knew I was going to come away with something from this presentation other than kicks and boos and yas. So following in the theme of asking multi-part questions, is your code available or will you make it available? Yeah, you know, like my friend Mark Pearson from Earlham says, I'm not a proper PHP programmer and I want to clean it up before I ruin my reputation and put it out there. I have shared it with a couple of schools because they've shown that they're interested in collaborating on it, but it needs clean up. Okay, fair enough. This is four-year-old code and I'm a lot better rotten PHP programmer now than I was back then. And then my other question had to do with, it looks like you have automatic sign-on going on. You don't. So when you get into Moodle, do you have to then log into Google to authenticate? You have to log into Google, yeah. In the same browser session. We fooled around with single sign-on for a while and it caused us more grief than good. Gave all the faculty weird messages and I hate that. Is there a specific version of Google Apps that your university needs to run? I know ours is normally several months behind whatever is at the actual drive.google.com and is there any plans for chat, talk, or hangouts integration? Hangouts would be our next one because hangouts, I've had so many requests to do it, there really isn't any documentation out there about how to integrate hangouts. There is a Hangouts API and I'm interested in hearing people's ideas on how they would like hangouts to work in their course. We've got, you know, online, totally online courses that are taught and hangouts would be perfect for it. Anybody else? Time for one last question. Then I'll ask one. So on the basis of the comment there that because the file is copied into Moodle, that it's worthless, I would actually challenge that and not just be devil's advocate, I think when you're using an external repository, surely having a snapshot of what the file was at the time you intended it means that if that file is re-edited in the next semester, the link is still pointing to the current version. Surely from audit point of view, you should always have the actual copy used in that course at that time in case a student comes back and challenges something a year later. You can do that with this too. You can export or download the Google file and then upload it to Moodle. But I think there's the advantages of having it updatable for importing into future courses and not having to re-link it or re-bring it over distances, the disadvantages of it being an older file from an older course. Just to clarify what I meant by that, Gavin, when I say it's worthless, I mean, if I want a dynamic document and I'm converted to a static document, that's what's worthless. A PDF is a static document, so if I pull that in to the course, I'm more likely to want to do that than a doc or a sheet where I'm actually looking at the power of Google Docs is the integration or, excuse me, the collaboration and I lose that if I have to copy the file. So that was what my point was. Thanks. Okay, I sort of have suspected that, but just I wanted to, because it is one of the things that I see with a lot of people using external repositories, that they forget that they actually don't have any at-time snapshot of what the course was anymore. Once they roll it over, it's now fluffy. There's no actual state. Because it's a Google Doc, it's got a revision history. So they do actually have a snapshot of it if they want. Thank you.