Not really, just a catchy title. Monday morning, been of all weekend, moodle stuff.
Busy time of year for me, supporting education - teachers, lab tech people, students, parents, school administrators, school technology administrators, facilitators. Lots of people in different roles.
Clean up the Email server bad address notifications (to the admin. account, which is me). Do this over 6 active moodle instances and that is a lot of push.
Reset student passwords, since the cannot use the reset password feature of moodle, because they do not have a legit email address to communication with.
Resting more passwords, but not for moodle, for my camera security people - system. This was a real time insertion.
Working with the IT person at Cal. Mum HS. She is inexperienced with moodle. We have her account synced with their MS Directory server via LDAP. The passwords were not updating - pushing from MS server to Moodle. We changed a setting in local LDAP configuration and its working now. Customer has one of principles update their password in LDAP and verified that it worked in moodle. Good. I also disabled the automatic permission assignment with a group in the LDAP - teachers in the group but moodle assigns them course creator privilege site wide. Hmmm. After a little thought here ended up turning that off and going with concept of "upon account creation, no permissions". Those permissions would be managed and assigned in the content of a course(s). No modifying the moodle default permissions so the teacher role could have site wide permissions. Steer the conversation with the customer away from site wide privileges. I helped by also removing enrollments from each of the 5 or 6 courses that my customer created. The accounts, since given site wide course creator rights (not any more)where automatically enrolled into the course(s). I could tell, since moodle did not allow me to remove them like I would a manual enrollment. Ended up having to actually go direclty into the DB table to removed the enrollment records. My smart brainy colleague Mike was working with me in real time with our customer on speaker phone. When the normal enrollment interface would not remove them, Mike found a post about "removing course creator privilege site wide" and into the DB we went to remove. We talked about accounts being enrolled manually in the course content and students in the student role in the course context.
I have another customer who is a new teacher to a few nursing courses in an established program delivered on the moodle. I helped her with getting her students accounts created (self option from home page) and then explained how she could enroll the accounts in the course(s). Also explained co-horts and how they could help with enrolling. Also explained the self enrollment option, like the self account creation, with an enrollment key. She is also trying to understand how to change course data. I send her moodle docs link on how to manage course content and a little encouragement.
My primary moodle customer has been quiet for a few days. Good. They have enrolled about 100 students into various courses this month - start of school. I helped with a integration issue last week, the grade data in the moodle was not syncing with the 3rd party enrollment software. I helped a couple of the teachers with backing up some course content, corrected a link in a course that uses content from a LTI compliant server. We have 3 vendors, who we purchase course content from, that provide their content via LTI protocol. Explained / Investigated / discussed with other teacher who has used vendor - how the content is not local to the moodle - good, but bad since we give up ability to manage the grade data in the content. That is managed on the provided server not in the local moodle course shell. This matters because it is common to want to edit the value of graded activities in the moodle course. Vendor content historically has been pushed to us and lived locally in the moodle course. These vendors want to be able to sell their content to other systems, besides moodle, so serve it in a way that is consumable in many LMS's. This also makes sense, moodle is trying to catch up and provided good control access to features made available via the LTI protocol.
The student progress is reported / managed via a 3rd party software. Students are directed into the software for login and course access. It is the student and teacher course portal space. Some of the courses offered via the AccelerateU service are not on my moodle server. They also use APEX and Brainhoney to offer courses. The portal software manages the linkage - usage of course content on different LMSs. This also makes sense - my customer wants to offer as many courses as he can. There are some courses only available on certain LMS. Anyway, vendors serve up their content, and LMSs consume it. Fueled to moodle, middlebury to moodle, ELA regents to APEX etc. etc etc.
Another customer came to see me in person, sat down and started talking about this report she can not quiet finish. She has been trying to learn SQL for about a year, a little older woman, sharp, but slow to pick up the SQL. I have been helping her for many years, but have been trying recently-ish to let her do the work. I helped her by listening and stating back what she said she was trying to do and make a couple suggestions. Also offered to look at it if when she sends me an email with the details about what she wants, why the query is. I have not heard back yet from her. This is complicated a little more by the fact that she and I have to remote into their (our DB on their server) to accomplish this. The interface provided by the portal customer does not provide editing capacity to the entire DB, just parts of it, so we (she) gets to remote direcly into the DB using MS SQL workbench. The GUI to create by joining tables is lacking in the software, lacking compared to the nice visual GUI that MJ has used in MS Access for many years.
I have also been helping another customer on a different moodle site. He is redoing a couple nursing - health care courses. I have had to upgrade the version to the tip, since a plugin he requested would not install until I did. Then installed another plugin. Both plugins have provided moodle with a little more functionality in terms of moving a lot of files around and organizing the course home page. One added another "topic" format for the home page, the other, plugin, created a mass selection and movement of files from one category to another. Nothing in terms of teaching improvements, like the use of activities to better engage the student, both plugin enhancements have been for administrative improvements.
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