How we solved a problem with outdated course material and student progress...

We had a problem recently with our computer science course from a commercial vendor.  We had initially split a course into multiple semester long courses, a common practice of ours. 

The teacher discovered a problem with the content in the course because he teachers another section of the same course.  To cut to the chase, The teacher had been teaching two courses, one with 5 enrollments, the other with 2, whose content was outdated.

Our choices really were

1. do I update the course content in place?
2. do I create a new course, with new content and move the students into it?

We decided on option 2 - since there were a lot of quizzes and assignments that had changed in the course.  The vendor provided us with some good detail.

The *problem then is the student progress.  How does that migrate to the new courses?  Not in a clean and simple way.

What we ended up doing was leaving the first course, that had 5 enrollments, with the students all about 75 % of the way through the course.

A little snap shot of one of the students, their progress and the teacher feedback.

Lots of data for more than a few students.  This course we left alone.  We offered to help bring in some new content modules if the teacher wanted, but we did not offer to try to *move the course progress into a new course.  My experience with this has been tedious and we usually end up printing of comments, grades and downloading files and inputting them manually in the new course. 

Moodle does not really have a clean and simple means of pulling content from course A and plopping it into course B.  If the content were the same, we could simply do a course backup and restore to a new course with student data - that would bring all the progress over.  But - the content that we need is in the other course. 

We did create a new course for the other course that had only 2 students with less progress.

I logged into the *outdated course and downloaded the assignments that each of the students had submitted.  My hard drive looked like this (2 students * 5 uploads)

Once the students enrollment changed to the new course - I logged into the new course as the students and uploaded the files again.  I also manually updated the grade book, adding the assignment grades back in.  I did this in the Grader Gradebook view, logged in as the teacher.

In the end we ended up with

1. A course not changing, because of too much student progress that would have been crazy to try to move
2. A new course being created, with new content, and grade data being manually moved into it

Moral of the story?

Define the problem clearly, move toward the simplest solution.  Analyze the problem afterward and learn from what happened.