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.
- I have authentication working beautifully from a central LDAP server.
- 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.
- I'm planning on using Categories for semesters.
- 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...)
- 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.
- 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?
- 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?
- 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.
- If the TA is defined as a Non-editing instructor on his/her sub-course/section could s/he still edit the gradebook?
- 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