General help

Hi Ann, for any number of reasons, Mahara is not available to us, and nothing else is either, so we have been at a loss to decide what to do about a Student e-Portfolio. What has been suggested is the development of a Moodle based solution. 

To do this, we are setting up a course, one course per Student, that the Student manages. Essentially, what that means is the Student is the Teacher in this course. Just how we are going to do it is yet to be decided, but what I am suggesting is the capability to upload files, to write a page, to add and edit a blog. I am sure other resources may come into play, but most of the activities will not get used. To do this though, there needs be a new Role, and that is what I am developing now. Part of what Students will be expected to do is to enter semester grades and reports themselves, unless we can find a way of automating this process. The course will follow the student right through Junior and High School, as long as that student is attending that school.  

Just how this is going to work is, for me, pretty dodgy, but with nothing else to do, this is the only thing that makes any kind of sense. The real problem for us is we have no control over the basecode or the database, Moodle being hosted on a State-wide basis. Lots of problems here, but this may help you decide what you might want to do and how you can achieve it. 

We do something like what you're talking about...here is what we do.  We used to make a copy of the site and have a new site each year, but getting a list of everything required staff to login to each site.  Now, we're keeping years together...two so far, getting ready for year three.

As you say, we keep all courses open and visible.  No one gets unenrolled, ever.  Well, unless they didn't complete the course and didn't need to.  Activities are set to close on the last day of the relevant year but the courses stay open.  Staff can go in and see their grades but have no access to activities (other than certificates, which they're always welcome to print again if they completed the course).

Each top level course category is essentially the year (though I have a couple non-year categories for stuff that's resource info or development space for teachers).  I copy all the courses/workshops that will happen again into a new year category with none of the user data.  Then I close the site for a few days (if there was more than me, we could probably do it quicker) and shift navigation to look at the new year and move all the previous year links to an "archive" link.

That said, the user overview report will pull every enrolled course and the grade.  You could probably hack that to reflect something else.  We enable an extra field in our courses we called course hours and set up a series of possible hours which course creators select. 

The overview report doesn't really do it for us, so we also the use configurable reports plug-in.  You have to have someone who knows SQL to get reports written (me again) but there are several available in the community.  We want reports separated by year, so I copy and modify the reports each year, but would be super simple to have one report that provided all training.  With that, you don't have to hack code to get what you want and you can easily put what ever you want on the report and change it if need be.  And you can have as many reports as you want, doing several things...which is pretty nice.