Creating new accounts.
Enrolling users into courses.
Batching new users, account creation
Batching users for enrollment.
Troubleshooting CSV files that chock when batching
Looking at moodle docs to verify what is required in csv files
Discussing, explaining that moodle does allow for self enrollment.
Activating self email based enrollment.
Backing up and restoring courses
Backing up and restoring parts of courses, when content is missing
Tweaking environmental settings in php mainly. php.ini - in support of large restore files.
Working with 3rd party vendors to diagnose problems in many places in our courses.
We migrated to a new version of moodle this fall, 2.2. The vendors who we purchase k-12 course content from also migrated their course ware to moodle 2.2. We did not get most of the course ware until mid August. We spend most of the time between mid august and the opening of the semester formatting the courses received from the vendor on our content server. About 200 courses between 3 vendors. Most of that formatting, I was able to automate or do en mass directly in the database. Then we backed up the courses and stored the files on a novell share drive that is accessible to our production server. Then we restored some of the courses from the content server to the production server. Our internal customers who provide that detail. When enrollments came, we would move the course to the production server.
Once the semester started and teachers and students started pushing into the courses a bit, we discovered many problems in the courses. Problems like
content not rendering properly
quiz and gradebook problems - scores not formatting correctly
pdf files not downloading
pdf files not interacting
java applets not rendering
Many of the problems are also computers in labs where my internal customer Mike has been visiting not being ready to fully support all the media types that moodle uses. Quicktime and flash media.
Many of the problems are teachers and customers not fully understanding how things are working. A lot of the teachers are coming from moodle 1.9 and 2.2 is just different.
One of my districts are using a version of IE and it is not supporting any of the drag and drop functionality related to file uploading.
I have have to activate legacy file settings for a lot of the courses that migrated from 1.9. We even tried to do a backup and restore from a 1.9 version of a course to the 2.2 moodle instance. The restore worked ok, it appeared to be successful, but when we pushed the quizzes in the course, they would fail, error out, not render properly. After a bit of analysis and checking with the vendor, we realized that this course was not provided and updated from the vendor. The course has be to updated by the vendor to work properly in 2.2. I'm sure there are many updates to the DB that have to happen for the course to work properly.
For our internal customer that is serving public k-12 students, we are using the My home space. I have the site wide setting active. The students and teachers see links to their courses in the home space and links to any graded activity that has an explicit start and end date. Yesterday, a teacher requested that they not see this in their home page. After explaining that if we turned it off for her it would effect all the students, we decided to leave it alone. This is a course wide setting, there is not an individual setting per student.
I explained to one teacher why they were not seeing submit buttons in assignments. This was reported as an error to the vendor before I could explain to my customer and then the teacher that moodle is a very ROLE based entity. In order to see certain things, like a submit button in an assignment, you need to be viewing from the correct role. Once I explained this and showed them how to change their role, the teacher and manager role can change their role to student, they understood and were less confused.
I worked with another teacher encouraging them to *clean up their course page a little. Some of their students where complaining about not knowing where they were in the class. This conversation was had with our internal customers first, who have a couple teachers who develop course content for us, as opposed to the vendor courses. Needless to say, the vendor courses look good, they construct their courses *correctly. In a nutshell, I helped the teacher to understand that they should move their content into sub pages and leave the course page as links to things, with a few images, but the bulk of the content does not go on the course page. This reduces the scroll of death and makes it easy for students to keep their place in the course.
One of the new features in moodle 2.2 is completion tracking. We have activated this for every course, minus the general section of each course. When a student is in their course, THEY can update the activity by clicking the checkmark for it. A nice visual reminder of where they have already been in their course. So far, no issues with this. I have a couple scripts that I use in the DB to activate completion tracking for all the course activities. This would be a brutal task if we had to use the moodle interface to activate tracking for each activity manually.
I have moved all the google analytics code from my old 1.9 instances on the old server to the appropriate instance on its new server. I am tracking 12 moodle instances. Most of the instances are using the formal_white theme. I open he general.php page in the theme folder and add the javascript code generated by google analytics into the bottom of the document.
One of my districts batched in over 1000 users in two different csv files. Im sure that their data system that tracks student information simply generated the csv file for moodle. with the following required columns
username,password,firstname,lastname,email
RSmith,56410,Robert,Smith Jr.,RSmith@schoolcsd.org
Moodle automatically converted the username to lowercase when creating the account, batching the users in also allowed me to not obey the password policy set for the site. This is how they wanted to do it. This is their site, not mine, so I cannot force them to obey a password policy.
I have been going in my DB using MySQL workbench and mass updating course URL options, since some of the teachers or classrooms with smaller monitors, are requesting that the content activities render in popup windows rather than embedded. This is fine, its a choice. I am running a simple Update set statement with a where clause for the course. I have this SQL code stored as a snippet, as I do many other frequently used code snippets.
I have had to add the manual enrollment method to a bunch of courses that were backed up and restored from one of our vendors. they must have decided that it made sense to not choose an enrollment method, since moodle has many options. The result was no option to enroll, until you specify the manual type.
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