How to use Near-Life effectively in Moodle
How To, Moodle

How to use Near-Life effectively in Moodle

Serious, female teacher works at laptop in classroom.

When you combine the power of Near-Life to create interactive learning experiences with Moodle, the world’s most used LMS, you’ll be able to share interactive learning experiences at scale.

Moodle LMS offers a wide range of tools and features to create engaging and interactive elearning experiences. One such feature is the integration of Near-Life content, which enables educators and learning designers to create interactive videos and VR experiences, quizzes, presentations, and more. This guide explores how to use Near-Life effectively in Moodle, enhancing the learning experience and streamlining the course creation process.

What is Moodle?

Moodle is the world’s most customisable and trusted elearning solution. Its mission is to empower educators to improve our world. It is the most used LMS in the world with hundreds of millions of people in thousands of educational institutions and organisations around the globe using Moodle to manage their online learning.

What is Near-Life?

Near-Life is a cloud-based authoring tool that allows anyone to easily create interactive and engaging content for their courses. With Near-Life, you can create a variety of content types, such as quizzes, interactive presentations, branching scenarios and VR experiences, which can be added as standalone Near-Life activities in Moodle.

Advantages of using Moodle and Near-Life together

Integrating Near-Life content into your Moodle courses offers several benefits:

  • Interactivity: Near-Life content enhances learner engagement by adding interactive elements to your courses.
  • Ease of use: Creating and editing Near-Life content is simple and straightforward, making it accessible for educators and content creators with varying levels of technical expertise.
  • Flexibility: Near-Life content can be easily embedded as Moodle activities, allowing for seamless integration into your courses.
  • Responsive design: Near-Life content is designed to work well on various devices and screen sizes, ensuring a consistent learning experience for all students.
  • Scalable VR: Near-Life VR learning experiences are easy to create and are shareable at scale, launched directly from Moodle. 

In addition, Near-Life is a Moodle Certified Integration Partner, meaning that Moodle has tested and approved Near-Life for use in Moodle.

Creating and editing Near-Life content

Educators and learning designers can create Near-Life content using the Near-Life CREATOR authoring tool

With Near-Life, anyone can create interactive content using existing videos, images or presentations. To create VR learning experiences, simply use 180 or 360 video or images. Near-Life users maintain full control over content creation and maintenance.

Once the interactive content is created, it can be connected directly into Moodle using LTI. Enterprise users can also download and upload to Moodle via SCORM.

No file upload limitations

Connecting Near-Life and Moodle via LTI means there are no file upload limitations. This is great for larger interactive projects, like interactive video and VR, that may exceed the external file limitations set by Moodle administrators. The LTI connection also means that any edits to the project in Near-Life are easily updated to Moodle without any further editing on Moodle. Meaning that, once published in Near-Life, all updates are immediately available to learners. 

Adding a Near-Life activity to a Moodle Course

To add a Near-Life activity to your Moodle course, publish your interactive learning content, making sure to set up your Secret and Key in Near-Life. You will also need your content’s LTI launch URL.

How to use Near-Life effecively in Moodle. Screenshot of Near-Life LTI secret and key

The LTI launch URL is unique for every interactive experience.

How to use Near-Life in Moodle effectively. Screenshot of the Near-Life LTI launch URL

Then, in Moodle, add an Activity or Resource using the External tool option.

How to use Near-Life effectively in Moodle - Moodle screen shot add an activity or resource screen with External Tool highlighted

Next, paste your Near-Life LTI launch URL in the Secure tool URL field, the Key goes in the Consumer key field and the Secret in the Shared secret field. In Moodle, set how Near-Life content displays via the Launch container drop down menu.

Moodle screen shot - External tool required paramaters for LTI integration

That’s it!

Finally, simply hit the Save and display button to save the settings and test the display of the interactive content. You can edit the activity settings any time.

Happy teacher raises hands in success while working at laptop in classroom.

Whether it’s simple interactive content made with slides, more advanced gamified branching scenarios or a VR learning experience, with Near-Life creating and integrating engaging interactive content into Moodle is quick and easy.


To learn more about using Near-Life with Moodle, watch the Near-Life webinar: ‘How to increase engagement with immersive learning in Moodle’.

Click here to learn more about how interactive learning content made with Near-Life is used in Moodle, or book a demo to speak with one of our team.

Need to find out more? Get in touch with our team.

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