I have a situation where there may be up to 50 teachers who need non-editing teacher access to 10 courses that are all in the same category.
Is there some easy way this can be done? I could always make a small script that automatically makes each teacher a teacher of each course, but that seems like an inefficient way to accomplish the objective since it would create multiple records in the database when one might suffice.
Is there an easy way that this could be programmed in, I wonder?
I could forsee a similar situation whereby one might want to have students automatically registered in all courses in a specific category, as well. Perhaps similar logic could be applied to this, too.
Dear Tom,
Please may I ask a question about the system you have going. It sound similar to the one I am trying to set up.
I guess that your courses are not all on the same day. What did you do about the deadlines of quizes and the like? Did you re-create the course10 times? What do you do when you edit the course during term time? Or don't you?
Tim
Sorry, Tim, but what I am doing doesn't involve traditional courses. Students from all over the world have access to any of 10 "courses" if their instructor has told them the enrollment key.
There are no quizzes because the courses are used mainly for discussion among the students, as a way of improving their proficiency in communicating in English.
Concerning your problem of having to set individual access times & dates, I don't see much of a way around this. Even if the quiz itself was available from a central source, you would still have to manually set the access times.
As it is, you can install the quiz multiple times since the quiz categories and their contents are available across all courses. It should be relatively simple to move the quiz items from the category to a new quiz, particularly if you make a category equivalent to a quiz by having just the items you intend to use in it.
Concerning the question I posed about teacher access to multiple courses, I have solved the problem. I've made of kluge of the login files so that any teacher enrolled in my course called "Teachers' Forum" has free access to any of the student areas. If you would like to see how the system works, please write me off-list for the teachers' enrollment key. You can view a bit without it though: http://sl-lists.net
There are no quizzes because the courses are used mainly for discussion among the students, as a way of improving their proficiency in communicating in English.
Concerning your problem of having to set individual access times & dates, I don't see much of a way around this. Even if the quiz itself was available from a central source, you would still have to manually set the access times.
As it is, you can install the quiz multiple times since the quiz categories and their contents are available across all courses. It should be relatively simple to move the quiz items from the category to a new quiz, particularly if you make a category equivalent to a quiz by having just the items you intend to use in it.
Concerning the question I posed about teacher access to multiple courses, I have solved the problem. I've made of kluge of the login files so that any teacher enrolled in my course called "Teachers' Forum" has free access to any of the student areas. If you would like to see how the system works, please write me off-list for the teachers' enrollment key. You can view a bit without it though: http://sl-lists.net
Thanks Tom.
It seems I have a knotty problem if I want to automate, but as you say there may be no need for automation; I just need to update the quizes one by one. Making a quiz tends to take me a couple of hours, and still my questions are still none too good. I am sure that there are going to be a lot of question changes. But wait a second.... if I use "random questions" only then perhaps I only need to change the questions as stored in the category and not the quiz. That would be good. I will check that possibility out. Even so, I bet that I am going to be adding resources and links and annotations to 15 courses so the possibility of a sort of heirarchical course structure is one I will look into.
BTW you posted a pedagogical post about not-evaluating very much in one of your classes and how well it was going. If you can remember any words or phrases that you used in the post that I could then search the forums with I would be grateful since I would like to look at it again.
And, thanks - I will be using your quiz report modules before term is out. I am a regular user of the import module that you made back when? A while ago. Thank you.
Timothy Takemoto
Timothy said, "if I use "random questions" only then perhaps I only need to change the questions as stored in the category and not the quiz."
There doesn't appear to be any way to move questions OUT of a category and into another but I don't think that is needed. If you make a quiz category with, say, 20 questions using the "Random Question" type, and then create a quiz containing 10 of those questions. A subset of those questions will appear on each student's quiz. It doesn't appear that you can force it to select that SAME SET of questions for a particular course, however. All students over all courses will get a random sampling of the questions from the set.
I suspect that you can add or delete questions from the category at any time, and future instantiations of the quiz will be based on a random sample of what is currently in the category. (I've never tried it though, so perhaps someone who has should confirm this.)
The database, by the way, doesn't physically store quiz items separately from what you see in the categories. When you create a quiz, all that happens is that those particular items that you have chosen are recorded as "belonging" to that quiz. Any quiz item, regardless of what category it belongs to may be incorporated into a quiz. (Except for the random answer type,where all items must be in a particular category.)
Concerning "not evaluating too much" I can't locate that posting either although it sounds like something I might have said. Perhaps it was on a different list. I might have said something to the effect that I don't comment on students' discussion postings until the discussion has slowed down because if the instructor comments too early, then it tends to snuff out student comments since "the voice of authority" has been heard. (Please start a separate thread if you want to discuss this further, or write to me separate, since it is off-topic here).
