Clusters of Courses

Clusters of Courses

by Paul Jacobson -
Number of replies: 2

It's a lazy Sunday - little research - straight to the Lounge. I've been dreaming last night of the problem we have with clustered assessments; and I hope for some breakthrough thinking on this in Moodle.

All our qualifications are made up of 10 or so discrete Courses. They are designed in Moodle as such; and our official records also treat them separately. In practice however, several Courses may be taught as a cluster - for instance, we combine the cognitive skills of witing complex documents with the technical skills of producing complex documents (in a word processer).

The assessment for a cluster currently is a metacourse with a combined approach. This does not present a problem.

The college, however, wants to enrol some students in discrete Courses and other students directly into clusters. In other words, they want some sort of unique ID that will accomodate the two different styles of teaching.

I'm hanging on your every word!

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Paul Jacobson

Re: Clusters of Courses

by Michael Penney -

Hi Paul, in our ELIS set of add-ons for Moodle is a Program Manager, which does  what you describe - groups of courses can be organized into programs (we call them curricula in the tool), and students can be enrolled into Programs. Each curriculum has it's own required credits to pass, it's own enrollment list - as well as other roles such as 'Curriculum Manager' - who can manage courses, etc. in the curriculum as well as receive various notifications about students in the curriculum.

Perhaps have a look at our user documentation and see if it is something that would work for your use?

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Clusters of Courses

by Paul Jacobson -

Dear Michael - the ELIS documentation is impressive. It will make good holiday reading for me. As a Course designer, I've been beavering away on Topics format unaware of the Pages format that Moodlerooms developed - however, it has caught the eye of our administration and they are keen to implement it across the college. In the midst of problem solving for a simple, elegant UI, I am also concerned about a few things if we adopt Flex Page.

Our portfolio has migrated to Moodle 2 because of essential tracking that uses conditional logic to detect non-participation. Next, we need to accomodate clusters of courses because some of our qualifications are delivered and assessed that way. Thirdly, we use Groups to identify which qualification a student is doing (when several qualifications pursue a similar Course). Are we on the right track to achieve our goals?

The Flex Page format is set up in Moodle 1.9; and I'm pleasantly surprised to see we can implement Groups normally. Does this migrate to Moodle 2?

And are you saying that we should work with the ELIS plugin to sort out the clustering of our curriculum - will this also migrate to Moodle 2?

I appreciate your expert opinion in this regard. The college could easily put its foot down and stick with Moodle 1.9 which is working fine; but in our experience, this would place a cap on how many students we can manage without automatic flagging of non-participation in remote online work. It's not an issue for blended learning where there is classroom contact; but half of our funding can evaporate if we don't have timely interventions for those students who procrastinate with remote online learning.

Average of ratings: -