The Dataform is one possible workaround. You can populate the content of a frontpage dataform instance to any course either in a block (with the Dataform_view block) or in a label-like resource in the course section (with the Dataform embedded resource). Both the block and the label-like resource allow you to either display the content flat on the page or to embed the content in an iframe in which case you can interact with the content without leaving the course page. For instance, users can rate content from the course page.

Moodle 3

One button does it all!!!

One click and your students will have completed the automatically created course and the class grades according to your institution's expectation will have been submitted. You no longer have to worry about these things. We make sure it works even if you don't! 

To take your point even further, Frankie, in my experience animated gifs at the point of success in fairly difficult (serious) activities also proves to be quite engaging. I have given exercise quizzes with complex problem solving (10 to 40 steps) that may take hours to solve. In the first year correctness was indicated the standard quiz way. In the second year I made it show the . In the third year I made it show gifs like      and . For some learners (myself included) solving the problem for making the dancing and winner dudes show up was no less important than the problem solving practice.  

There wasn't an argument in my comment, Davo. Just a concern. I can add to this that I've got over 10 years of using LMS as a teacher/instructor, including running training sessions with colleagues etc. but such additions are rarely relevant.

The point of the concern is that beyond Moodle infrastructure, content management is still seriously lacking, arguably not because file uploading has been over-clicked. It should make an interesting topic for the 2013 Moodle conference to examin the impact of dnd file upload on Moodle courses.

If you want a set of group records (even if with just one or two fields) you need to get_records... rather than just one record.

$DB has a rich set of methods which abstract the sql of most of the common queries and should make it easier for you to do without or minimal sql. See for instance 'get_records_menu' that is designed to return an associative array of the sort you need for the select element. (The other get_records methods return an array of objects)

You should also check the respective lib (grouplib in this case) as some of the common interactions may already have a designated API.