Restoring a students work from a previous moodle course

My customer occasionally needs to *pull up old moodle courses to see what a student actually did, or more likely to see if something that a student did may qualify them for some credit, so that can graduate.  But, I digress before I even get started.

A request like this came in recently.  Actually a little different.  The request was *re-instate a student into a course.  A student had previously dropped the course, now my customer wants to allow her to re-start.  Fine.  The request was to find the grades for the student and the work she had done

We know in moodle, to use the Gradebook - specifically the Grader report - to actually grade and the User report to see what a student had done.

I restored a moodle DB from about 6 weeks earlier - that when she dropped the class and was removed, her enrollment - which is of the external DB type.  She and her state in the course were long gone, I had to restore a copy of the DB to another moodle instance to see it.  I have a moodle instance called restored_student - complete with its own version of the DB.  This is a fairly common thing that I do in support of my moodle(s) - restore a copy of the DB from a previous date and examine a course and students work.

After restoring the course, I found the student in the course as advertised.  I screen grabbed - took a pic of the User report, that shows the grades and comments entered by the instructor.

I also exporting the grade data using the native moodle gradebook export process - which is kinda useful.  If I were trying to import the data into  a course, I would use the CSV type export, but I just want my customer to see the data and he can re-enter the grades himself.  He is actually re-instating the student into the course, but in a different LMS.  That does not really impact what I was doing in moodle, just provides insight into why he was not trying to import the grades into the new course.

Moral(s) of the story?

• Moodle is good at sharing its data.  Moodle is good at exporting and importing things - it wants to play nicely - if it plays nicely, people will use it.
• My customer gives every opportunity to allow students to get credit for courses.
• Often times, we want to examine a previously dropped or incomplete course.  
• I often restore copies of the entire moodle DB to a *RD instance.
• Contribution by a student in a moodle course usually consists of 3 things
• I create 3 backups a week of the moodle DB. 
• I keep two copies a month for perpetuity.

1. - uploaded files
2. - quiz grades
3. - forum contributions

The end.