How do I host learning content for multiple schools on Moodle?

How do I host learning content for multiple schools on Moodle?

by Pim Ren -
Number of replies: 6

Dear Moodle community,

I'm completely new here, but I hope you can help me out.  I work at a small startup that develops learning materials for a number of schools. We use moodle for our learning content, but only use about 1% of its features. For example, we don't allow students to digitally hand in assignments to their teachers. This is because we have one Moodle environment with read only access for all schools.

We want to give multiple schools access to the same learning content. We want this content to be easily changeable, so that we can correct mistakes, broken links etc. in one place for all schools. At the same time we would love schools to have a closed off environment where teachers can see and interact with only students from their own school and use more of Moodle's great capabilities. Is there a way that this can be done?

Thanks in advance.

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In reply to Pim Ren

Re: How do I host learning content for multiple schools on Moodle?

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Have a look at www.iomad.org.  This is Moodle with some multi-tenancy features grafted on top.

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: How do I host learning content for multiple schools on Moodle?

by Pim Ren -

Thank you for your quick reply Howard. Iomad sounds very interesting! Do I understand it correctly that they would play a very limited role: namly hosting and setting up the multi-tenancy features and that all other Moodle settings could still be set by us? If so this sounds like an interesting option.

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In reply to Pim Ren

Re: How do I host learning content for multiple schools on Moodle?

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Iomad is completely open source. You can just download it from the Github site and install it in exactly the same way you would "normal" Moodle. 

If you want the creators/maintainers (ELD) to host it for you, I'm confident they would be happy to hear from you. You are under no obligation at all to do that.

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: How do I host learning content for multiple schools on Moodle?

by Pim Ren -

Thank you so much Howard, that sounds like a great solution for us!

I do have one question, do you perhaps know if they still release updates? When I look at their site they say "New versions of Iomad are released within 3 months of any new Moodle version". But when I look at the GitHub page I see the last contribution was made on december 2014. Does this mean that a current Iomad will only include functions from a Moodle version from 2014?

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In reply to Pim Ren

Re: How do I host learning content for multiple schools on Moodle?

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

The last update to the most recent (3.3) branch was one hour ago at the time of writing (https://github.com/iomad/iomad/tree/IOMAD_33_STABLE). It's kept up to date with Moodle and fixes regularly. 

I think there should be a 3.4 branch ready soon. 

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: How do I host learning content for multiple schools on Moodle?

by Pim Ren -

Wow, that's impressive. In that case thanks for all the help Howard! Iomad sounds like a great sollution, that we'll hopefully implement soon for our learning content.

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