Moodle Integration with Access and Excel?

Moodle Integration with Access and Excel?

by Mark Hardwick -
Number of replies: 3

I’m trying to find out how far Moodle can be integrated with Access and Excel.  Right now we use: a hand registration system, Access for our data base for student information, Moodle for quizzes/testing and Excel for our grade book. 

I’m going to post in Moodle jobs for someone to write the program/code to help us integrate and streamline our processes but I’m don’t know exactly what to ask for.  Here are a couple of specifics that I would appreciate some input on to know if it can be done by someone that knows how to program these systems.

We need to build a registration page on our website that can be imported into our system.  From what I’ve been told, a webpage format is not compatible with Access.  Is this right?   

In Access we have several tables of data that have relationships such as: students to affiliations.  Therefore in access we can pull up a query to find out how many of our students belong with XYZ affiliation and who they are.  For this to happen we have to have a table for the affiliation as well as a table for students and then have a relationship from one to another.  Can a program/plugin of tables and relationships be written in Moodle to support this?

If not; can a program/plugin be written that will let us enter data in Access for new students and then import it into Moodle without duplicate entry work?

We keep our grades in Excel because we have lab activities and a spreadsheet to match.  I’ve never used the non-testing part of Moodle grade book but I know we have several custom formulas in Excel that if they do this project, these points are calculated in.  We also have a curve on test grading that I’ve created that I would like to stick with.

So the question is, can the grade book be customized to give an overall grade from: Lab activities with one weight, Quizzes with another weight and Final exam (with a curve) with another weight?

Again, I’m not asking how to do this but rather can it be done by someone who knows programming/code with Access, Moodle and Excel and how to integrate them?

Thanks,

Mark

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In reply to Mark Hardwick

Re: Moodle Integration with Access and Excel?

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Lots of data integration is possible with Moodle. With luck you will get an answer from someone like Howard Miller, who knows much more about this than me.

For getting student information in and out, look up authentication and enrolment plugins.

The Moodle gradebook can import and export data in CSV format, which should be a viable basis for interoperating with your Excel spreadsheets.

The real problem with both Access and Excel is that they are really based on the idea of one user editing at a time, whereas Moodle is a system designed to cope with simultaneous access. That makes it harder to link the two, but there must be ways around that.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle Integration with Access and Excel?

by Mark Hardwick -

Tim,

Thanks for the reply.  I'll check out those plug-ins and see what’s out there.  Other than having years of data in Access and Excel, it may be that we don't even need them anymore if there is a solution to create in Moodle a relationship between the student and a company, affiliation or group.  I know how to add fields to a student beyond the basic data but connecting them to other affiliations and/or organizations is where I’m lost. 

My other concern on the registration is that if the people with the company or affiliation register the student directly into our system from our web page, it would be easy to miss a letter or go by another name such as Bob instead of William that may already be in our system.  Right now we double check for stuff like this before we assign a new student number.  It may be best to have our web host set up some kind of holding system for the data until we can export it to Moodle and enroll them ourselves.  Just thinking out loud. 

Does anyone with a self registration system have to deal with mis-information and spend a lot of time cleaning up stuff?

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In reply to Mark Hardwick

Re: Moodle Integration with Access and Excel?

by Rick Jerz -
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I have always used self-registration.  So far, over a span of about 5 years, I have had around 800 students self register in my courses.  I try to keep my moodle as clean as possible, so I do sometimes have to clean up some of their data.

Being in the U.S., some students don't understand what a "surname" is, so I have to either enter their last name correctly, or swap first and last names.  I also like to have the first letter of a name capitalized.  My guess is that out of 800 students, I have had to clean up maybe 20-30 for this reason.

I as students to upload a photo into their profile.  Sometimes, this doesn't work for students for whatever reason and I have to upload one myself for them.  This has happened to maybe 30-40 students out of the 800.

Occasionally, students will not enter their email address correctly.  As moodle will send a confirmation email to this incorrect email entry, confirmation never occurs.  So I have to do this manually.  Out of 800 students, I have had to worry about this for maybe 10 or so.

Well, that's about it.  I let them set their other fields as they wish, including country and time zone.

Here's an interesting statistic.  Passwords!  I have only had to mess with resetting passwords for less than 5 out of these 800 students.  Moodle's password reset tool is great.  Since I am the administrator, I do get emails from my moodle about students with unsuccessful logins, and there are many.  But somehow, these students use the password reset tool on their own and never bother me.

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