One course, multiple groups of students using it?

One course, multiple groups of students using it?

by Ivan Roulson -
Number of replies: 4

I'm not too sure how to frame the question in "Moodle terms" as I'm a teacher not an admin, but I wonder if someone could help here. I'm also pretty sure it's a common issue, so I'd be interested to see if anyone has any ideas about how best to solve this one...

 

Two issues.

I have a number of Moodle courses that I'm happy with. However, in lower school teaching we have groups of students who stay for one term, do the work and then head off to another teacher with another course. I'd like to have all the (say Year 7) students that I teach enrolled at the start of the year. I'd like them to be able to submit work through Moodle. At the end of each term I'd like to move on to the next group, while still having the previous group available for assessment and archive purposes. I'm not sure how to do this effectively, or how admin can support us in this. We apparently have access to ZiLink but I'm not sure if this is working for us.

 

Second - similar but maybe subtly different for those who know these things?

I will be teaching 5 groups from my Moodle course concurrently for the whole year. They are called 8b, 8c, 8d, 8e, 8f, 8g. Another teacher will teach 8a, and we will collaborate on constructing the course through the year. I'd like each student to be able to submit work but when I search for that group's work I don't want to search the whole year group. Obviously the other teacher will want to see her course without wading through my lot. Is this possible? For me the most obvious way would be to create the course six times and only have members for each group in each course - an 8a course, 8b course etc. As the course isn't finalised yet, this means that we can't really just copy the courses. Any solutions for this one?

 

If it helps, I'm sure we can create a spreadsheet or csv of users/usernames/email addresses for the whole of each year group.

If it's a simple solution, I'm sure it could become popular throughout the school...

My thanks for reading,

Ivan Roulson,

Technology Teacher, a school in Devon...

 

 

 

 

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In reply to Ivan Roulson

Re: One course, multiple groups of students using it?

by Keith C -

I think a lot of this will depend on how much the course will change as time progresses...let me explain.

 

a solution to your first problem is to just create a new group every time you start a new group in the course...and add the new students to the new group.  Do not remove the enrollments or groupings for the students that have completed the course.  This way, those students can log in at any time and see the work they did.  Additionally, you could pull reports that reflect all the work done in the course by any groups ... a lot of options there really.

It sounds like this addresses your second problem as well.  so you would have 8a - 2013 and the other teacher would just grade that stuff and you would do yours.

However, if you are going to be changing things then it becomes a sticky mess if you ask me.  Example, you change an assignment...well then you have all kinds of student data that reflects an old assignment but it looks like the new one.  That is useless false information. 

Now you could add new assignments and activities and hide the old ones....but then the instructors will have to wade through that mess all the time.

You need to take a longer look at what your requirements really are.  I don't like the whole "replicate the course" approach.  It screams to me of people working in Excel when they really need access but have no clue how to use it.  Excel is an analytical tool.  Access is a RDBMS.  You replicate courses you end up defeating the purpose of having a centralized repository of your data.  There is nothing centralized about completely delineated data LOL.  On the other hand, this issue of change is significant.  There are a lot of concerns.  You need to understand the effects of change in your course on prior data and have solid change management strategies or you are going to be making a mess of that too.

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In reply to Keith C

Re: One course, multiple groups of students using it?

by Joshua Bragg -

I agree quite a bit with Keith here but for a couple reasons I've decided that the replications of courses is the best way for us to go at my school.

I used Moodle by myself at my school for 3 years before I started a school wide server.  I've tried both the groups and groupings.  In fact, my first year, I had fall semester, spring semester, and a yearlong class all running at the same time together on a 1.9 site in a single course. In that situation I ended up with duplicates of every assignment since they all had different due dates and availability.  While everything was in the same class, there was very little centralized in the database other than the static files.  To top it all off, my course these days has over 200 activities and resources after eliminating the duplication.  It was terrifically long and difficult to deal with when you looked at all the duplication.

Quizzes bear special mention here.  Once a quiz has been attempted, you cannot add or remove questions to the quiz.  If you make a mistake in your quiz structure, you're now stuck with that quiz unless you duplicate it.  There are some ways around this but none of them are ideal.

Finally from an end-user standpoint.  I've taught myself the ins and outs of Moodle groups, groupings, group and user overrides, resets, etc over the past 4 years.  A new teacher to Moodle will just get confused by all of these complications.  Having a clean copy of the course for the next group of students lets them change things and tweak things without worrying how it will affect the former students' grades and data.  Version control can be difficult to deal with if you're not well prepared.  

Our process is to backup the courses close to the end of the course change (typically during exams) and restore it to a new course.  Once the old course completes, it is hidden and moved into a hidden category.  Teachers can still access it but students cannot.  We keep one old course for each teacher and then delete them as we rotate a new one in. 

Ivan, to your second scenario, I would use the separate groups and permissions change as has been suggested in prior posts.

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In reply to Ivan Roulson

Re: One course, multiple groups of students using it?

by Sakshi Goel -

Hi Ivan

For your second question:  You can use create groups into your courses assign teacher and students in it and then in the course setting page set the Group mode to be "Separate group" (Each group member can only see their own group, others are invisible) . Force group mode to Yes. Then go to Settings  > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles > Teacher . Edit his capability 'Access all groups' to prevent.It will prevent teachers to access other groups and view other group work.

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In reply to Sakshi Goel

Re: One course, multiple groups of students using it?

by Christine Healey -

I use Sakshi's solution on courses and it works seamlessly. You can also set up Groupings (in Advanced group settings on vs1.9) and use that to provide additional tasks accessible by only some students on the course, which is great for extension activities.

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