In the Teacher Role there is the ability to change the short name of a course. The default is set to Allow, but you can change that by unchecking the permission box.
Go to Site Administration > Users > Define Roles > Teacher (or whatever Roles you want to change this on) and click the Edit button. Search for "short" and you should find the lines:
Change course short name
moodle/course:changeshortname
Checkbox is alongside.
Cheers...
mmmm AFAIK, denying a capability is an effective strategy as Moodle permissions are recalculated every change of page, which slows the change process but maintains higher levels of security.It should not make any difference either way.
What you are showing in this image is another process. I understand the database uses the course shortnames as a key index for search strings, therefore it cannot be duplicated in the database. This is an automatic process and cannot be hacked. If the course is the same, restore the course into the created one or if there is duplication of sections, select the bits that need be used and discard those that do not.
I have been looking at this for a while and what I put above is both right and wrong. It is right from the perspective ofthe backup and restore process is different than renaming courses while editing. There is no permissions about what a user can or cannot restore, therefore the issue of renaming courses while restoring. There is no way to change this without hacking the code.
I suggest you go into General Developer's Forum and ask how to render the Name and Short Name text boxes inactive, making them inaccessible by the person restoring the course. That is the only thing I can think of that has a remote chance of working. I suspect an IF statement in the formslib that separates out the restore form and deactivates those two dialogue boxes, otherwisse the form runs normally.
Thank you Colin,
since we are hosted by Moodlerooms I don't know if they will tweak core for me. Or at least I don't know how much they will charge us to make the change. Do you think this is something that I should put in a tracker request for? That is, a request for an admin setting that would do two things 1. make it so that a course being restored into another course retains the name of the target course and not the course that has the content. 2. allow me to indicate that a teacher may not change the short name of a course.
It does make for an interesting exception does it not? The capability can be granted or removed by a simple switch with the course, but the backup/restore makes no presuppositions about what may or may not be done. All you can do is ask as a tracker item. It does not appear to be a huge request, I suspect, but I really don't know. Having said that, it may mean changes to the capabilities of users, which may entail some serious work in the database, the code - so one of the developers may be abe to help. Discuss it with Moodlerooms, first though, they may have an alternate solution already in place - don't know until you ask.
Good luck..
Hi Autumm,
Did you ever find a resolution to this? This is still a big problem for us - I opened up a tracker item back in July last year but the developer did not think it was bug-worthy.
https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-34523
Thanks Ben,
our teachers are actually used to being able to copy content from one course to another for themselves in blackboard. Since we are less than a year into the conversion perception is everything. Taking this away is putting new items on the plates of our admins and some of our faculty see it as a more complicated process. What they used to be able to do for themselves they now have to issue a request for - and wait till the admin can get to it. Right now we actually have them use the import feature but that has issues with formatting. We are working with an instructional designer now to create templates and will need exact copies as we go forward.