I got an email today from one of our numerous 3rd party commercial course vendors, Florida Virtual. I give them credentials to a specific category on our moodle, and they take their time loading the course. Upon completion and reflection.
These are the things I like to remind myself and my customer about commercial courses loaded to our moodle.
Vendors like to use quizzes, assignments and forums.
Teachers can customize the course content. Their role can hide and delete content, activities etc. They can also add their own content.
Teachers can re-arrange content. Just because the vendor thinks these topics together make sense, or these topics first, does not mean we have to agree. Teachers can move, remove, rename or add their own topics. We pay the vendor for the course, we can manipulate it however we choose.
We format and set up the grade book. This is what my customer likes to do. He wants all the courses we purchase from vendors gradebook to look the same. This used to cause me stress, but I have come around to his way of looking at this. The gradebook is complex and we still end up dealing with gradebook issues, even after formatting it the way we do.
Formatting the assignments. We like to turn on the "email teacher notification" property. Our customer likes the teachers to get an email notification whenever a student submits an assignment in the course. In the past, teachers have *complained that they do not always know when a student has submitted something. They like to know so they can grade it. We also turn off the "send for marking button". This feature allows the student to submit an assignment and then get feedback without sending it for marking. Its a good idea, in some cases, but not for us. Too often, students have submitted an assignment only to have it site in this *state, where the teacher does not get notified. We turn this off - which means when the student submits, its for a grade, and the teacher gets notified. We also change the file size for uploaded documents. We set the default file size limit to 20 MB. We set the allowed number of file attachments to 3.
All these assignment updates are handled in a script that I created that is run on the moodle DB. We do not have to mess around with the moodle interface or ask our teachers to change these. I do however ask out teachers to change things from where we set them. On occasion, the teacher wants to tweak these settings, I encourage them to do it, my customer likes me to do it.
Fish for a man, eat for a day, teach a man to fish, eat for a lifetime.
Formatting the quizzes. We set the number of attempts to 1 with a time limit of 1 hr for quizzes, two hrs for exams. We leave the quizzes open all the time, since we have a rolling enrollment model, students are at different points in the course throughout the year. Sometimes we change these settings, allowing more time or attempts. Occasionally, I will delete an attempt, or coach the teachers how to do this or turn on / off the many feedback options avail. for the quiz module.
Forums. We sometimes have to add point values to the forums and an aggregation type - which will allow the forum to appear in the gradebook.
Points allowed for quizzes, assignments, forums, exams and other activities. We coach the teachers to change these values if they want. Sometimes the traditional teachers only want 100 points avail. for the entire semester. In which case, they reduce the points for a quiz from 50 points to 10, for example. If a course has 10 assignments, and they only want a total of 100 course points total, then we coach them to change the points from 40 to 5 for example.
We also turn on certain blocks, like recent activity, mainly for the teachers to see what has taken place since the last time they logged in. I prefer to coach the teachers about the blocks and how to turn them on / off and not try to decide which ones they want. My customer says "I want the blocks the same for all the courses and teachers". He has a point, but over time, he has come around to let them change it. Probably more like, we will set them and then tell them how to change them.
Module content display. We usually like the content for the course to appear in an embedded window. We have tried other options, but tend to come back to this one.
Completion tracking. Our customer likes this, for now. He has waffled on this over the years. The vendor courses usually do not have this active. My script activates completion tracking for the courses and sets it specifically for the quizzes, assignments and forums - where the student has to have completed the activity and received a grade for it. Then the activity is marked as completed by moodle.
Create a course backup. Once all our formatting is complete on a course. I log into my special backupmaster account on the moodle and make a course backup. The course backup is then used to create *deployed or live courses which are assigned to teachers.
Finally, we add a blurb for technical help.
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