Archiving (exporting) content of a Moodle course for auditing, program accreditation, etc.

Archiving (exporting) content of a Moodle course for auditing, program accreditation, etc.

by Cris Fuhrman -
Number of replies: 2

We are using Moodle at an engineering university in Quebec. In the USA and in Canada, university engineering programs have to go through an accreditation (audit) every so many years (1-5) by ABET and CEAB/BCAPG respectively. It's important to be able to provide board members (auditors) with examples of course content: presentation materials, course plans, graded homeworks, graded quizzes, graded exams, etc. 

Some of these things are easy to archive with Moodle (2.4) when the content is already in PDF or Word, etc. The exams for our courses are not done in Moodle (yet), and graded on paper. Auditors can inspect those documents easily.

However, I'm struggling with how to export adequately the graded homeworks and quizzes, such that auditors can view the information without looking at a running Moodle site. It's not feasible to expect auditors to navigate a Moodle site (the UI for instructors is less user-friendly than it is for students) nor is it feasible to provide an instructor who can walk them through during an audit, as the timing of the audit is very tight. We need output (proof) that is in a form such as PDF, Word, HTML, etc. that can be examined on a standalone PC at the auditor's leisure.

Many of the courses have a lot of data in a course that had 50+ students with 15+ quizzes, each with multiple attempts allowed, with the best grade being retained.

Here's what I managed so far, with the shortcomings of each approach:

Question bank:

  • Exported the question bank to XHTML. No correct answers displayed, nor is the feedback displayed. All of my questions have feedback.
  • Exported the question bank to XML. That format is not human-readable (at least not user-friendly).
  • Exported the question bank to GIFT. That format is not human-readable, and I couldn't find any GIFT editors that could generate reports that are. Perhaps someone knows a good GIFT application that will grok Moodle export data and display it in a report?

Graded quizzes:

  • Generated a report in XHTML. Only the student's chosen answer and correct answer are displayed. The feedback and other possible answers are not shown. 

Graded homeworks:

  • Could not find a way to generate a list of all results of a graded homework (using a rubric) with comments from the instructor. I can view the graded homeworks individually and print each page to a PDF file. This is hardly user-friendly with 50+ students and several homeworks.

I would be grateful for advice about better ways to achieve my goals for facilitating the accreditation inspections. 

Regards,

Cris Fuhrman

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In reply to Cris Fuhrman

Re: Archiving (exporting) content of a Moodle course for auditing, program accreditation, etc.

by dawn alderson -

Hello Cris,

My response is not that of a highly technical nature but rather one based on intuition and experience in presenting samples of work for external examiners.

Might it be an idea to take photographs of the screen shots, including a selected sample of attainment/achievement across the cohort, (top, mid, low) and create a digital/hard copy portfolio, which you can annotate with further explanations, for ease.

Hope helpful

Dawn   

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In reply to dawn alderson

Re: Archiving (exporting) content of a Moodle course for auditing, program accreditation, etc.

by Cris Fuhrman -

Thanks Dawn. Indeed, some of the internal advice I got was that the board members only need samples of electronic versions of documents.

In the past (when everything was paper) I always provided all documents and auditors did the sampling.

It's relatively easy for me to take a sample of one or two quizzes or homeworks, if that is appropriate for the reviewers (an answer that can't be found here).

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