Enrolment

Hello Silvia,

We are now implementing our special synchronization between our system's data and Moodle.

We use LDAP standard plug-in for authentication and External DB extended plug-in for enrollments.

We are not implemented an end user support yet. But there are a lot of institutions that made a special Moodle course for user support, with forums where users help other users.

Bye,

Hi Silvia, the best options would depend on where your student enrollment information is kept, what format you are currently getting it in, what staff and project budget you have.

IMO, ideal options for connecting to a backend system are LDAP (if you have an LDAP server), IMS Enterprise (if you can write structured XML out of your backend system), external database, or web services. Do you have a backend system or are you using Moodle's own enrollment/user creation system?

It is a very good idea if you can do most user support through Moodle. For example, a special category of courses where teachers can learn about Moodle. That way they experience Moodle from the Student's point of view a bit, and get used to the forums. Also, with forums, as here, they can help each other sometimes.

After some initial experimentation with IMS Enterprise we decided to go with LDAP (for authentication) and External DB (for authorization, i.e. enrollment). Still, I wonder if people would like to share their perceptions about the following observation.

If you use External DB for enrollment then Moodle essentially is sharing the very same data with the backend SIS, although it may make an operational copy of its own in MySQL. On the other hand, IMS Enterprise requires the creation of a file that duplicates (part of) the ERP database, and then Moodle creates yet a third copy of the data (in MySQL). If file creation or cron updating of MySQL fails for whatever reason, the data are not synchronized.
These would seem to be two very different approaches!

Ditto for using LDAP for authentication as opposed to IMS upload of user data from the backend to Moodle. In one case authentication is actually shared at run-time (although it may be synch'd ahead of time) whereas in the IMS case you are duplicating data and then authenticating against the copy.

So: what advantages are there to IMS, if we do have LDAP and External DB plugins capable of implementing a "tighter" integration? One thing might be an extraordinarily large dataset that chokes LDAP on the synchronization. Perhaps another would be intermittent failures of connectivity with the LDAP server or external DB server.

Are there other considerations that could motivate in favor of IMS ?