Formerly, when a course is created
and the visible setting is set to hide, an administrator member had to manually make the
course visible.
The process of identifying which courses should be made visible and then
opening the courses to students can be tedious and error-prone.
Surprisingly, there is no core functionality in Moodle to automatically make
courses visible to students at the appropriate time. This plug-in provides that
functionality.
Its operation is straightforward: Once a day, it checks the course table to
determine which courses, if any, are scheduled to start that day.
It then makes those courses visible, and sends a report by email to one or more
administrators. Any problems are reported to the site administrator by email.
This task is done through the cron. We will like to give this plugin to the community. I am attaching documentation about the plugin and a zip file with the plugin.
This plugin works with Moodle 2.7.8, 2.8.6 and 2.9.0.
To install the plugin:
1. Navigate to the local folder in the Moodle structure
ex: cd /var/web/wwwroot/moodle/local
2. Unzip the zip file in the local folder
3. Clean up the install file
4. Log onto the Moodle instance with an admin account and press the “Upgrade” button when the “Plugins check” screen appears
a. You should see “local_rruopencourses” Success followed by a “Continue” button – click it
This plugin has 2 settings:
Open Course date and Emails. Each of these is global; they affect all courses.
The first option allows you to specify how many days in advance of each course’s start date the course should be made visible to students. The default setting, 0, means that the course will be made visible to students on the course’s opening day. A setting of 3, for example, would cause the plug-in to open courses three days prior to their start date.
The second option, email, allows you to specify to whom the notifications of opened courses are sent. One or more email addresses can be entered here. When there is more than one email address, the addresses should be separated by semicolons.
To finish installing the plugin, add a crontab entry that looks like this (adjusting paths, of course, for your installation):
30 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/php /var/web/wwwroot/moodle/local/rruopencourses/runopencourses.php > /dev/null 2>&1
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This runs the plugin at 3:30am local time daily.
We will like to receive any feedback about this plugin.
Cheers,
Carlos