courses within courses

courses within courses

by Nadja Kutz -
Number of replies: 12
Hi everybody,

I am sure the issue "courses within courses" had been
discussed already thoroughly....nevertheless I couldnt
find a thread sad. This concerns especially the question
why you have introduced the concept of groups at all
-instead of implementing courses within courses.
(I guess this discussion may be in an old thread of last year?)

I understand groups as being the same as courses- just with very restricted authonomy. The reason for such an (artificial)
restriction of authonomy is probably rooted within the
programming challenge one would face when programming
"courses within courses", but thats a guess and so I was
looking for a thread about that issue.

I found several threads where people try to find workarounds,
for the restricted authonomy of courses-like installing
several copies of moodle or making up aliases
in order to allow students to enroll into several groups (were
this seems to work only if the student has many different email adresses, at least for the case of email authentication?
(letme know if you found another way)).
But I have found no thread about: Why not construct a
supermoodle (i.e.a facility to organize several copies of
moodle in a hierarchy (or graph-like scheme))
but as I said I am sure there is a thread on that issue...smile

thanks for any hints!

nadja


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In reply to Nadja Kutz

Re: courses within courses

by Hans de Zwart -
What do you mean by courses inside courses?
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In reply to Hans de Zwart

Re: courses within courses

by Nadja Kutz -
Hi Hans,

With "courses within courses" I mean
that e.g. the following example:

you have a course and e.g. tutor sessions (groups)
-just like at an ordinary university.
Now a tutor is something like a teacher, so in principle
he/she should be able to run "a little course" by him/herself,
in particular he/she could get the idea to delegate some of
the work again into "working groups" a.s.o.


So this tutor session wouldnt be really a new
independent course in itself but rather be dependent
on the original course - so its more a kind of "branch".
In particular the functionality of that "subcourse"
(like possible activities) could be the same as
in a "real" course, i.e. the rights of the tutors would
be that of a teacher/course creator regarding their "subcourse"
(or call it tutor session) but their rights with regards to
administrating the "real" course (which is one level
above in the hierarchy) would be rather restricted (where the amount of restriction would be in the hands of the teacher/course
creator of one level up).


Or like in designing big software - there is
a hierarchy of working groups working together on a final
product - and each working unit ("course") can
delegate work to other working units in order to accomplish
the task they were assigned to.

...hope to have been clearer this time smile.

nadja
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In reply to Nadja Kutz

Re: courses within courses

by Hans de Zwart -

Okay, I think I understand. How about this for a solution:

Create the master course. Backup this one and then restore it to as many 'tutor group' courses as you need. The tutors can then adapt this course to their own needs and even have subgroups in these courses.

The difference with normal groups in a single course is that one head teacher can create the master blueprint course and still give the tutors enough space to do their own thing.

Hope it helps.

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In reply to Hans de Zwart

Re: courses within courses

by Nadja Kutz -
Hi Hans,

the problem starts if you would like to have more than
one master course - you would need another copy of Moodle,
if I understand correctly.
So again this would be a workaround.

kind regards,
nadja
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In reply to Nadja Kutz

Re: courses within courses

by Ger Tielemans -

Working groups, working together on a final project have very strict rules between these groups: so named contracts.

(removing the dust from an old book: Rebecca Wirfs-Brock 1990: Designing Object Oriented Software) She starts with the userinterface, using CRC-cards from Ward Cunnigham, and talks about contracts between objects.
I still like her approach.

They must deliver functionality on the outside, being able to react to a (sometimes long) list of messages like "print yourself" as specified in that contract.
These are the messages other workgroups are allowed to send to your objects under restricted conditions.

Under these conditions they can TRUST to get the right answer back.

On the inside they are free as God in France, well... in a Moodle contract they should at least use the two Moodle tablets weblib and moodlelib.

Going back to your institute: you can compare a course with such a workgroup, yes, and inside a course you can give the professor in that course all the freedom, you only regulate with him/here "result obligations" in his course contract? 
As soon he wants to pass the borderline of that course, he gets in trouble.

  • What does he know of the ouitside world?
  • Where are the updated course contracts of the other professors?
  • What did they change in the details for the students in their courses?
  • Most Universities have this written down before the courses start - from an informatics point of view: in an very loosy way -
    Most of the time it is still stored in an old admin system that is double secure. 
    Who has the two keys to enter that system?

If you want courses to be able to know what goes on in other courses, you need a LMS system (Moodle is only a CMS, and yes, it is the best)
In that LMS you store all these businesss rules of your university in a automatic tracebale system instead of the current Human readable system. (XML, bla blabla..) 

