Category: LMS / VLE

Learning Managment Systems AKA Virtual Learning Environment

Rudimentary system for importing Canvas grades into the Student Information System

SIS integration is a topic discussed at the CanvasUKHE Group & the need for cases studies which illustrate what is possible and how it is achieved in practice. These slides and code could contribute to case studies regarding the integration of assessment & grades data with SIS or MIS systems

Content first posted on here: https://twitter.com/JagoBrown/status/900621690144686080

Google Apps for Education with Hapara & Moodle

With this screen cast and accompanying materials in a Moodle course , I am trying give an overview of what in all likelihood, will in time become the standard way in which schools, colleges & other types of organisations manage large parts of their Information, Communication and Technology.  However the focus will be on the anytime formative assessment of students work (files).   For a good number of years I have been demonstrating & encouraging the adoption of what I think is effective use of technology, and thought I would share  this.   This was in part motivated by the needs of my own teaching practice

Youtube screen cast:

Diagram giving overview of Google Apps, Hapara & Moodle:

Presentation:

Link to Moodle course with accompanying materials: www.thelearner.net/course/view.php?id=12

Moodle code to add grades & course links to Profile & ILP pages

This is a short-ish posting to ensure reasonable consistency between the posts here on my blog, with posts I’ve made on the Moodle.org site.  Amongst other things the Personalized Learning Environment (PLE) I developed for Stanmore College, is now proving useful in helping students navigate their courses in Moodle, & tracking which BTEC criteria they have achieved *.   I have made the basic Moodle PHP code for this available on Github.com.  The following files illustrate the basics of displaying grades & links in the /user/profile.php,  & might help other benefit.

In the following file, see line 346:

The above links are also at: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=226791&parent=1062462 & are illustrated by https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=235598

All this should make more sense to interested parties when I post my #ALTC2013 presentation, which provides the broader context for  and includes * early evidence.  Following this I plan to make  demonstration site http://www.thelearner.net  & code available for these PLE enhancements  – applied to Moodle 2.6 🙂

Adding Grades & Feedback to the #Moodle student course Profile (PLE)

Having implemented the changes shown in the previous blog post, adding Grades & Feedback seem like a logical improvement ?
(similar to below,  is now in production in the Stanmore College Moodle & being  piloted with its users) :

Enhancing the Moodle user (course) profile with Grades and Feedback
Enhancing the Moodle user (course) profile with Grades and Feedback

This improvement can be Voted for at https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-39273

Notes on migrating to #Moodle 2 with ILP 2 plugin + pruning the DB & site files

Warning (!) These notes might not mean much if you are not involved with Moodle/LMS administration in some way. However, I have found it useful to read and discuss (see footer links) how others have migrated Moodle 1 sites to moodle 2, so have assembled these notes:

Background & overview

@StanmoreCollege started to use Moodle (1.7) in 2007 and it is now used by nearly every member of staff & full time student in some capacity. The broad aim was to prepare the site for another 5 years of intensive communication, learning & creative use. By creative, I mean I wanted the database, codebase & servers setup so the college could readily exploit new services & software that could enhance teaching & learning. For example integrating with other community resources (personal blogs, mnet, hubs…) & publishing to the community. Ideally we would have installed a fresh moodle 2 site & built the 300+ courses from scratch, but this would loose the user account #IDs which links to users (ILP 1.0) Personal Learning Plan data in moodle 1.9 (PLP) & could require returning students to update their profile… This would also take hundreds of hours of teachers time to rebuild the courses, so the compromise was to upgrade the existing moodle 1.9 site to 2.2, then migrate the required courses across to a fresh moodle 2.2 installation (backup & restore), but where certain data* for example the Moodle 1.9 mdl_user table… was migrated to the fresh 2.2 installation.

