Feedback wanted - Moodle-based student profile system from CMIS

[jamesss]

Hi All,

I've been developing a Student Profile for Moodle 1.9 which integrates with our Facility CMIS database.

We'd really appreciate any observations or suggestions you have on how we could improve it, features it is missing, what you do in your school etc.

We have an open account for our recent Open Evening and thought this might be a good opportunity

The url is Connect - Open Evening and the password is 'rainford'.


Many Thanks!

[CyberNerd]

That looks great, we have something similar for SIMS provided by schoolsict.net

Is the module open Source? and does it have a direct MSSQL link (which is what we used to do when we used CMIS)

I'm assuming that the courses are metacourses, built upon the CMIS course codes?
Suggestion would be to link the timetable to the actual course, and provide parents with a login, linked to their children.

Also - some of your english/maths resources look commercial - you should remove access to this from the internet incase you get in trouble with the provider (thanks for the mymaths login btw..)

[jamesss]

Thanks!

No it has been completely written by me and the code was written with the task in mind at the time rather than open sourcing it - something I may think about for the future!

The data is stored in a MySQL DB (albeit in a different DB to the moodle tables) and is transferred from CMIS's MSSQL DB at select times during the night via cron tasks. We find that the CMIS DB is too sluggish to use direct access and presents some issues when it comes to exam time (we also release the exam results online).

That's something we haven't got around to yet, all our enrolments are done via the Facility to CMIS block, but it's certainly something we're interested in.

Thanks for your suggestion! I will be having a look at that when I get some time to experiment!

I've removed those now... forgot about that!

[CyberNerd]

No it has been completely written by me and the code was written with the task in mind at the time rather than open sourcing it - something I may think about for the future!

You should, getting many people to review code and make improvement and more features will benefit your school as well as others. You can still sell support (you are the expert) and make money if you wanted to, the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.

The data is stored in a MySQL DB (albeit in a different DB to the moodle tables) and is transferred from CMIS's MSSQL DB at select times during the night via cron tasks. We find that the CMIS DB is too sluggish to use direct access and presents some issues when it comes to exam time (we also release the exam results online).

That's a good way of going it, we toyed with the idea of an intermediary database, then moved to SIMS, then moved to the schoolsict solution which uses SIF via groupcall. I think the main issue would be that if CMIS (or SIMS) changes their database format then you'll lose the connection. Also you'll invalidate the T+C's if you ever want to write back to CMIS/SIMS - which is also something you might want to think about, eg you could export moodle quiz or SCORM quiz data into your MIS. you'd need a different approach to do this.