Hi all,
Even after all this time I'm puzzled by how you access grades of students who have (1) left a course to move on to another year, say, and (2) are no longer in any course, perhaps even having been marked as 'deleted' in the database.
Hi John,
If you have deleted your student from the database, then I am not sure on how to review his grade anymore. At least easily. I think you will need to recreate the exact user first somehow, and this cannot be done via the regular UI.
Are you usign 1.9? 2.0 wil be different..
If you have unassigned the student from a student role in the course, then in order to review his grade you will need to add him back. All the grades would reappear, so you can review them.
if you don't want the student to see his old course during that time, you can use the 1.9 workaround. (2.0 solution is here, at the very bottom).
We, for example, do not re-use the old course shells. Instead we create new Moodle courses for new semesters, and copy the content over for new set of students. That way all the historical data stays in place.
Hi Elena,
That's a very useful summary, and in fact exactly what I was expecting as far as the 'unassigned' student is concerned. You have to re-assign the student(s) to a course, but with one of the two workarounds you mention to stop them from seeing that prevous course in My Courses.
As yourself, we have older versions of courses, hidden from students, so that their grades can reside there for staff to refer back to as necessary. Inevitably this means an ever-burgeoning moodle site as years roll on. It also means that you will be in real problems with auto-enrolment from say LDAP or a Registry database when students are off-rolled at the end of their course (e.g. their graduation), as their marks will disappear anyway.
But since users aren't necessarily deleted from the database, but rather marked as deleted (deleted=1), then there could be an entirely different concept of what a gradebook is. Namely, a book of grades, with pages (effectively snapshots) that you can turn back to reveal previous snapshots, from earlier semesters or earlier years.
This is certainly not the way the gradebook in Moodle appears to run AFAIK [correct me if I'm wrong]. What IS notable is that the gradebook is a snapshot in the sense that if you edit a 'grade' in the gradebook, you lock that underlying grade, but the version in the gradebook remains editable. However, this doesn't go the whole hog and allow you to turn 'pages' back to see all the earlier grades (from a previous cohort of students), even when the student is no longer with the school / college. Even though their records not actually expunged - when you couldn't possibly see any user or user grades!
Do others use an XML or Spreadsheet export to hold such old snapshots? Likely, as we do. But it all seems a bit clunky compared with a roll-back electronic Grade Book.
Have I missed the point here?
John
I will describe our way of dealing with this:
Our students stay enrolled in the old and hidden from them courses. Only those who are dropped or withdrawn during the semester will actually lose access - and even for those we have developed an enrollment setting that allows instructors to prevent this from happening.
So, this is just the matter of integration rules with the registration database
Since we do not re-use the course shells for new semesters and students remain there in the Student role, all grades and gradebooks stay in tact.
After semester is over, we move old courses to a separate "archive" instance, where they stay available only to instructors in exactly the same format as they were on production. Thus, instructors can review old grades, and support team can grab (backup) content in order to restore/reuse it for the next semester courses.
And after fter 2-3 yerars we purge old courses from the archive instance.
Thanks Elena, again that's very clear.
You use another entire instance of Moodle as your content archive, complete with users and their assessments, but without any student access, which you can either do by hiding all the courses (not very foolproof because a staff member could unhide them), or by modifying the Student role in the archive instance only. Very neat.
I'll ponder over ways forward. Cheers, John