Site particulars, pruning & upgrade

The site to ugrade was moodle at 1.9+ with ~ 300+ courses to be migrated. In previous years a few courses have exceeded 600Mb when backed up. This has made the course backup & restoration slow, & not worked at all in some cases…For this reason I requested that teachers clean up their courses & delete unused files. I then only kept any files over 20mb in moodledata unless there was a good reason to do so, and did other things like check the length of filenames for files that students & staff had uploaded. One reason why you might want to do this is referred to here . In the end I just used the query below to find the moodledata folder URL e.g

   http://www.mymoodlesite.com//files/index.php?id=1284&wdir=%2F%2FFolderWithLongFileName

that included these – whole sentence long – filenames, where you can simply ‘Rename’ files. Alternatively you could edit the query just to find these folders. You could also download the result of this query to a spreedsheet, so teachers can identify and shorten file names themselves

 SELECT c.fullname, CONCAT('http://www.mymoodlesite.com
 /course/modedit.php?update=',cm.id) AS cmID, r.id,
 SUBSTRING_INDEX( r.reference, '/' , -1 ) AS FileName,
 r.name, r.type, r.reference, r.timemodified,cm.course
 FROM mdl_resource r
 JOIN mdl_course_modules cm ON r.id = cm.instance
 JOIN mdl_course c ON cm.course = c.id
 WHERE LENGTH( SUBSTRING_INDEX( r.reference, '/' , -1 ) ) >100
 AND r.reference NOT LIKE 'http%'
 AND r.type <> 'html'
 ORDER BY cm.course DESC ,LENGTH( FileName ) DESC

So after pruning these user files etc. I deleted logs & stats rows from the database (These would be available in yearly archive sites we create @StanmoreCollege should they be need) I transferred the moodle site from a Windows server to a Linux server & performed a command line upgrade . This was so the user files could be processed & migrated into the new way moodle 2 handles & stores files . Below are some more notes on this upgrade:

Modules upgrade notes:

  • ILP (Personal Learning Plans etc) –> inserted ILP 1.0 tables into Moodle 2.2 DB…
  • Book (used for schemes of work) –> installed this mod in moodle 2.0 & 2.1 (becomes native in later versions of Moodle)
  • Turnitin Assignment type –> Deleted all instances of this prior to migration due to issues!
  • Turnitintool (plagiarism detection) –> installed mod in moodle 2
  • Feedback –> Did not migrate data for this (its in the Archive sites anyway)
  • Lightbox gallery –> Did not migrate data for this but reinstalled module later from github https://github.com/netspotau/moodle-mod_lightboxgallery

Miscellaneous upgrade notes:

  • Additional 1.9 roles created: Manager, Tutor, Senior tutor, Manual-student were not migrated
  • compared upgrade with fresh DB schemas – used collation utf8_unicode_ci
  • Made changes to grade scales that I wanted to see in the new moodle 2 site

Set up of fresh Moodle 2.2 installation

Thousands of the mdl_user rows from the upgraded table were inserted into this fresh installation. This was necessary because I wanted all returning students to be able to login without requiring them to update their moodle profiles. Also for their ILP 1.0 data to be available.

*other considerations for this fresh moodle 2.2 installation were the password salt, Guest & Admin (ID#2) accounts, user mnethost value, updating links that pointed to our old Moodle site address … Also if you are migrating in this way, before you upload user pictures into your fresh Moodle 2 installation, remember to set picture=0 in the mdl_user table:

 UPDATE mdl_user u
 JOIN mdl_context ctx ON u.id= ctx.instanceid
 LEFT JOIN mdl_files f ON ctx.id = f.contextid
 SET picture = '0'
 WHERE ctx.contextlevel =30
 AND u.picture = 1
 AND f.filearea IS NULL

Migration of courses to fresh Moodle 2.2 installation

This was a case of backing up courses in the site upgraded to moodle 2.2 then restoring them to the fresh Moodle 2.2 installation. Although this was time consuming it presented an opportunity for further pruning:

  • Unused activities & resources were not backed up & restored
  • Blocks were not backed up or restored (keeping things simpler)
  • Last year student user Grades were not restored
  • Courses that were no longer needed were not restored…

This resulted in reducing the DB & moodledata by well over half, which is good as Media & Computer teachers are now needing students to be able to upload files upto 50MB.

Related links:

Moodle 2.0: Making the Leap, Senate House, 29th February 2012
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=205367
http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/Upgrading_to_Moodle_2.0