VLE - Yearly roll over

[danIT]

This is probably a bit early but im actually looking at putting some code together to deal with the yearly roll-over.

 

We currently use Moodle as our VLE,VLP,CMS, etc etc...

 

What happens at the moment is that our SIMS data is imported into Moodle on a weekly basis updating our teacher/staff and pupil class associations. This creates all the classes and assigns the correct permissions to teachers and pupils in order to give them access to there timetabled classes.

 

This works great for 12 months, teachers add resources to there classes and pupils access them.

 

At the end of each academic year we archive the courses, this involves 'hiding' the courses from pupils, this can be reversed if required, and appending the academic year to the class name so it can be easily identified.

 

We then import the SIMS data enrolling all our new pupils and moving existing pupils into new classes etc.. This also applies to staff.

 

Staff can still access old courses so that they can import resources created in previous years into there new course.

 

What this effectively means is that each year teachers start with a blank course and have to rebuild there courses based on last years efforts.

 

All id like to know is how does your school deal with this process, it doesnt have to be based on Moodle it can be any VLE. If you have a managed service or service provided by your LEA what do they plan on doing for the Year roll-over?

 

Currently our teachers are being trained specifically on how to backup/restore courses and how to import resources from one course to another due to the roll-over occurring shortly but many of them feel frustrated by the added process.

 

Feedback appreciated.....

[danIT]

What nobody has thought about this?

[Geoff]

just backup and reimport your courses under a new name?

[danIT]

That sound like a good idea.....BUT...what about the enrollments.

 

Obviosuly in the backend I can remove the enrolments using a simple script but how would i setup the new enrollments, if staff have changed the course ID name in the course settings it wont match with SIMS or MIS data. Is that Id stored anywhere else?

[CyberNerd]

That sound like a good idea.....BUT...what about the enrollments.

 

Obviosuly in the backend I can remove the enrolments using a simple script but how would i setup the new enrollments, if staff have changed the course ID name in the course settings it wont match with SIMS or MIS data. Is that Id stored anywhere else?

 

 

Whenever someone logs in, get moodle to query SIMS and have moodle dynamically enrol students and teachers on to the courses:

SIMS and Moodle Integration - EduGeek.net Wiki

[strawberry]

when you back up the courses you can choose to not backup the users, restore that to a new location.

[danIT]

The problem is that its not a live link to SIMS its a weekly update of SIMS data.

 

So teacher are enrolled manually if you like via an IMS import, this creates there classes and enrolls students and teachers correctly, we update the data to only append teacher and student data.

 

The problem i have it what happens when teachers change classes next year, there not going to need to access courses enrolled on this year.

[danIT]

So SIMS data creates course: Ma/7/2 with Teacher A and students added

 

Next year Teacher A teachers Ma/7/2 again but this time with different students

 

 

if i use the backup and restore option to re-create the course again how do i identify that course again. Teachers are allowed to change the name of the course, and the course ID name if they wish effectivly Ma/7/2 could be Year 7 Maths set 2.

 

So this means i have no way of identifying it in the databse, unless the information is stored somewhere else?

[CyberNerd]

I guess it depends on how the courses are named - if every year the course has a new name then it will cause problems, otherwise If a student or teacher changes class then that should be reflected in moodle (or when they log in if it's dynamic data) So as long as the course name stay the same, the content should remain.

 

Alternatively, it's pretty easy to import files from one course to another (press the 'import' button.

[strawberry]

So SIMS data creates course: Ma/7/2 with Teacher A and students added

 

Next year Teacher A teachers Ma/7/2 again but this time with different students

 

 

if i use the backup and restore option to re-create the course again how do i identify that course again. Teachers are allowed to change the name of the course, and the course ID name if they wish effectivly Ma/7/2 could be Year 7 Maths set 2.

 

So this means i have no way of identifying it in the databse, unless the information is stored somewhere else?

i think you can restore the content of a course to an existing course. so let the new one be created, then restore the backup minus the pupils.

[Geoff]

Or if you simply wanted to get rid of the pupils every year, instead of importing everything all the time, how about setting the enrollment duration to a year? that way the pupils are automatically unenrolled?