Annual course preparation moodle style

My annual steps of prepping a couple courses each summer...

Now moodle has a lot of options.  It cooperates with many other things out there.  It is like a hub or a portal.  I know, its an LMS, an open source LMS.  Open source LMS has helped it to be very popular.  My audience is mostly high school, not college.  My customers who use moodle have various uses for moodle.  Blended learning.  At least.  Teachers set up their courses in the moodle and put stuff in them to help with their traditional class.  Some add activities, which require students to participate in the moodle course.  The big three, quizzes, forums and assignments.

The customer who I am blogging about today teachers a couple sections of a health class.  To my knowledge, the course meets exclusively on line.  No blend of online and classroom, no hybrid, just on line.

Steps

1. backup course about to be updated - just in case
2. remove enrollments from course -  exclude the teacher
3. reset the course - remove student data
4. edit course properties - fullname, summary text.  dates from previous year
5. update the enrollment key
6. backup the course
7. restore the course
8. remove the teacher, add the other
9. update the enrollment key
10. communicate to teachers that courses are ready for enrollment.

These are the steps involved for prepping their courses.

Authentication and enrollment

The site allows for users to create their own accounts.
















Teachers have emails for the students and share a course enrollment key with them.  Students come to the site and create their own accounts, set their own passwords and email.  Then they click on the course and are prompted for an enrollment key.  Once the key is entered, moodle enrolls them into the course.















The enrollment plugin above shows 9 students already enrolled sine yesterday.  A little SQL to look in the DB too, shows recent enrollments.

SELECT *, from_unixtime(timecreated,'%m %d %y') FROM `wflboces`.`mdl_user_enrolments` order by timecreated desc;

The teachers are using the same course as the previous year, mostly.  They make changes to one course and I create a backup of it and restore it for the other teacher.  I also manually enroll the teacher.

I also reset the course, removing student data from the previous year.  I choose the defaults (quiz scores, forum posts, assignment uploads - text.

AND remove the enrollments from the previous year.  This is a tedious process with moodle, but I am leary of removing enrollments en mass via a script, since there may be other tables beside mdl_enrol_user where records are removed, when using the moodle UI.