One of the things that has frustrated my professors most about using Moodle is that when they import activities and assignments from a prior course that have a due date and cutoff date, the dates do not automatically adjust. We are encouraging our professors to use Moodle to its fullest potential, but they have been less willing to use the activities when they have to manually go in and change the dates for each one every semester. Is there a way to automatically have Moodle update the assignment dates when we import them from previous courses? We are currently on 2.7 but will be upgrading to 2.8 next week.
Hi Wendy,
Here is what I do, I back up and restore course sites, rather than import activities. I find as long as the start dates are accurate, the restored course will change the assignment dates to match. So if the original class started Feb 1 and an assignment was due Feb 4, and the new course started March 21, the first assignment will be due March 24.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the feedback. I tried your suggestion and couldn't seem to make it work. Here's what I did:
- I backed up a course from our spring semester that had a start date of January 19.
- I made sure that there were assignments with both due dates and cutoff dates. The particular assignment I was looking at had a due date and cutoff date for January 26, 2015.
- I restored the information to the new course that I had created to start on July 1
- The assignment was appropriately placed in the second week of the course, however when I checked the due date and cutoff date of the assignment, it was still set to January 26.
Did I miss anything?
After reading your post, I did it again using 2.7, and it worked by backing up and restoring. The dates were successfully changed.
I made sure I did not back up user information and I set the date when it asks to change the name in the restore.
Hope this helps.
Thank you! Specifying the course date during the restore process was what I was missing.
Out of curiosity, how has that process worked for other professors in your college? I would like our professors to be able to do this themselves - especially since it would save them so much time - but it seems as though it might be a bit difficult for some of our older professors who struggle a bit with technology.
The professors at my college do not even realize it.
I set up all the Moodle sites I send out periodically an email reminding them how to request a Moodle site. A handful of our instructors "reset" their sites. Other than that, I setup every site.
If they want a Moodle site duplicated, they need to tell me the specific one on the site. I also need to know the start date. If they do not send me this information, I send a pleasant note saying without this information the creation of your site will be needlessly delayed.
As for age, I have found the opposite to be true, our oldest instructor, is also our biggest user of Moodle, Many of the younger ones use it the least, if at all. I have not been able to figure that one out.
This is very helpful. Thanks for the feedback Mike!
We have about 350+ classes each semester on our LMS and I am the only support analyst for this product. I'm wondering about the feasibility of doing this myself.
You want to get the edit dates report, I believe maintained by Open University from the plugins page.
Thanks Bob,
I'll have to check into that.