Moodle in English: Best practices for university course reproduction

Teaching with Moodle

Best practices for university course reproduction

by John Andre - Tuesday, August 6, 2019, 1:52 AM

I am very new to these forums but I have searched and only found this question from seven years ago which seems related to my question. If the answer exists somewhere else, please let me know.

I work for a university and I use Moodle in the undergraduate courses I teach. Like most universities, we teach the same subjects every year. For example, every fall, we might teach ECON101 and every spring we might teach ECON102.

I see different ways to handle this in Moodle but I would like to know if there are any "best practices" that we should be following. Currently, we just create a new course and re-do everything from scratch. I see that we can backup and restore or even reset a course. Perhaps there are other options as well.

Resetting doesn't sound great for us as we would want students to be able to go back and access their old courses. However, if we have separate courses one challenge is that we cannot use course badges as we would be unable to create a badge in ECON101 this fall if that badge name was already used in ECON101 last fall. I know we can use site badges but is that the best way?

I am not looking for an answer to solve a small technical problem. I am really looking for guidance on what are all the things we should be doing throughout.

I've been through all the Moodle 3.7 training videos on YouTube but these seem to be about the basics. I am really looking for what is recommended for us, given that I think what we need is quite common among universities around the world?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Best practices for university course reproduction

by Joost Elshoff - Tuesday, August 6, 2019, 3:58 PM

Hi John,

There are a few ways of going about this I recommend the higher ed clients we serve:
- for archiving purposes don't reset the courses to default
- instead, use the bulk create courses function with a specific field (templatecourse) to create a large number of courses and then fill content (but no user data) with the content from the template courses) (manual: https://docs.moodle.org/37/en/Upload_courses)
- for a smaller amount of courses, create each course manually and then use the Import function for a full course import (or a selective one)

You'd need a category structure similar to this: Department > Programme > Degree > Academic Year > Subjects, where you'd add the courses in the Subjects category.

When in doubt, you could consider contacting a Moodle partner in Asia (Singapore being the closest, I guess) or Australia to set up administrator training, as the instruction videos for Moodle 3.7 are there to get started and the questions you may have are well beyond the aim of said videos.

Good luck!

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