Then your course can - for example - ask what the groups where in the previous course and "inherit" that from that course, or overrule (OO design) etc..

  • I agree with you that your idea would be nice, but reality is hard:

    When I wanted to connect my previous system to the admin system at our Univerity in 1999, I ended up -believe it or not - with 32 separated systems that stored information about running courses 32!! (I can give you the names, I still have that inventory report)
  • Looking more close to our working systems, I saw a secretary reading the number five from one terminal and typing four in the next terminal. I said, you make a mistake, but she said no, I KNOW that I have to make that CORRECTION.

    WHERE IS THAT RULE STORED IN THE RULE BASE?

    Humans are still the most flexible systems, they keep the wolrd running..




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In reply to Ger Tielemans

Re: courses within courses

by Nadja Kutz -
Hi Ger,

thanks for your long comment. Yes you are right one
needs a kind of contract between teachers of the "mastercourse" and "subteacher".

Nevertheless this contract can be very small on the
moodle side - the "masterteacher" would need only specify how much rights the "subteacher" (I hope this doesnt sound too
much like master and servant smile, may be one should better
use other words..) has with regard to administrating
the master course (this can include full rights!) The
masterteacher should have all administrative rights on the subcourses by default. The masterteacher
is responsible for everything which happens in the sub and
subsub courses (like the administrator in moodle).

the contract concerning "real life" and also content should be
made outside of moodle - which doesnt exclude that they negotiate within Moodle (Like have teacher-subteacher meetings in moodle,
exchange data within Moodle (where it was negotiated before
WHAT content has to be transferred) etc.)

I think this view is especially important for a constructivist
approach - since here autonomous units build a knowledge base.
If you want to merge this "assembled" knowledge of the
different units you need some kind of plan of how to merge.
or: In a constructivist approach instructional goals and objectives should be negotiated and not imposed. And if you
have a complicated task then not the whole group can negotiate about every bit - so to my opinion you have to have some hierarchical "merging" structure. or in other words: If your content gets too complex you have to have some kind of "integration" scheme.

kind regards, Nadja
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In reply to Nadja Kutz

Re: courses within courses

by Ger Tielemans -

Yes, I agree, nice analysis.

  • Sharing info between teachers is possible in the teacher forum on the left
  • you can differentiate a little with the role assist teacher, but as you describe it, you need real role differentiation. (version 2?)
  • also the idea of an autonom group with a spokesman needs further development, I like the idea, it goes further then peer review, must inspire Ray..
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In reply to Nadja Kutz

Re: courses within courses

by Timothy Takemoto -

Dear Nadja,

I think that we are facing the same problem.

I have to supervice 26 courses soon. The content will be basically the same and created by me but there will be 26 classes and about 12 teachers.
There seems to be two ways to go.

One is to create a master course somewhere, back it up, and then restore it as a new course many times. If alterations need to be made then it is possible to resotore ontop of existing courses. This was Bernard's suggestion on this thread.
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=2957&parent=14091

The other way would be to create one course with 26 groups and then there would be no need to create 26 courses. All that is necessary would be to supervise 26 groups on the same course. Then if changes needed to be made, they could be made to the one course.

The second way seems to be by far the more graceful. The only problem is that I have yet to use groups.

Nope. I have just realised, the second option would not work due to the problem mentioned here
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=5757
The start and stop times of the quizes would be the same for all of the groups, when in reality some students would have their lessons on a monday and others on a friday.

Tim
Takemoto

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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: courses within courses

by Tom Murdock -
Tim,

I would recommend the first solution. It is good when a teacher can reach into a course and rearrange things mid-journey. If you had several different groups running at different times and looking at the same material, such changes would really disorient people.

-Tom
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In reply to Tom Murdock

Re: courses within courses

by Timothy Takemoto -

Thanks Tom,
I agree entirely and will do as you suggest.
I hope you found a good blog.
I did not realise that there is a blog software (simpblog?) available for moodle.
Tim

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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: courses within courses

by Tom Murdock -
Yes, the simplog project has been exciting. I think in the end, I was looking more for Content Management stuff and you gave me plenty of good ideas to consider!

-Tom
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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: courses within courses

by Nadja Kutz -
Dear Tim,

Thanks for your comments and the interesting link.
The discussion there is definitely related to my above problems!
And all problems may be somewhat again summarized by stating that
moodle seems to miss a hierarchical structure (courses within
courses). It is quite some work if you have to restore
the same content 15 times, or to assign 15 teachers to all
courses and so on. but i imagine this hierarchy structure to be
quite a hard programming work. still i think also if the
realization may be far away the discussion of these concepts may be useful.

nadja
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