There doesn't appear to be any way to move questions OUT of a category and into another but I don't think that is needed. If you make a quiz category with, say, 20 questions using the "Random Question" type, and then create a quiz containing 10 of those questions. A subset of those questions will appear on each student's quiz. It doesn't appear that you can force it to select that SAME SET of questions for a particular course, however. All students over all courses will get a random sampling of the questions from the set.
I suspect that you can add or delete questions from the category at any time, and future instantiations of the quiz will be based on a random sample of what is currently in the category. (I've never tried it though, so perhaps someone who has should confirm this.)
The database, by the way, doesn't physically store quiz items separately from what you see in the categories. When you create a quiz, all that happens is that those particular items that you have chosen are recorded as "belonging" to that quiz. Any quiz item, regardless of what category it belongs to may be incorporated into a quiz. (Except for the random answer type,where all items must be in a particular category.)
Concerning "not evaluating too much" I can't locate that posting either although it sounds like something I might have said. Perhaps it was on a different list. I might have said something to the effect that I don't comment on students' discussion postings until the discussion has slowed down because if the instructor comments too early, then it tends to snuff out student comments since "the voice of authority" has been heard. (Please start a separate thread if you want to discuss this further, or write to me separate, since it is off-topic here).
I just tested the issue of changing quiz questions. And as you said/surmised, if you changes the quiz questions in a category, then the questions in the quizes themselves are changed too. And if one adds and removes questions from the pool of questions matching a random set, it is the new, updated pool that is used to create a new instance of the quiz each time someone makes an attempt.
So even if one had a lot of courses, it would not be necessary to change the quizes individually. This is very handy for someone with a lot of courses to adminstrate.
One day, a long time in the future, this way the quizes are organised might provide the basis for the sort of a multiple-identical courses architecture. In other words, if not only quizzes but all the elements of courses, and their layout, could be selected from a two column quiz-creation-type window, and be stored not in the courses itself but only associated with the course, then changes to the categories (now of quizes, forums, glossaries and what have you) would result in changes to all their instances in the multiple courses.
In reply to Timothy Takemoto
Re: Assigning teachers to all courses in a category
by Bernard Boucher -
Hi Timothy,
I have good news for you because "One day, a long time in the future" the future is now ( If I have well understood your problem )
I think that Moodle already have most of the features that you requested. The trick is to combine these in a good way.
1 - Create a "dummy" course with only one crazy quiz.
- Use that crazy quiz to create all yours categories and all yours questions.
- Use random set of questions and normal questions as you want.
- Don't forget to publish all yours categories.
2 - Create a "model" course.
- Add yours ressources.
- Take care to use the site folder (but not the course folder) to store images, sounds, pages, ... ( no relative links because the site is the course with id=1 )
- Add other stuff ( quiz ... ) with the same care.
- Take care to use the site folder (but not the course folder) to store images, sounds, pages, ...( no relative links because the site is the course with id=1 )
- Assign teachers to the model course.
- Add yours ressources.
3 - Backup the model course.
4 - Restore the model course as many times as you need ( with appropriate name ) with users ( only but all teachers for the model course 
).
You will have very little to do manually after that.
If you add questions in pool of questions in the dummy course all other courses will use it.
If you modify a question them it will be modified for all the courses and quiz using it.
If you modify the model course, it is possible to restore it in an existing course with adding modifications.
Bye,
Bernard
In reply to Bernard Boucher
Re: Assigning teachers to all courses in a category
by Timothy Takemoto -
Hi Bernard,
Thanks very much for clarifying these steps for me. I have take the liberty of saving them to a file. I can tell you have thought this through more clearly than me because I do not understand some of the steps (hmm... it is dawning on me): particularly the two "( no relative links because the site is the course with id=1 )."
If I do as you suggest, and create site files and insert them in my model course then since I have "( no relative links because the site is the course with id=1 )" I would be able to edit the titles(?) or at least the content of the site files and this would change the content of the resources in all the courses?
However, lets say that after the course has begun, I want to
1) Change the title of a quiz/other module,
2) Change the position (week) of a resource/quiz/other module,
3) Change the order within a week of a resource/quiz/other module,
4) Add a resource/quiz/other module to one of the weeks, or perhaps to all weeks,
5) Change the settings (deadlines, grading, upload file style) of a module,
(I think it is likely that many of these will happen.)
Then, as you say, "If you modify the model course, it is possible to restore it in an existing course with adding modifications".
Okay, so it will take less than an hour to restore it 15 times with the appropriate names.
