CLEO plugin for Moodle

[beeswax]

I've spent part of the morning with a colleague from another school getting our heads round this. I have to say that it works as per the instructions. Great stuff. Thanks all round.
Can I have some clarification on something though? All the year groups were created, lesson groups, passwords sent over etc, but we were trying to get different classes in the same year, for example, 7a, 7b, 7c into the same ICT lesson, but still remain in their separate class groups as this would make it easier for teachers when it comes to marking work.

[Ric_]

If the class is defined in SIMS, it appears in Moodle IIRC.... therefore, if 7x1 is an IT class it can be picked from the list... multiple classes can be added too (e.g. 7x1, 7x2 and 7x3)

[beeswax]

What I hope the diagram shows is that we want to keep separate classes all doing the same subject to allow for ease of selection by different class teachers when marking. However, the difficulty we are finding is keeping the classes separate when adding them to the group doing Year7 ICT.

[Ric_]

I'm not a user of Moodle so I'm not 100% on this, however, can you not create a course and then duplicate that course (i.e. you would create 7ICT and then duplicate that 4 times, naming each after the class).

The teachers will only see which courses they are assigned, as will the teachers... the course creator for ICT will see the 'template' course too.

[GrumbleDook]

Are you refering to Meta Courses?

Never seen this used in anger and would really like to.

[CyberNerd]

The way to do it is to create a new course that is a metacourse.
The metacourse is then populated with classes that were originally imported, so when a student changes course their metacourse is automatically updated.
Metacourses also bring all the teachers of the individual courses together too.

[CyberNerd]

Never seen this used in anger and would really like to.

well most of our courses are metacourses. The way it works is that when the user logs on, the moodle checks against a view of the SIMS database to see what course they belong to ( all 1400 courses are populated). If the class teacher wishes, they can populate that individual course with material. Some teachers/departments prefer to work collaboratively in which case they create a metacourse (say KS3 science, or Yr French homework) that is only populated with the relevant courses, and hence the relevant teachers/students.
If a new student joins the school, or a student moves class then as soon as SIMS knows about it, so does moodle, meaning the metacourse is auto updated as well.
The only caveat to getting this all working is that you need to get SIMS to populate Active Directory with student UUID's so that moodle can use that information to work out who is who - but it's easily scripted.

If teachers want individual students to work collaboratively and create their own groups, they use drupaled as more of a social networking site. the drupaled/moodle isn't entirely integrated but the themes are pretty close match.

[beeswax]

I had that thought (meta courses) this morning. I think my little diagram (above) illustrates this as well. Just couldn't see it at the time.