advice structuring Moodle

advice structuring Moodle

by Andrew Bredhauer -
Number of replies: 4
I'm new to moodle and possibly stretching the boundaries of its use a little but would like to get some tips on how best to configure and structure it to work for my project.


I'm looking to use Moodle to support a behaviour change program that will be delivered face to face and individually over the phone. The program design will be managed centrally but the actual delivery will be outsourced to organisations who will provide their own instructors/coaches. I need to centrally manage the students and measure their attendance and track progress with various activities. Each "course" will have 6 sessions over 6 months and an organisation can run multiple courses at the same time depending on demand and how many staff they have.


Specific questions I have are

  1. What's the best way to structure courses in this scenario? I'd like to have a centralised course template and the organisations would have limited ability to customise the individual course. I've looked at meta courses but not sure if that will do what I need. I've also looked at copying courses through backup/import but I'm concerned how this will impact the size of the Moodle db over time.
  2. How should I structure the organisations/instructors? I've looked at categories/groups and meta courses but not sure which way to go. I've also discovered iomad today but not sure how active its community is. Ideally organisations would be constrained to only seeing their own clients. An extra complexity is there will be a central call centre who need to be able to manage all clients across all organisations

Any tips welcome


Thanks


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In reply to Andrew Bredhauer

Re: advice structuring Moodle

by Rick Jerz -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

Your questions should generate a number of suggestions from users here.  Here are some of my ideas.

I would run one Moodle.  In it, I would have a one course for every session, meaning 6 courses.  I would have one course that is my template, and I would backup/restore it the six times.  I wouldn't worry about the size.  A course "shell" doesn't take up that much spaces.

If you want common content webpages, I would create and manage these outside of Moodle (yep, seems a little odd, but I find this to be more flexible.)  In this way, if you make a change on any content it will be immediately reflected in all courses.  There are different ways to do this depending on the privileges that you want to give to each organization.  I would certainly keep any videos outside of Moodle.

If moodle's default "roles" give your organizations too much or too little control, you can always adjust the roles.

You can have a "manager" who can manage the entire Moodle.  The organizations would be giving lower "roles" or rights.  My guess is that each organization would have "teachers" who can manage only the course.


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In reply to Rick Jerz

Re: advice structuring Moodle

by Andrew Bredhauer -

Thanks for the quick reply Rick


You're correct that each organisation would have a number of teachers who would only manage the course. 


I was considering a single topic based course with 6 topics rather than 6 individual courses. In a traditional education context I guess the program would be a course and each session would be more like a lesson. Participants would be enrolled in the program and should attend each lesson/session but I'd need to track attendance to measure this


I would like to record some additional info against an organisation so I'm not sure if an organisation would just be a user or I would have to do some custom development to allow me to build the organisation concept and then link users to an organisation and courses to an organisation.

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In reply to Andrew Bredhauer

Re: advice structuring Moodle

by Rick Jerz -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

It is much easier to give organizations control of a "course" instead of control of a "topic."  I am not even sure if "groups" can be restricted to see only certain topics.

Quite honestly, I am not sure what a person with "teacher" role can or cannot do because I run my own moodle and am always the "manager" role.

You might consider experimenting with moodle in a "sandbox" mode, by installing it on a local computer using one of the AMP configurations, such as MAMP or XAMPP.  

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In reply to Rick Jerz

Re: advice structuring Moodle

by David Morrow -

Greetings!

On restricting topics to certain groups - Yes, sections/topics can be restricted by group. I use this sometimes to give notes to facilitators: Create a “Facilitators” group, then name a section something like “Facilitator Notes” and make it invisible to everyone who is not in the “Facilitators” group - making sure to put the facilitators in that group. Restriction by profile field is nice, too. In my k-12 district, teacher and student email addresses end in different domains - that makes it easier than using groups in certain situations.

The six topics could be restricted to different groups or by profile fields this way, but it would probably make it hard to record course completion.

There is an add-on  - "Group Choice" - that lets users self-select a group, in case that would help.

The “Switch role to” option in the Administration block is nice to get an idea of what people can see/do in a course, but it only goes so far. I have several fake user accounts that I can enroll in a course as a student, teacher, or non-editing teacher and then log in as - just to make sure that I know who can see what.

Thanks,

David

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