Dear all,
I have been at an institution that was using Blackboard. Annually there was a period of downtime when the courses from one year were cleaned up and the courses for the next year added. It was called rollover.
In my new institution we have no VLE and so I am now considering Moodle.
I am concerned that I'd like to have Courses/Degrees (we offer 3 Diplomas, 2 Graduate Awards and 1 Undergraduate degree) and Subjects but maintain the information term to term and year to year so students can access material while they are still here.
For example as a tree I would consider the Course/Subject information to be
Undergraduate Degree
Subject 1
Subject 2
Diploma 1
Subject 3
Diploma 2
Subject 1
Subject 2
Graduate Degree 1
Subject 4
Subject 5
For each subject I would like to maintain information on a semester per semester basis without changing the codes from things like SU101 to SU101-2006S1.
Effectively
Undergraduate Degree
SU101-2005S1
SU101-2005S2
SU101-2005SS
SU101-2006S1
SU101-2006S2
SU101-2006SS
SU102-2005S1
SU102-2005S2
SU102-2005SS
SU102-2006S1
SU102-2006S2
SU102-2006SS
Diploma 1
SU103-2005S1
SU103-2006S1
etc....
Is there a rollover mechanism in Moodle or is it as difficult as I saw Blackboard was? Or do I have to perform this with suffixes for the year? Or is there another solution?
Regards
David
David, it's possible that the "separate groups" mechanism would do what you want. If courses are set up with separate groups, people can only see the posts and other resources that have been created by their own group.
Hi,
I'm in the same position as David, and considered going down the lines you suggest Tony. However, it's my understanding that groups functionality doesn't allow you to e.g. make assignments to specific groups only.
So I've kind of stumbled into the year group suffix type of solution sketched by David. However, there would seem to be a problem with that until the ePortfolio aspect of Moodle gets sorted: how do you organise it such that the student work doesn't get deleted when the old course is removed?
Until we can come up with a solution to that, I'm not sure we can use Moodle at our place...
We use a year suffix but we don't delete the old course. We move the course into an archive type category and restore a clean version of the course without user data for the next intake.
If you want to keep the work then keeping the course shouldn't add much storage overhead unless you are holding big resources in your course ... in which case you can just delete the resourcess when the course is archived.
I like the idea that students can revisit the course and not just the work at our school as they can also revisit all of the interactions and see the progress and structure in their learning.
Darren
If you want to keep the work then keeping the course shouldn't add much storage overhead unless you are holding big resources in your course ... in which case you can just delete the resourcess when the course is archived.
I like the idea that students can revisit the course and not just the work at our school as they can also revisit all of the interactions and see the progress and structure in their learning.
Darren
Hmmm, interesting.
So the Archive category is just something you've manually created, not an inbuilt special category? Does this mean the course lists grow to an unfriendly size, or is that not an issue?
Just spotted the ePortfolio plugin download - in case you weren't aware, see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=38736. Mind you, not sure we can trust students to move contents from courses into Portfolios, so I guess we'd have to do that in tandem with archiving courses.
(PS had a look on e-subjects.co.uk, good on you. If we get up and running I'll ask our IT teachers to start making their content available to you.)
Cheers
Hello
The archive category is just a manually created one. In that we have another category for each achademic year so it's all still organised. That said, it will grow and grow but nobody ever needs to navigate to it so that doesn't really matter.
Elgg is looking like it may have potential for e-porfolios. There is also work going on with moodle intergration (from the elgg side) and will the next version will be released in the nearish future from what I can gather.
Thanks for the e-subjects plug
. I look forward to seeing anything you may feel worthy of sharing.
Good luck with moodle.
Darren
The archive category is just a manually created one. In that we have another category for each achademic year so it's all still organised. That said, it will grow and grow but nobody ever needs to navigate to it so that doesn't really matter.
Elgg is looking like it may have potential for e-porfolios. There is also work going on with moodle intergration (from the elgg side) and will the next version will be released in the nearish future from what I can gather.
Thanks for the e-subjects plug
Good luck with moodle.
Darren
Not hearing other thoughts...
Doing mass backup and restore could get you there.
See http://docs.moodle.org/en/Backup_%28administrator%29
In BB you'd likely use the "copy components" feature,
where the faculty would pick selected elements of some existing
course to "import". I don't see that feature in Moodle, except
in the Backup. Someone should correct me if that's wrong.
At my own institution, we have opted to create a "course instance"
for each time the course is offered. Which means rollover is
important. My own long term goal would be to automate this,
moving courses into some "archival" state after they have been offered.
The naming scheme you are suggesting, Graham, would be part
of that. With a bit of planning and aggreement on what IDs used
to identify courses, I think this could work.
I don't see this as the same thing as "e-Portfolio", more like a cousin.
Cleanly separating the course data so that it can be moved around is
a key for both the Course Rollover and e-Porfolios.
Doing mass backup and restore could get you there.
See http://docs.moodle.org/en/Backup_%28administrator%29
In BB you'd likely use the "copy components" feature,
where the faculty would pick selected elements of some existing
course to "import". I don't see that feature in Moodle, except
in the Backup. Someone should correct me if that's wrong.
At my own institution, we have opted to create a "course instance"
for each time the course is offered. Which means rollover is
important. My own long term goal would be to automate this,
moving courses into some "archival" state after they have been offered.
The naming scheme you are suggesting, Graham, would be part
of that. With a bit of planning and aggreement on what IDs used
to identify courses, I think this could work.
I don't see this as the same thing as "e-Portfolio", more like a cousin.
Cleanly separating the course data so that it can be moved around is
a key for both the Course Rollover and e-Porfolios.
Hi Dirk, in Moodle it is "Import" in the course administration menu. This is still at an activity level in 1.5 (you can choose all forums, all lessons, etc.). In 1.6, there is a more granular function for importing individual instances of course activities.