Google Sites as an LMS/VLE

I have seen various uses of Google Sites as a resource repository, but have yet to see it work as a true LMS where data is fed into a database and retrieved from a database the way most VLEs like Moodle, Firefly, and Schoology do. I decided that Sites needed more attnetion in regard to data management and have set myself the goal of replicating VLE behaviour using Sites, Sheets and whatever gadgets and coding is required. 

My first foray into using Gsheets as a database was with Andrew Stillman's Reportlet apps script (I had to request the code for Reportlet directly from Andrew). Reportlet does a nice job of representing info from a sheet and charting data, however it can take some 30 seconds to load. After communicating with Andrew with the hope that New Visions would invest effort into tuning the script, it seems that Reportlet is not part of their development program.

Over my next posts on this topic, I will demonstrate how I have used Awesome Table Gadget to pull data from Gsheets to present specific data to the logged in user. I will show how Apps Sheet can be used to build apps for users to log into the same data on Android, IOS and through a web app. Finally, I will demonstrate how to post data to a GSheet using a simple form (based on the work of Martin Hawksey.)

In order for Sites and Sheets to work like an LMS, the data in the GSheet for each student must be as up-to-date as possible; most VLEs do an extraction nightly so that data stored that day is available for the next morning. For this to work, my Student IMS will need to run a scheduled report each evening that exports as a spreadsheet or html file, so that the import functions in Gsheets can refresh each night automatically. The export and import of data from the IMS is the final phase of feasibility testing and should work in theory!