I am looking to create IMS Enterprise files for :Add/edit/delete of:
courses, enrollments, students/Faculty etc, crosslisting of courses, merged rosters and anything else.
We have banner SIS. How are others that deploy IMS Enterprise file implementing this? Any pitfalls /heads up !!!
Most probably I will end up writing a custom ASP.NET application to extract banner data and write out in XML format.
Any better idea/suggestions.
Thanks,
Chandrika
That is basically what we did to generate the IMS file. One thing to keep in mind is that at this point moodle imsenterprise does not edit or delete. It only creates people, courses and the enrolment of people in courses.
This defeats the purpose of having IMS formats if all we can do is add. What do you suggest for edit/delete.
We do have regular edits and deletes in our current LMS,
Thanks,
Chandrika
I stand partially corrected. You can delete people via their "recstatus" if you turn that one in the configuration of IMSenterprise in moodle.
We do a couple things.
Our courses are created as "Unavailable to Students" and are only made available by teachers if/when they use them. This limits the listing of course that are not used.
Because disenroling a student from a course will delete their work and our student enrolment status may flucate in the begining of the term and we do not want to delete any data. Do deal with this I have customised the imsenterprise code and capabilities to support teachers disenrolling students that are not in the ims xml.
I hope this is helpful.
We use IMS Enterprise for course creation but manage enrollments with the database plug-in for hourly syncs with our SIS (no Banner). For cross-listing we have a translation table we maintain that we pass the enrollment data through to merge courses before the data hits moodle. I have PHP scripts that generate the IMS files and populate the database table.
We're on 1.9.x. One thing we found with IMS is with very large files we had some inconsistent enrollment (some students getting dropped from courses). Some searches yielded an explanation of "greedy" regular expressions in the IMS code. After limiting IMS to course creation and managing hourly enrollment syncs with a database table things have been super-smooth.
-- Scott
So one of the issues with IMS in moodle is that the minimum required php version for moodle 1.x does not have a good XML parser. Due to that the processing of the xml is done via regular expressions and is really finicy*. With moodle 2.x it is now possible to use a real xml parser. If it does not happen in core I hope to do it this winter myself.
*The joke about regular expressions is that when you solve 1 problem with them you now have 2 problems.
Hello Scott,
I tested out IMS plugin and this does not serve our purpose for either courses or enrollments. I am a little disappointed with this. I am looking into external database. The moodle docs are not very helpful. Would you mind sharing the setup.
We have banner and our Moodle will run on Oracle. So far I have DB-links to the required banner views into Moodle. I have the SQLS that will run from Moodle DB getting Banner info. I am ready to set up the External Database enrollment settings but I am not sure how this works.
Appreciate your help.
Chandrika
harathch@umdnj.edu
973 972 8238
Thanks Erik and Scott. We are currnetly on moodle 1.9 / php 5.3.3. I am not sure how large a very large files will be. We are using ANGEL right now and their XEI extracts all the info and in add/update mode if record exists it updates else adds. As a result we extract all relevant information from SIS. My strategy to start with should be: extract only Add and Edit information separately so that the resulting file is not a large one. I'll have to research this.
Hello Again,
I am in the process of designing our IMS file.
Do you have 1 file for all: membership / group / person or 1 per each activity.
Also what would be a large file for enrollments to get messed up ?
Thanks,
Chandrika
One file for the whole thing.
I have created a file that creates courses, stduents and teachers, but when I try to enrol teachers as teachers to the course it just ignores the enrolment. No message, it just seems to pass over that xml section. So for the following section, the message comes back that the person is created, course is created, but the teacher is not enrolled. Can anyone tell me where I am going wrong.
<person>
<sourcedid>
<source>Oasis</source>
<id>239998661</id>
</sourcedid>
<userid>239998661</userid>
<name>
<fn>Peter George Smith</fn>
<n>
<family>Smith</family>
<given>Peter George</given>
</n>
</name>
</person>
<group>
<sourcedid>
<source>Oasis</source>
<id>GE072</id>
</sourcedid>
<org><orgunit>HSI</orgunit></org>
<description>
<short>GE7CR11S1</short>
</description>
</group>
<membership>
<sourcedid>
<source>Oasis</source>
<id>JA077</id>
</sourcedid>
<member>
<sourcedid>
<source>Oasis</source>
<id>239998661</id>
</sourcedid>
<role roletype="02">
<status>1</status>
</role>
</member>
</membership>
Thanks for your time
MM
Thamk you but I figured out my error. It was a problem with the test data
MM
