Hi,
I'm looking for guidance on best practices for testing new courses. I use Moodle in a corporate environment and want to have colleagues review courses under development before opening them up company-wide.
Thanks,
Bob
Add a few student users, even another one for yourself (using a second email address), log in as the students and then try your resources and activities. When finished with the experiment, reset your course to remove the experimental stuff or create a new course based upon your experimental course.
Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, I didn't ask my question the right way. What I'm trying to accomplish is create a fully functional course that is accessible only to certain users. When those users have finished reviewing I want to open up the course to all users. How do I do that?
Thanks in advance.
Dear Bob,
Rick's suggestions will still work for you:
1. Create a Moodle category that is not visible to users
2. Create your course in this test category and ensure the course is not visible. this ensures no one but an admin level user and you, will be able to see the course.
3. Add your users to the course. When they are added, they will be the only ones able to get into the course.
4. Test with your users. When you are done, move the course to a different, visible, category.
I too use Moodle in a corporate environment. I used to do this until we created a duplicate test Moodle system.
Cheers,
Peter
I agree with you Peter about doing this on an experimental, or test version of moodle. This way the log files for one's production moodle will not contain all of the experimenting actions. Then once the course has be tested on the experimental moodle, I would backup the course without user data, and restore it in the production moodle.
Thanks Peter and Rick. I agree a test environment is the best model, I just haven't gotten there yet.
A follow-up question...I have the course in a hidden category as suggested and I've manually assigned users to the course. But the course doesn't show up for those users. What am I missing?
Thanks,
Bob
I normally don't run my moodle this way, but I will take a guess at the problem.
Since the course category is hidden, students will not be able to see it. I think Peter mentioned above that only administrators would be able to see this hidden course. The administrator can log in as any student (impersonate a student) and try things, but the students cannot (yet.) Maybe Peter can add some more thoughts to this discussion.
Tell me why you cannot set up an experimental moodle? It might only take 5 minutes to do so.
I have bandwidth limitations and thought setting up a test moodle might take a lot of time. Are there instructions you can point me to that cover the options?
I cannot anticipate any bandwidth differences between experimenting on one versus another moodle.
I will provide the quick install, but it is always best to read the docs. This can be done on the same server, too.
1) Create another database, such as moodleexp.
2) Create another moodledata folder, such as moodledataexp
3) Install the new moodle into a new folder, such as moodleexp. Log in, let the install happen. Fill in the required "blanks."
You're essentially done.
Sorry Rick, by bandwidth I was referring to the limits on my own time to work on this. Many thanks for the instructions.
Now I understand. Yep, your are in good company here on moodle.org. Many of us have the same limits on our time. Time (i.e., do it yourself) versus money (i.e., pay someone else to do it.)
Good luck.