This is a lengthy explanation of my current challenge - I appreciate any advice you can give me. I suspect that the moodle app is capable of doing exactly what I want, just that I haven't figured out how. I hope that someone with a better understanding of moodle will be able to easily point out the solution to my problem!
I have been asked to help a local company with their implementation of moodle as an e-learning tool for their staff. They have created about 40 courses, all categorised and with resources and assessments in each course.
They have a set list of courses a staff member needs to take, which varies according to the department of the company. Some courses are relevant to all departments, and some to just one.
Their wishlist:
- They want to be able to force enrollment to all relevant courses for a staff member, as the relative staff member must complete all of their courses within 3 months
- They want a manager/administrator to easily (ie in one screen) review which courses a staff member has completed and which they haven't
After reviewing the documentation and the moodle app (this is my first time using it), I have re-organised all of their courses so that there are now only 4 courses in total, with what was previously a course now as a topic. I shall refer to these as "modules" for the rest of this message for simplicity!
- Department A (contains all modules for this department)
- Department B-1 (contains all modules for all staff in this department)
- Department B-2 (contains modules for senior staff in this department)
- Department C (contains all courses for this department)
Department B is also split into about 20 groups, as this matches their team structure. The groups should allow the gradebook to be changed to show just the data for that team.
This provides improvements to their wishlist, in that
- staff members now only have to enrol on at most two courses, most often just one, and they will be "enrolled" for all of their modules, and
- the gradebook provides their reporting requirements automatically, except that for a senior staff member in Department B there are two separate gradebooks to review.
Some problems with my approach seem to be:
- Some modules appear in more than one course, and if they need to be updated then they will need to be updated in each place. I have documented how to do this using the import process but it's still more fiddly than I/they would ideally like
- A module that every staff member takes like "Health and Safety" can not be reported on for the whole company, as the gradebook only compares those in the same department
- One of my courses contains about 20 modules, with multiple books and at least one assessment in each module, so this is now a very lengthy and possibly intimidating view for the staff member. (It is set up this way so that you can look at a staff member's gradebook and on one screen see if they have completed all of the modules.)
- If someone is searching for something then they probably wont find it as the search seems to be limited to Course information, not picking up Topic information.
Additional challenges to overcome are:
- The company staff list has been added as users. Can I enrol these users to the course that is relevant to them, and add them to the relevant group in that course? Or do I need to give them instructions so they do this themselves?
- When a new staff member is hired, can I do the same? Or do I need to give them instructions so they do this themselves?
- Some staff members had actually taken some of these assessments before I restructured the courses as described. Can their assessment scores still be kept or will they need to re-do the assessments?
Possible alternatives that might help me (but the documentation hasn't convinced me it's possible or helped me understand sufficiently):
- Setting up the gradebook to display grades from multiple courses
- Meta-courses... Are these relevant to me?
My biggest concern is that my lack of understanding has led me to an inappropriate structure for their needs.
Any pointers or help is much appreciated, as I am going around in circles with the documentation