Moodle + CLEO Tool = Auto course management?

I am playing around with a moodle install as the school is keen to get a VLE setup. Currently we have an intranet system which does a fair bit of the stuff we need, things like behaviour logs, grading, student and staff timetables/lists, room booking and email.

What we need now is something to present course and lesson info to the students, our intranet does have some functionality but it is always worth looking at bigger and better things, that's where moodle comes in...

I have used the CLEO tool to get the student's usernames/passwords created from SIMS and it has also nicely assigned them to their class groups as in SIMS (Eg 11xMA2 for maths group 2 of year 11 group X, if you see what i mean)

This is all shown from CLEO when enrolling students to a course in the CLEO box under the standard moodle user's box.

So, I know that CLEO has recognised the names of the classes so my next goal really is to get a course generated for each of those groups.

For example:

7xma1, 7xma2, 7xma3 etc... as courses, then for moodle/CLEO to automatically enrole any student assigned to the group. In theory this setup would only require someone to re-run the SIMS report, and re-upload the TSV file for moodle to automatically update class lists, for example if a student comes in or drops out etc...

I can manually assign teacher roles but auto enrolling the students is pretty much the only way i can see moodle being a usable system for us.

Are you saying you want a mechanism to actually create courses automatically for you? AFAIK the only way to do this (and I haven't tried it) is the bulk course upload tool script here: Moodle.org: Modules and plugins but it's not linked to your CLEO tool

Thanks for the link, ill check that out in the morning.

What i essentially want is for the students to be auto-enrolled into all classes they are in.

The SIMS data has a class ID field, which is then used in a many to many relationship with the student ID field, hence one student can be enrolled in many classes and one class can have many students.

An image is attached to this post to show what i mean, im fairly bad at explaining with words...

So looking at the graphic you can see that the student ID is linked to the course/class ID in the middle table. So our student is in the Art and Design course. What i need is for moodle to realise this, so i create a course called "Art & Design" with the shortcode "10A/Ar1" and when uploading the user data, or running a cronjob or whatever, moodle scans the database for all users who are in this class (which is seen because the userid of the user will be in a row with the "id" of the course as shown in the graphic) and automatically enroll them as a student...

Clear as mud i am sure!

I can probably write this myself in PHP but before i get dirty i was hoping someone had done the work for me.

As a side question, where in the DB structure does moodle store the course/user data? I have found the individual tables mdl_user and mdl_course but i cant see any moodle table which links the two. If i can find that then i can probably start writing something up in PHP methinks, im sure it wont be that easy but time will tell.

Well not quite clear as mud because I know what you mean :) But despite living in CLEO land I don't use the CLEO tool - and don't venture into the moodle db -but if I were wanting to do what you wanted to -ie enrol students into the courses in one go I'd just do it with a csv file - as long as you get the fields right you can enrol directly into a course or courses (in fact you can enrol into a group in a course, which is what we do rather than having a course per group/set/class whatever you call them) Issue is of course you'd have to get the set lists yourself into csv rather than having it all set up in SIMS.

What you have described is currently available, the auto creation of courses and the automatic enrolments. I was the original author, there are other posts in this forum detailing where you can get hold of them.

Interesting, i did do a search for cleo and moodle and found nothing useful... I will look again.

Cheers

(if you are feeling particularly charitable and know where these threads lurk.... Just sayin :D)

Hi,

I noticed that you have contributed a lot to the forum about the integration of SIMS.net and Moodle - is there a way that you're aware of to generate SIMS reports using the Command Reporter and then use those reports to maintain the Moodle enrolments? I cant use the external db solution as the installation of Moodle is hosted separately from SIMS. Is this possible?

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.