Creating courses and assigning instructors from a database

Creating courses and assigning instructors from a database

by Jon Kovaciny -
Number of replies: 4
We're going with Moodle for the first time this fall, and to give our instructors a head start we'd like to have all the courses already created for them. Next semester we'll make it their responsibility.

I have a database table with the course names, ids, and descriptions. I tried importing that into the mdl_course table. The courses show up in the course listing, but when I click into them there are no blocks showing and only 1 topic block is visible. Can anyone help me with importing courses from a database?

After that's done, I need to know how to assign instructors to the courses. I have a database table with their names and the courses they teach.

Thanks for your help!
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In reply to Jon Kovaciny

Re: Creating courses and assigning instructors from a database

by Clive Gould -

I'd be interested in a solution to quickly creating a large number of courses too.

We're planning to deploy Moodle College wide over the Summer and would like to set up the Courses in advance ready for Teachers to be able to use them.

The idea of doing multiple restores to create many courses does not appeal to me. Is there any easier way of doing this?

I've wondered about creating a custom php course creation form or even modifying the restore script to speed things up.

Suggestions welcomed...

Clive

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In reply to Jon Kovaciny

Re: Creating courses and assigning instructors from a database

by Orville Canter -
I would also be interested in finding out what you come up with. We are working on the same thing. Importing a list of users was easy; we just modified /admin/uploaduser.php and fed it a moodle-formatted user list that we created by dumping the student database nightly and parsing it a shell script. But creating courses is a little harder; I don't really want to call /course/edit.php once for every course (there are about 32,000 in the database). We're working on a more elegant solution. I can't wait to hear what you find.
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In reply to Orville Canter

Re: Creating courses and assigning instructors from a database

by Clive Gould -

Have a look at the postings in this Moodle Forum:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=24835

Looks encouraging...

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In reply to Clive Gould

Re: Creating courses and assigning instructors from a database

by Orville Canter -
Scott's solutions sounds promising. I e-mailed him about it.
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