Questions on Enforcements in Moodle

Questions on Enforcements in Moodle

by Cape School, Inc. -
Number of replies: 1
Hello Everybody,

I would like to ask a few questions about presentation/quiz enforcement as it relates to our business.  The company that I work for market is in providing continuing education to folks that originate loans, sell insurance, prepare mortgages, etc.  We do online courses that have presentations and webinars too.  We are contemplating making the switch from Atrixware to Moodle however do not know if it can customized to fit our business.   Our students are #1 priority however out students are either nationally or state licensed which means that we have to enforce a lot of disparate regulations to adhere to in order to provide accreditation.  For example, a real estate student has to stay on a slide for 5 minutes before moving o the next one or a insurance student needs to spend  x minutes on the entire presentation to meet a time allotment requirement.  When it comes to tests and test taking the time allotted is different per state as is the variations of the test we are to deliver, etc.  These examples are just a tip of the iceberg for regulations, and each state is quite different so I was wondering if anyone could tell me or point me to a section that discussed these mechanisms.  In my mind, I picture our dev team developing a content delivery framework that enforces these regulations when the course is built that we can build our and edit at anytime at the course level.  Are their a set of hooks that my guys can write to that perform such tasks?  Are these hooks robust or pretty limited?  Prone to problems or solid as a rock?  Anything you can share in regards to these mechanism would be helpful.

Thanks for sharing.

-Jon


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In reply to Cape School, Inc.

Re: Questions on Enforcements in Moodle

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

These sorts of rules are really annoying to have to deal with, because what has "stay on a slide for 5 minutes before moving o the next one" got to do with learning? The only real effect will be to annoy students, who will probably start doing thing like opening the next slide, then switching to Facebook for 5 mins, or making a cup of coffee before clicking next, which will not help them concentrate. (It also implies that the learning is made up of 'slides', which is a bit limited.)

Anyway, you don't make these rules, you just have to enforce them. Or be seen to enforce them enough to satisfy the regulators. (If you are forced to implement silly rules, it seems perfectly reasonable to do the minimum required to meet them wink)

So, all that aside, can you do this in Moodle?

You can do almost anything if you write custom PHP code. Moodle is designed to be both an out-of-the-box LMS, but also a platform that is a good basis for customising if you want. However, you do have to learn the best ways to customise it. It might be worth asking a Moodle Partner, or other Moodle consultant, to come and give your developers some training on the specifics of Moodle development, and then also go through your list of requirements and discuss the best Moodle 'hooks', or plugin types, to implement them. Or, the developer docs start here: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/

In terms of the content, do you know about the SCORM standard? If you develop your content as SCORM, then you can use it in any LMS, not just Moodle (if you decided to change again in future) SCORM content is basically just HTML + JavaScript, so it is easy to create, and you can certainly do things like arbitrary time-limits.

For testing, the Moodle Quiz is very flexible. For example, you can give different time limits to different groups of students.

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