Hi all,
We're in the process of investigating the feasibility of having a single Moodle site where all student accounts are created and another with courses for each academic year. The idea is that students can be enrolled on the courses via Moodle network. Sites with courses can then be retired after a period of time, whilst the Moodle site with the students will remain forever, hopefully easing the issue of ghost data being left in the database when a course is deleted.
Due to the number of enrolments that will be required each year, we are looking to use the bulk upload facility to create user accounts and enrol them on the appropriate course(s). The issue I've encountered is that I can't find any information about enrolling students on courses on different instances of Moodle using the bulk upload feature.
I assume that this hasn't been implemented due to the different way in which enrolments are stored, depending on whether they are standard or network enrolments.
Has anyone got any experience with this?
Many thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide,
Stuart
Hi Stuart
We have had some experience with enrolling users on courses across a moodle network last year. The pilot was small, but showed significant problems with up-scaling as with your example. We are now working with a Moodle partner (Catalyst) to develop a bulk enrolment process that will be included in Moodle 2 and have a patch for 1.9+ - hopefully by mid-year (we don't expect to go to Moodle 2 til end of year at earliest). Our mnet relationships are with a number of independent education providers, so we need to allow for each Moodle site to be running completely independently and for the sites to be running courses that support users from 1 or more other sites.
Catalyst have been handling the upstream negotiation process but our development proposal was based on the following.
Cheers
David
We have had some experience with enrolling users on courses across a moodle network last year. The pilot was small, but showed significant problems with up-scaling as with your example. We are now working with a Moodle partner (Catalyst) to develop a bulk enrolment process that will be included in Moodle 2 and have a patch for 1.9+ - hopefully by mid-year (we don't expect to go to Moodle 2 til end of year at earliest). Our mnet relationships are with a number of independent education providers, so we need to allow for each Moodle site to be running completely independently and for the sites to be running courses that support users from 1 or more other sites.
Catalyst have been handling the upstream negotiation process but our development proposal was based on the following.
- Courses are created on the identity provider moodle (Moodle A) and users enrolled using the standard account/enrolment process for that moodle site.
- Moodle A is networked with a content provider site (Moodle B), which has a variety of courses published for networked user access.
- Moodle A & B admins can negotiate what user roles can be shared between their sites (e.g. can Moodle A assign a teacher role on a Moodle B course?).
- Moodle A admin can establish a relationship between a course on Moodle A and a course on Moodle B (kind of a meta course relationship), afterwhich
- all users enrolled in Moodle A course with approved roles (see 3 above) are automatically enrolled on the Moodle B course
- if new users are enrolled on Moodle A course, they will also be enrolled on Moodle B course
- when such a user logs in on Moodle A they only see the link to the Moodle B course (Moodle A course now hidden to them)
- but Moodle A admin user (or user with specific capability) will see Moodle A course and be able to assign new users or alter settings
- Moodle A admin has no role on Moodle B, unless they have been assigned to an approved network role within Moodle A course.
- creation of Moodle A course groups on the Moodle B course (we have a number of scenarios where this will be useful)
- potential for Moodle B course grades to come back to the Moodle A course gradebook
Cheers
David
Hi David,
Great to know that there been effort trying to enroll students on courses across network site in a large scale.
Currently we are enroll student manually across network site by login as the student themselves and at the same time be the administrator to perform the role assigning. The process is tedious and presently we still manage to cope as the group in the course is small at this moment. However the group size is expected to increase tremendously next year and enrollment by hands is not feasible at all by the time.
You mentioned your experiences in network enrollment, greatly appreciate if you could share your experiences or some guidance on how to do it. Thanks.
cheers,
Allison
Great to know that there been effort trying to enroll students on courses across network site in a large scale.
Currently we are enroll student manually across network site by login as the student themselves and at the same time be the administrator to perform the role assigning. The process is tedious and presently we still manage to cope as the group in the course is small at this moment. However the group size is expected to increase tremendously next year and enrollment by hands is not feasible at all by the time.
You mentioned your experiences in network enrollment, greatly appreciate if you could share your experiences or some guidance on how to do it. Thanks.
cheers,
Allison
Hi Allison
No magic bullet here I'm afraid which is why we are paying for further development
.
Methods we currently use:
Looking forward to our bulk enrolment development!
No magic bullet here I'm afraid which is why we are paying for further development
Methods we currently use:
- Standard networking -> enrolments option. Moodle A admin goes to [moodlesite]/admin/mnet/enr_hosts.php, selects peer site -> course and adds students to Moodle B course/s one by one. This creates user accounts on Moodle B AND enrols student on the course as part of same process.
- On many of the courses we provide, we need to assign Moodle A students to a group in the Moodle B course. We don't have admin access on Moodle B so use the following options.
- Leave it up to teacher to assign students to groups
- Negotiate with Moodle B admin to give one of our user accounts a special role on Moodle B that allows us to access courses and assign students to groups. We have established a "network admin" role on a couple of the sites we link with that is based on the non-editing teacher role + a few other capabilities. The Moodle B admin then assigns that role to our selected user account at course or category level. This "network admin" role also has the ability to assign teachers/non-editing teacher to a course which allows us to assign one of our networked users to these roles on the Moodle B course/s.
- Other options: a few members of our collaborative group have switched to using enrolment keys to allow students to self-enrol. The enrolment keys could be course or group-based for the courses on Moodle B. This has certainly worked across the network, but we prefer to keep things as simple as possible for our students and haven't implemented it for my institute.
- Add the Network Servers block to your Moodle home page or as a sticky block on the myMoodle page
- Instruct students to go to appropriate networked site, search for course (or supply jump link direct to course) and provide them with course or group enrolment key. Students have access to course.
- Consequence - As the enrolment has occurred directly on the Moodle B site, the Moodle A admin has no way to unenrol their students from the course. Unenrolment has to occur on Moodle B by the Moodle B admin/teacher or through the use of a Moodle A user assigned to the "network admin" role on Moodle B as described above.
Looking forward to our bulk enrolment development!