Managing courses in moodle

Each year, we figure out a couple really useful things that make our lives easier....and then we add another few things that make it more complicated...

A very useful process we created this summer for one of our moodle instances was to use a shared moodle account to create/deploy course backups.

We created an account with site wide manager permissions, I called the account backupmaster and shared the credentials with my colleague.

Each summer, we get new course *shells from our vendors.  We go through a process of readying the shells and then creating backup files of each that we restore when our customer gets an enrollment.  In other words, this is a critical process that in the past has been problematic, because we could not always find things (backup files) or sometimes had multiple backup files of the same course.

This year, after we finished getting the courses from the vendors and I completed the MySQL scripts on them and BEFORE we started making backups of each of the newly formatted course shells - we brainstormed the best way to manage this.

The end result was to share a moodle account, since it has its own private backup area.

My colleague and I can both log into this account to find, deploy or create new backup files.

I think this to be a very good idea, I will update this later to see just how good this process worked.