Good day all,
We are currently evaluating Moodle as a potential replacement for WebCT. This is the second semester that we have used Moodle. Feedback from professors that use Moodle has indicated that information has been disappearing. Here is a direct quote from one such user:
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Yes, I am importing information from my Autumn 2007 English 314W classes into my Spring 2008 English 314W classes. I have gone through the process of importing into both sections of my current ENG 314W classes. The import says that it is complete and the settings from last semester do show up (grade weights, assignments, etc). But as soon as I log out and log back in, the settings I imported have disappeared and the course has returned to its default state. Again, this import is the exact process that I used to import last semester’s data into my ENGL 315 Moodle course and those settings have not disappeared.
Though I did not import anything last semester, I struggled with information disappearing (settings as well as data like grades and comments). I do not know anyone else who uses Moodle but students have told me this semester that their previous professors also had trouble with Moodle last semester.
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Has anyone had similar experience? More importantly, does anyone have any suggestions on troubleshooting and/or resolving the above?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Yours,
Dwight
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Moodle setup:
Moodle 1.8 on Windows Server 2003 with Internet Information Server
mySQL version 6.0.0
php version 5.2.3
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Yours,
Dwight
Greetings, Dwight!
Your system set up is very much like ours. I will throw out two very simple things, and I recognize that they might have no bearing at all on your problem.
I have had instructors send me messages regarding "missing information" and one time the problem was due to our having ajax turned on. It doesn't appear to work well with IIS, so we turned it off again. Their information was not missing, but they were not able to save changes. The second problem was that the instructor had imported a course with 16 topics, but only had 10 topics selected for display. She thought moodle had failed to restore the information, but the truth was that it was merely hidden.
I would suggest that you set up a sandbox area and try some of the offending imports yourself. That way you can control for various selections, settings, course complexity, etc. When a sys admin looks at something like this, things may become apparent that just don't register with an instructor.
Does this only happen with import? Or does it also happen when restoring from an archive? If you have an archive, instructive information may be uncovered by parsing the xml file.
In addition, you might try the same import on another instance with a different stack--either moodle for windows, or email your archive to someone who is willing to test. If they get different results, I would think something about your setup might be contributing to the problem.
Maybe one of these ideas will get you started. Hopefully some other folks will chime in with better ideas!
atw
Your system set up is very much like ours. I will throw out two very simple things, and I recognize that they might have no bearing at all on your problem.
I have had instructors send me messages regarding "missing information" and one time the problem was due to our having ajax turned on. It doesn't appear to work well with IIS, so we turned it off again. Their information was not missing, but they were not able to save changes. The second problem was that the instructor had imported a course with 16 topics, but only had 10 topics selected for display. She thought moodle had failed to restore the information, but the truth was that it was merely hidden.
I would suggest that you set up a sandbox area and try some of the offending imports yourself. That way you can control for various selections, settings, course complexity, etc. When a sys admin looks at something like this, things may become apparent that just don't register with an instructor.
Does this only happen with import? Or does it also happen when restoring from an archive? If you have an archive, instructive information may be uncovered by parsing the xml file.
In addition, you might try the same import on another instance with a different stack--either moodle for windows, or email your archive to someone who is willing to test. If they get different results, I would think something about your setup might be contributing to the problem.
Maybe one of these ideas will get you started. Hopefully some other folks will chime in with better ideas!
atw
A.T.,
Thank you for your suggestion.
The enable AJAX box is not ticked by default, so that would not be the issue for me.
I verified that the AJAX box is not ticked.
I have not restored from an archive, but will try that. However, faculty who teach the same course each semester would like to just import last semester's course content into this semester course and be done with it.
The issue could also be due to faculty not knowing how to use Moodle properly, so I am also going to approach that avenue.
Yours,
Dwight
Thank you for your suggestion.
The enable AJAX box is not ticked by default, so that would not be the issue for me.
I verified that the AJAX box is not ticked.
I have not restored from an archive, but will try that. However, faculty who teach the same course each semester would like to just import last semester's course content into this semester course and be done with it.
The issue could also be due to faculty not knowing how to use Moodle properly, so I am also going to approach that avenue.
Yours,
Dwight