Microsoft got some open source press yesterday when it submitted some 20,000 lines of device driver code to Linux, and today Microsoft is releasing a plug in for the open source classroom content management system Moodle.

Moodle, based in Australia, is used by some 50,000 communities and nearly 30 million users in over 200 countries in 80 languages.  According to the Moodle website:

The focus of the Moodle project is always on giving educators the best tools to manage and promote learning, but there are many ways to use Moodle:

• Moodle has features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and hundreds of thousands of students, yet it can also be used for a primary school or an education hobbyist.
• Many institutions use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses (known as blended learning).
• Many of our users love to use the many activity modules (such as Forums, Wikis, Databases and so on) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around their subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition), while others prefer to use Moodle as a way to deliver content to students (such as standard SCORM packages) and assess learning using assignments or quizzes.

Microsoft’s Live@edu program, which provides email, Messenger, Live ID and SkyDrive storage services for educational institutions including hundreds of universities and school districts around the world, will now be able to integrate with Moodle, according to a post on the Microsoft and the Issues blog:

This plug-in is a free download that provides integrated access to Live@edu services such as e-mail, calendar, instant messaging and search within the Moodle environment. This newly integrated experience is accessible via a single username and password.  We believe this experience will enable more teachers and students to quickly and easily access the Live@edu resources they already use to efficiently communicate, collaborate and learn.

The Moodle plugin for Live@edu is available now on the Microsoft Education Labs site.

More information about Live@edu on Microsoft.com