I have been having some discussions with a coworker the last week or so regarding enrolling students into moodle. The goal is to enroll them and add their courses to that enrollment. My coworker (who works with sonisweb) thinks the best way to do it is, via IMS, but as per a few postings on this site, you might notice it is not working well. BUT it works great on our practice computer. I think that we should do CSV and update the students courses that way. sonisweb will create both reports and I have actually created a few batch enrollments already this way. But, I can't seem to win my coworker over. Any thoughts? comments? I dont think either way is wrong, I just think CSV is easier. I dont see any real advantages to ims currently and actually think (from what I have read) it is for total automation and it will continue to update (so maybe for constant enrollments etc) and grab the information from a folder on a regular basis.
Any thoughts?
We use IMS enterprise to create courses, categories, students and enrollment data, including placing students into groups. The main reason behind this choice was that it was a legacy of the old Blackboard installation. It works well for us, and any updates take place with the running of the cron.
Although we currently don't use it, I would suggest the Minted plugin if you want your updates to work properly. The current IMS plugin doesn't support rectatus 2 (update), but the Minted one does (on selected fields).
One other issue we still haven't allocated resources to solve is that each new course created by the IMS file do not adhere to system defaults. Instead each course gets 1 week/topic and a 0 byte upload limit. This also happens on the test server running the Minted plugin.
A final note, we have around 1000 courses and approximately 10,000 users and with related enrollment data. This takes approximately 30min-1hr depending on the load on the server. To address this we have created a data dump which is reconciled against our campus management system, then only updates are fed to the Moodle install. Of course, to do this correctly you need to have an update feature in the IMS interface, which is currently only supported by the Minted plugin.
Cheers,
Adam
Although we currently don't use it, I would suggest the Minted plugin if you want your updates to work properly. The current IMS plugin doesn't support rectatus 2 (update), but the Minted one does (on selected fields).
One other issue we still haven't allocated resources to solve is that each new course created by the IMS file do not adhere to system defaults. Instead each course gets 1 week/topic and a 0 byte upload limit. This also happens on the test server running the Minted plugin.
A final note, we have around 1000 courses and approximately 10,000 users and with related enrollment data. This takes approximately 30min-1hr depending on the load on the server. To address this we have created a data dump which is reconciled against our campus management system, then only updates are fed to the Moodle install. Of course, to do this correctly you need to have an update feature in the IMS interface, which is currently only supported by the Minted plugin.
Cheers,
Adam
Adam, thank you very much for the information.
We are not as large as you and honestly, we only do enrollment 4 times a year and alot of it is just moving students to new courses. Your info helps alot.
We are not as large as you and honestly, we only do enrollment 4 times a year and alot of it is just moving students to new courses. Your info helps alot.
If you are not maintaining a "live" enrollment system, then CSV is probably your best choice. IMHO.
Thank you Adam..that is what I was thinking too