However, please correct me if I am wrong, don't I loose my student data - all the quiz answers and forum posts etc that students have done till then? Can I merge the copies of the model course, with the courses that the students have been doing? Or are the student details stored course independently? As far as I understand, if I backup and restore 15 times, I will loose the user details of all but one (or all) of the ongoing courses.
In my dream of the distant future a "quiz-like-model-course-structure" resembling a quiz as they are now, would be created using an interface like that in the image above. Then, as can be done in a quiz now, the order and content (and all changes, 1-5 above) of that quiz-like-model-course-structure could be edited. In so doing all the instantiations of that QLMCS, with different start dates, user data, of the mother-courses that hold the QLMCS, could be changed at once. There would also need to be a function "insert QLMCS." This is probably structurally impossible.
Timothy
In reply to Timothy Takemoto
Re: Assigning teachers to all courses in a category
by Bernard Boucher -
Hi Timothy,
backup/restore module is able to do all your requests.
You only have to choose the option Restore to : Existing course, adding data to it and you will loose nothing. For example if you change the name of a quiz in the model course when you restore it the new name appears on the real course. And so on for all others proprieties. But I didn't test all possibilities.
For the links, relative or absolute, it will be easier for me and for you , to answer a precise question than toexplain it completly.
Here 2 topics about links : http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=3160
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=2988
But I think it is better for you to try what is following and if you have problems with links I will answer.
The best way to understand it is to try it with a dummy, a model and two real simple courses and the backup/restore module. Save to your "file" the results with yours comments.
Have good testing,
Bernard
In reply to Bernard Boucher
Re: Assigning teachers to all courses in a category
by Timothy Takemoto -
Bernard!
How could I have overlooked that? Thanks a lot. I shall go to the ball. I did not realise that we are able to back up courses onto others. Now all I need to do is back up course 14 times (I have found that there are 14 courses).
The TOEIC course has 60 classes, and the Basic English course has 26, however. I suppose it is only greed to say that I would still like to see a multiple course editing function. My university seems to be going in the Moodle direction but our resident php programmer is still develping her own education management system, which she started to make 5 years ago. Maybe she will give up on it, poor lady, and start developing Moodle mulitiple courses editing functions some day.
The relative links still seem rather arcane - do you need to have access to the server, to make relative links there? I don't have command prompt access. At least at my new university server I don't. At the server in the states that you looked at for me I can set up links of a sort using the Cpanel. The links mean that one URL points to another. Even if I were able to do this on my new server, I am not sure how I would integrate that into a moodle course. Would I add modules etc as links?
Tim
Nice!, Q&A should move to the tips and tricks forum!
Timothy,
I was wondering about your changing questions remarks:
In my view:
- I create topic related question-containers (categories) in the context of a specific course
- Then I create quizzes based on the content of these categories
- If I borrow questions from other courses, I give them "new meaning" in the context of the new quizz, related to my new course...
- "Standalone Quality" of a question has litte meaning, it gets is meaning in the context of the total quizz in that (new) course on that moment in that course..
- If I want to differentiate between question levels, I create two categories with the same name but with A and B in the tails of the names: then I can say: "take random 4 questions from level A and 4 from level B, etc..."
- With the simple statistics (thanks Martin and Tom) I can start to monitor the quality of our questions a little. Are it good questions, are the A questions more difficult then the B questions - what was my intention - etc... so a little statistics is enough on this moment.
- The only reason to change a question is to replace it - with lots of hesitation - by a better version of that questions, not to create a new quizz, otherwise the quality improvement procedure makes for me little sense
- New questions ask for new categories, again course-context related
I am mainly teaching English as a foreign language (using moodle). I am not sure how my quizes might change in the context of the course.
- I have been asking a lot of reading comprehension questions to get students to read texts before class so that we can discuss the issues in class.
- I will also have to make a lot of TOEIC style listening questions before next year.
- I would also like to make a lot of really straight forward, quick to do, vocabulary questions, perhaps using the match format. I have not tried that yet.
I can imaging myself changing the reading comprehension questions (1) since I get feedback like "this one is too difficult" or "this answer is correct too." Fortunately if I change the question it will be changed in all the courses.
In the TOEIC type quiz (2) answers are all just A, B, C, D since the answer itself is generally given in the sound file. So generally it would only mean changing the sound file, and that will be the same for all the courses.
The vocabulary questions (3) really need a new flashcard module, to do something like
http://www.paul-raedle.de/vtrain/home.htm
http://webs.ono.com/usr032/learners/flash.htm
But that it another story.
Anyway, it is really good how the quizes are course independent. If all resources were added like the quiz module then I would be able to handle loads of courses without stress. In subjects like English there are often a lot of identical courses going on at slightly shifted time frames, with different students and teachers. There is one called "TOEIC preparation" with about 48 classes? I think.