andykemp.org.uk

Just thought I would add something into the mix:

IMS Enterprise

Admin –>
Courses –>
Enrolments –>
IMS Enterprise File

From Moodle.org:

IMS Enterprise is an international standard XML file format which may be used to specify enrolments/unenrolments in courses, as well as course information and user information.

Features:

- Based on a ‘standard’
- Creates users, updates user accounts
- Creates courses
- Assign students and teachers to courses
- Updates enrollments (E.g. Remove from one course and assign to another)
- Creates groups

Its quite a technical solution as you would have to convert your SIMS data export into the IMS XML format but seems to do everything required? If memory serves me correctly SIMS is able to export in IMS format, however I havent ever seen the output directly from SIMS so this would require some investigation. Worth a look?

More information:

http://docs.moodle.org/en/IMS_Enterprise

http://www.imsglobal.org/enterprise/

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=34351

https://studydirect.sussex.ac.uk/downloads/imsenterprise.php

Moodle Help Documents:

http://cvs.moodle.org/moodle/lang/en_utf8/help/enrol/imsenterprise/formatoverview.html?view=co

Excellent post Andy.
What I’m finding is that very few teachers/educators are using moodle in this way and the tool snecessary to make it work ‘properly’ are not well documented or are hard to find. Even developers I have spoken to seem to be unsure.

So, from this model, I can keep my existing content, create *master* courses, but instead of making a copy of each course for each class, I can make groups inside the courses for each class. Therefore, whenever I update a resource in the course it is updated for all users and for subsequent years.

However, if I create a course for teaching Y8 Volcanoes, and I then want to enrol all Y8 in that course and divide them via the group tool into classes, the groups are not going to be present in that course, or are they?

Sitewide (global) groups will be a feature of Moodle2.0 when it is released but they are not there yet.

Possible solutions therefore:
1. Create a course, extract data from SIMS, tweak data and update user profiles to be enrolled in a group in a particular course. This would have to be done every time a new teaching unit is created.
2. Create a course for every year group in every subject and present differentiated material of all teaching units into that one course for use throughout the year. Not ideal for obvious reasons.
3. Wait for the updates.

Not sure I’ve got my head round this yet. Will have to play. Let me know how you get on with yours. And thanks for your thoughts on twitter. Why are teachers doing this? Where are the techies?

:O)D

Good thought Dan,
This would be a great solution for an automated solution, however I suspect it would be too complex to get the data into the correct XML format, as even once you have the data out of SIMS there are a whole host of problems:

1) Do you know their username? We don’t store usernames in SIMS at present so they would need to be manually added…

2) Much of the data would need to be manipulated to represent the appropriate structures…

3) Course names are not likely to map nicely to output from SIMS

Whilst these problems still exist with the csv solution, I would personally find it easier to manipulate the csv file then the xml file…

That said I will do some reading as your suggestion certainly has potential, I just suspect for the kind of one-off upload type scenario it would be easier to manipulate the data in a csv file…

I’ll also take a look and see what kind of data I can get out of SIMS!

However if you get anywhere with an IMS solution I would love to know!

I agree there are definitely issues with the possible solutions you suggest…

What I really want is for metacourses to cascade groups through…

This way you can setup a master Year 9 Maths course with appropriate sets and then create any topic courses as metacourses which would keep the same grouping automatically… However at present this isn’t possible!

In response to your points Andy,

1. You dont need to know there username, simply populate the Id Number field in the profile with there UPN and use that to identify each pupil. Staff code or equivalent for Staff.

2. Correct, if you change the structure of the SIMS data so that it correctly represents what you want in Moodle your going to need to do this each time you update the Moodle data via SIMS.

3. Indeed, course names like ’7x/Ma3′ isnt going to mean much to pupils. Another stumbling block

In response to Dai,

Global Groups coming in 2.0: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-11826

From looking at all the solutions the CLEO Tool seems to offer the best way to assign groups to courses, but then a combination of the IMS and bulk upload tool seem to offer the best ways to manage users.

Cascading groups in meta-courses:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=43755&parent=200867

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=43755

Good call Dan! It hadn’t occurred to me I might be able to id by something else… I shall have to look into that…

Global Groups, sadly is still listed as needing funding so it may not make 2.0, either way I would prefer cascading metacourses!

Cheers! I shall have to have a read and see how easy it would be to port this to 1.9 as this was written for 1.6 I think…

Hi Andy

Another alternative I have used is to create the different groups in a course first and assign them different enrolement keys. Then when pupils enrol into the course they use the key that matches their group/class.

Seems to work OK.

Thanks for the input. I have used the enrolment key method when I was teaching ICT, but now I mostly teach Maths and so Moodle is mostly used from home I find getting them to remember and use the correct enrolment key is too difficult!!

Great solution in some scenario’s though – thanks for the reminder!