How to make a teacher happy using moodle...

We have a teacher who is teaching a science course this fall.  She is teaching a 3rd party course that has a lot of content in in.  She has spend time modifying the course to her liking.  We have a district that requested the same course, but wanted their own section.  Following our normal process, we created a new course by restoring a master backup of the course.

We enrolled the teacher and our enrollment DB enrolled 10 students into the course.

Today, I got this email from the teacher:

Hi Mike...couple of questions/concerns.

Why are the Brockport students in their own section of Euro and not in with Jack and Jericho?

And, remember at the beginning of the course how I had to go in and make changes because Moodle was a mess? I deleted content, added content, corrected assignments, etc.  If the Brockport students have to be in their own section, is there anyway to copy the edited VAP Euro Part I over to their section? I spent like 5-6 hours editing that course and I really don't want to recreate it.

Is there anyway the tech guys might be able to help?

Since the enrolled students had not submitted any work, I was able to delete the course and restore the original course - keeping all her edits.

How to keep teacher happy, and people using your product? Do not lose their work.  Copy the content for them.  

To be moodle specific, perform these steps

1. backup the original course, without student data
2. restore the backup, to the teachers category in moodle
3. enroll the account in teacher role
4. make sure the course short name matches external enrollment DB section LMS ID

I did not have to do anything in the other system.  I only needed to backup, restore, enroll, and run the cron script, and that was only because I wanted to see the accounts enroll into the new course.

It took me about 30 minutes to work through this problem.  It was not immediately in my brain.  I was initially skeptical about changing the course on the moodle side and *re-enrolling accounts.  BUT, that does not make teacher happy when i say something like "Sorry, the course is deployed and student enrolled, you will have to copy the changes from the original course bla bla."

Moral of the story?

If you want people to use the product and feed the beast, help them.  Help them do their work.  Make it easier for them.  Do not make them have to re-doe things.