Support for storing syllabus and using it when creating courses

Support for storing syllabus and using it when creating courses

by Alejandro Forero -
Number of replies: 7
Hello.

At our school, Escuela de Administración de Negocios, at Bogotá, Colombia, we have been using Moodle in our courses and are very satisfied.  Thanks for such wonderful program! smile

We currently have a few projects for extending Moodle to perform certain things it currently doesn't.  The most advanced of our projects is one where we make it possible to create "templates", corresponding to the different kinds of courses that our institution offers in each academic period.

For example, suppose that every period we offer three sections of "Programming 101" and two of "Operating Systems".  Here, even though that would mean we use 5 different "courses", we would use only two "templates", one for Programming 101 and one for Operating Systems.  Once the academic period is over, we will probably erase the 5 courses but the templates will remain, as new courses of their specific types will be created.

Each template has certain contents (similar to the contents of courses: instances of the modules) associated.  When a new course is being created, the user must choose one of the existing templates or the "no template option".  If the user chooses a template, the course will start with the specific contents associated to the template instead of starting empty. 

This serves two purposes.  First, it saves the teachers time and increases the quality of the contents available on the course pages.  The teachers no longer have to fill in all the activites that make part of the course (they come from the template) and the information published is very likely to be of a greater quality than if the teacher has created it directly for the specific course.

Second, it helps our faculty to standarize the courses we offer.  For example, we can make it so *all* courses of Programming 101 share a common set of activities.

We have three options:
  1. We incorporate these changes into the official version.
  2. We create a fork of Moodle with these and some other changes that we are working on.
  3. We keep constantly synchronizing our changes with changes to the official version (maintaining them and releasing them as a big patch).
Would there be any interest in incorporating our changes into the official Moodle version?

Thanks.
Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Alejandro Forero

Re: Support for storing syllabus and using it when creating courses

by Sjan Evardsson -
I think it sounds like a great idea. We often have several sections of a given course running concurrently as well, and if the instructors didn't have to recreate every instance of them from a backup that would make their lives a bit easier, I do believe.

I would be very interested in seeing the code. Perhaps we can get this tested in a few places and push it to the cvs:contrib branch?

Anyone?
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In reply to Sjan Evardsson

Re: Support for storing syllabus and using it when creating courses

by Penny Leach -
Have a look at this thread:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=10472

In which we discuss using the backup/restore code to provide an "import course data" feature that, while is not as elegant as creating courses from templates, allows you to quickly move across all or some activity modules to a new course.

I wrote some code to do this and there's patch linked in the thread. The only problem is that currently it only allows you to select "import ALL forums" or whatever, but doesn't have the ability to select INDIVIDUAL instances of each activity module to import.

Eloy has plans to build this sort of thing into the backup/restore code, and at that point I'll probably (depending on the requirements my end) enhance my patch to work along with it.

Although I'm not sure it would actually take too much work as my patch is really just an new user interface to the underlying backup restore libraries so it might just work, we'll see.

Anyway, it might be worth having a look at.

Cheers!
Penny
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In reply to Penny Leach

Re: Support for storing syllabus and using it when creating courses

by Dennis Daniels -
Being able to easily share course materials and quizzes is an important feature. Every teacher will want to make sure that certain question groups are emphasized but, they will want to also draw from a large a data pool as possible. Sharing quiz data across classes is big! I've got 25 categories, or so, of English questions... I'd love to be able to hand off the lot to a new teacher and say start with this...
best
Dennis

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In reply to Dennis Daniels

Re: Support for storing syllabus and using it when creating courses

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
You can already "publish" quiz categories across courses (within Moodle) in real time.
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In reply to Sjan Evardsson

Re: Support for storing syllabus and using it when creating courses

by Karin Haack -
Hello,
I am working at EAN (Escuela de Administración de Negocios) in Bogotá like Alejandro who introduced the idea to extend moodle with templates. We could make some progress on it and we are already able to create courses based on pre-defined templates.

The address of our moodle development version is http://216.72.4.138/~karin/moodlesvn. For all who are interested in viewing our moodle site, I created a new user account (username: visitor / password: visitor) with creation privileges (course creator).
 
In the block Administration, you will see a new link "templates" which leads you to the template sites. At the moment, just one template (called first template) exists. Before creating a new course, you will be asked to choose a template. If you choose our example template "first template", you will see that the new course will already contain some modules which come from the chosen template (all template modules and section summaries will be copied and pasted into the new course).

The architecture and the look of template sites are pretty much the same like courses. There is a new directory "template" which includes almost the same files like in the course directory, just adapted to templates. Some library functions and php pages will be called with an additional argument (objecttype=template) in order to distinguish between courses and templates. All the original calls used by courses are not affected by this change and don't need to be modified.

For now, only assignments, labels and resources can be added to a template. I am currently working on extending this list. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any suggestion to improve this development work.

Best regards,
Karin

Please consider that the moodle installation is under development.

Still needs to be done: backup/restore; log site; new block for linking to templates (like course block); template listing (template/index.php); extending list of template modules; including changes to version 1.4 (current moodle version 1.3.3)
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In reply to Karin Haack

Re: Support for storing syllabus and using it when creating courses

by Peter Honan -

Looks great wink, pretty much what I've been hopeing for...the duplication of files and resources is to me a good thing (while we have no centralised repository (DMS)) and allows, in my situation, the 'classroom' teacher to customise their course.

Congrats...look forward to seeing more big grin

P.S. Do students/teachers see the template block and items or only Creators and Admins?

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In reply to Alejandro Forero

Re: Support for storing syllabus and using it when creating courses

by Peter Honan -

Personally, I think this would be an excellent inovation approve

I am currently installing a second Moodle site to provide teachers with exactly that, an area where ongoing curriculum development an take place. Those courses can then be used as templates for new courses on the student delivery site or just as documented curriculum for any other subject.

Obviously to integrate the templates into the one system would be desirable especially if/when DMS is included to reduce the duplication of resources etc.

Are you testing any code currently? Very keen to see..tongueout

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