Enrolment/role(s) of teachers so that they can self-manage?

Enrolment/role(s) of teachers so that they can self-manage?

by Alan Prefontaine -
Number of replies: 2

To start, thanks for taking the time to read this lengthy post.

Quick background about me: I am in IT and therefore familiar with setting up and configuring web technologies, though I am not a developer. I am new to Moodle. I have been googling for hours, and poring over the excellent Moodle documentation, yet I cannot figure out whether the business case that we are looking to achieve is possible without additional coding.

We want to set up Moodle so that departments are able to load their own training materials and make them available to their people; specifically, we would like a manager to be able to create a course(s) in Moodle and then add their staff as students to that course. Courses, course content and student creation is to be all self-managed by each department.

The challenge that we have is twofold:

  1. Managers/teachers/students must not be aware of other courses, students or teachers in the system (other than those in the current class). We want it to appear as if each department is accessing Moodle independently of all other departments. The only time that this might change would be if a company-wide course is made available to everyone.
  2. A type of billing occurs between departments. The decision has been made to set certain billing/student caps based on department size.
We are running Wordpress internally. From my research I believe that I can configure SSO between Wordpress \( \rightarrow \) Moodle. The flow that we would like to achieve is as follows. Please let me know if something along these lines is possible. As I'm currently learning about Moodle, please excuse any misuse of terminology. It's the general overview that matters.

  1. Department purchases a course through Wordpress. Would they be "sold" an enrolment key based on department size?
  2. Manager is then granted access to Moodle (through SSO).
  3. Manager creates their course, adds their staff, uploads their content. Based on the enrolment key they are allowed to add up to a maximum number of staff/students.
  4. Staff are automatically emailed Moodle access information.
An example would be: Manager is in Wordpress, navigates to the internal purchasing system and purchases the training based on their department size, e.g. 1 - 10? 11 - 50? 51 - 100? Manager receives an enroment key as their purchase. They are then directed to Moodle and authenticated after entering their enrolment key, per the single-sign on. They then have access to, or can create one new course which has a limit on the number of students which they can add, based on the enrolment key. After being added into the system, staff receive an email link from Moodle granting them access to their course.

I have searched through plugins, read documentation, read through forum posts but I'm unable to see whether what we want to achieve is possible. Maybe it's a lot easier than I'm making it out to be and I'm just not able to see the forest through the trees?

Warm regards,
Alan
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In reply to Alan Prefontaine

Re: Enrolment/role(s) of teachers so that they can self-manage?

by Emma Richardson -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

A few things...

You could use categories for each department and then assign the manager role at the category level.  This would allow each department to manage only their area.  However, to make the other categories totally invisible might be hard - each department would not be able to access anything in the other department's category but with some searching will probably be able to see the category listing.  Playing with appearance of navigation and front page settings will limit this however.

You could create new moodle instances for each department but that will take additional work...

As for Wordpress SSO, I know that plugin is fairly new and I am not familiar with it totally.  I run SSO from Joomla website and am able to sync Joomla groups to cohorts and also integrate with some of the ECommerce plugins to sell courses so hopefully the Wordpress plugin has similar functionality.  Then you could create a cohort of managers for each department and hopefully sync users across that way. 

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In reply to Alan Prefontaine

Re: Enrolment/role(s) of teachers so that they can self-manage?

by Rajiv Sathian -

Hi Alan,

After reading your requirements, I would suggest a solution that we have developed keeping in mind similar needs of our clients.

We have Edwiser Bridge which integrates Moodle with WordPress, by which you can create courses in Moodle and get them synced to your WordPress site.

This feature will help the site administrator to create courses in Moodle and showcase them in the WordPress end.


User will login to WordPress, if they are new to the training they will have to create an account of their own and they will get a mail to there email id which will contain there password.

Or else site administrator can create each user manually at the back-end of WordPress by which admin can set password for each user and let them access the courses.

Since you said this would be a solution for a industry training program, this feature will certainly help you.


At the WordPress back-end you will be able to enroll or unroll user's from any particular course since you mentioned that you need user to not access courses that they learnt.   


We have a Single Sign-On extension for Edwiser Bridge which helps user's registered in WordPress to access Moodle in order to access the course they are supposed to learn from.

The condition that you raised that you want users who select a particular course is allotted only access that very course during his training phase.


We have a solution that would have similar result at the user end, this is how it works once a user enrolls for a particular course and they come to Moodle to learn they would be able to see all the courses but they will be able to access only those courses to which they have enrolled.

Have a look at it, this will be solution for your venture.

Regards,

Rajiv Sathian.   


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