How to give many students their own space (groups, private course, user profile)?

How to give many students their own space (groups, private course, user profile)?

by Wiktor Banon -
Number of replies: 8

Hello Moodlers,

I'm trying to imagine a strategy to handle many students (100K) individually.
In this specific distance learning school, there is nothing like a class. Students can enroll and study when they want.

For learning resources and activities, we will probably use courses where students can study when they wish.

But my question is more about creating an individual space to each student where:

  • they could download their administrative documents
  • manage their discussions with the school (like a private forum)
  • view a list of the phone calls they made to the school
  • access a list of job offers customized to their preferences

All this will probably require to develop plugins but I'm wondering what are the different approaches to handle a large number of students in a very individualized way?

Should we use groups? Will Moodle be happy with 100K groups in a single course? It is probably not meant for such usage.

Should we create one course for each student and find a way to reduce the updating/maintenance/management of these courses?

Should we extend the user profiles with custom plugins because this is the dedicated space of each Moodle user?

In general, what are your thoughts about this situation?

Many thanks smile
Wiktor

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In reply to Wiktor Banon

Re: How to give many students their own space (groups, private course, user profile)?

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

I am not exactly sure what you are looking for, but I'll give it a try.

  • they could download their administrative documents

(They could download documents to their own computer, or their common drive.)

  • manage their discussions with the school (like a private forum)

Moodle can do this.  But so could the students email client.

  • view a list of the phone calls they made to the school

The student could look at their own smartphone.  Having any computer system get to the phone calls that a student made on their smartphone would probably violate the student's confidentiality.

  • access a list of job offers customized to their preferences
Again, they could store job offers on their computer.  Or maybe these could be stored on a job social website, such as LinkedIn.

It appears to me that only the need about "discussions" would be within the scope of Moodle.  However, this is not to discourage you from finding, or developing, some kind of plugin.

There will probably be others here on Moodle.org who will offer ideas.

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In reply to Wiktor Banon

Re: How to give many students their own space (groups, private course, user profile)?

by Ken Task -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

Or ... use of Google?

'SoS', Ken

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In reply to Wiktor Banon

Re: How to give many students their own space (groups, private course, user profile)?

by Wiktor Banon -
Hello everyone,

thank you Rick, Howard, Ken and Visvanath for your answers.

I described some of the features of a system which is already used by the students. However, we wish to replace this system by Moodle so students have only one point of access, a single platform to connect to. We wish the mobile app to be used as the main access to learning materials and administrative procedures.

For example, to let students send messages to the school and receive answers, organized by threads, directly from the Mooble mobile app (or using a browser).

I was thinking of creating one course per student. In such course, we could add a forum. The challenge would be to manage 100K private courses. We could maybe use the content bank to reuse one h5p text in all these courses and forums. 🤔

Another idea was to create a single course with 100K groups of one student. If I understood correctly Martin Dougiamas' explanations from the tracker's issue MDL-47161, using one person groups is not the right way to go, even if it seems to interest Moodlers : MDL-70670 related to Naming schemes for auto-created groups (3.10).

I also consider extending user profiles so each student finds an additional link in their profile page. This link would point to a custom page which gives the ability to exchange messages in threads with the school. However, this approach seems to require a lot of effort from the developers to develop and maintain custom plugins.

What do you think about these different approaches?

Thanks a lot,
Wiktor
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In reply to Wiktor Banon

Re: How to give many students their own space (groups, private course, user profile)?

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
My immediate reaction is that Moodle is really designed/tested for situations where the number of courses is a percentage of the number of students. A site with 100K courses would be, I think, unusual. I'm not saying that it's not possible but I would want to test it before recommending it. I run a site with 22,000 courses and it's fine (with a LOT of hardware, however).
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In reply to Wiktor Banon

Re: How to give many students their own space (groups, private course, user profile)?

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
A case for a student information system and a groupware. The basic building block of Moodle is a (taught) course, which can't be found in your description.


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In reply to Wiktor Banon

Re: How to give many students their own space (groups, private course, user profile)?

by Wiktor Banon -
Thank you Howard and Visvanath for your answers. It seems more intuitive to extend user profiles rather than trying to use one course per student or one group per student. We will use courses for the learning activities and occasional administrative information. Thanks
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