Work in progress: Extending a LMS with social capabilities: Integrating Moodle into Facebook

Abstract

Merging a Learning Management System (LMS) and a social network has social advantages for students. Among others, students can show off their achievements among their acquaintances, which in turn improves their social leadership and self-esteem. This is specially true in the case of distance learning, where there are no physical interactions between students, so their student life is totally isolated from their everyday life (e.g. students do not go out together, since they may live in different cities or even countries although they study the same subjects). All these points suggest that the use of social networks for distance teaching has clear advantages that can be harnessed. In order to achieve the aforementioned benefits, we are working on integrating a commonly used LMS, Moodle, into one of the most widely-used social network, Facebook. This integration allows students and faculty to use Facebook as a communication tool that improves the learning process and social life of students in the ways presented before.