Large Service Courses Planning

Large Service Courses Planning

by Isaac Vetter -
Number of replies: 2
Hello All,

I'm looking at using moodle at a university department level. We teach some large service courses. A number of our courses have over twenty sections each. Our largest course will have 56 sections and 2000 students this Fall.

We're trying to provide online gradebooks with an appropriate permissions structure.  Instructors would be required to use moodle's gradebook, but any other functionality of moodle would be optional (albeit, encouraged). It seems like this is the opposite situation of many other moodle users. Here's my plan so far for using moodle. I would love to hear what others have done.

  1. I have authentication working beautifully from a central LDAP server. 
  2. I believe that we need enrolment to happen even if a student nevers logs in, because the student needs to be in the gradebook even if they never login.
  3. I'm planning on using Categories for semesters.
  4. I'm planning on using MetaCourses as "Master Courses" with each section under the MetaCourse. (For example, PHIL101 is the MetaCourse and the Moodle courses underneath it are PHIL101 division 01 section 01, PHIL101 division 01 section 02, etc...)
  5. Within these large metacourses, a "Course Coordinator" manages the entire course and should have permissions to do about anything to it and to all of the sub-courses (sections) underneath it.
    1. If the Course Coordinator is defined as an Editing Instructor on the MetaCourse AND on each subcourse, would this work? Is anyone else doing it this way? Is anyone else handling "meta-instructors" differently?
  6. Each of sub-courses (sections) is taught by a Teaching Assistant (TA), who should have limited permissions that include gradebook editing and only on his/her own section.
    1. If the TA is defined as a Non-editing instructor on his/her sub-course/section could s/he still edit the gradebook?
  7. MetaCourse creation, SubCourse/section creation, Student account creation, enrollment, Course Coordinator and TA account creation and permissions specification need to all happen programmatically.


  • I've read the roles roadmap, and am eagerly awaiting v1.7. This will be a great feature.
  • I'm willing to spend programmer time on customization.
  • I feel that the top down approach my department is taking is not the usual method for moodle, but surely, with the size of some of the installs, institutions have overcome these same issues, right?

All replies appreciated,

Isaac
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Isaac Vetter

Re: Large Service Courses Planning

by Ken Chang -

Hi Issac,

We are also looking at large service course planning as well, and are in the introductory implementation stages. Congrats on getting LDAP to work!

We are facing many of the same issues that you are currently facing as well. I had a question about your point #4. We use MetaCourses, or we call them Master courses. On our old LMS, we created one Master Course, then created instances or copies of the course. I was thinking that we would try that same implementation on Moodle.

On our old LMS, we were able to search easily for the course names. I noticed that in Moodle, there is only one search feature on Moodle. It seems that you can't search for a course based on the Shortname or the Course ID, but only on the longname. So our courses would be named PHIL101.Master.SUM06 for the master course, then the sections would be named PHIL101.Chang.D1.SUM06 or PHIL101.Lee.D2.SUM06 for individual sections based on the instructor's last name.

I was wondering if your MetaCourse was a course within a course or if your MetaCourse was division in Moodle's course category then the sections were created below it. Also, has anyone discovered an easy was to search for classes, or come up with a good course naming method that works well?

For your point #5, I think you may have to create this from scratch. I don't know if this is a current feature of Moodle. It definately falls under our top down way of thinking about class management as well. I don't know if there are any plug-ins that would work this way.

I agree with your point #7, we are hoping to share access to our Moodle's database with our other campus apps to tie in the enrollment of new students, instructors, and course coordinators.

I had some more questions as well smile

1. Are there any enterprise management tools for Moodle? Such as a menu for copying a class, and creating multiple course sections?

2. Has anybody seperated courses by divisions or categories? Are there any advantages to this when searching for a course section?

Thanks in advance,

Ken

 

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Ken Chang

Re: Large Service Courses Planning

by Greg Carey -
 
I too am looking for an easy to use Student management system that will link with moodle to provide a record of courses completed and allow easy enrolment in various courses. Sounds like a similar need to what you are trying to do.
Currently we are looking at importing xcell spreadsheets into Access, but we want to enrol everyone from a central system then pull out their final grades back into the central system.
Have you any ideas of programs (preferably open source) that are worth investigating. Overall there could be around 1500 students
Thanks
Greg
Average of ratings: -