My yearly process of setting up a few courses each summer involves working with Moodle, a versatile open-source Learning Management System (LMS) that functions as a central hub for learning materials and activities. Its open-source nature has contributed to its widespread adoption. My primary user base consists of high school teachers who utilize Moodle for various purposes, mainly blended learning. They integrate Moodle with their traditional classroom teaching by uploading resources and incorporating activities like quizzes, forums, and assignments to encourage student engagement.

Today’s blog focuses on a customer who teaches health classes entirely online. There’s no physical classroom component, making it a fully online experience.

Steps

Here’s a breakdown of the course preparation steps:

1. Backup: Create a backup of the course before making any changes as a safety measure.
2. Remove Enrollments: Unenroll all students from the course, except the teacher.
3. Reset Course: Clear out previous student data like quiz scores, forum posts, and assignment submissions.
4. Edit Course Properties: Update course title, description, and dates to reflect the current year.
5. Update Enrollment Key: Generate a new enrollment key.
6. Backup: Create another backup after making the updates.
7. Restore: Restore the course using the latest backup.
8. Teacher Swap: Remove the previous teacher and add the current one.
9. Update Enrollment Key (again): Generate and implement a new enrollment key.
10. Notify Teachers: Inform teachers that the courses are prepared for student enrollment.

These are the steps involved for prepping their courses.

Authentication and Enrollment

The site allows users to create their own accounts.

Teachers distribute course-specific enrollment keys to their students via email. Students then visit the site, set up their accounts with passwords and email addresses, and access the course. Upon entering the enrollment key, Moodle grants them access to the course.

The enrollment plugin displayed here indicates that nine students have already enrolled since yesterday. A quick SQL query on the database confirms these recent enrollments:

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

The teachers primarily reuse the course from the previous year with minor adjustments. I back up the updated course and restore it for other teachers to use. Additionally, I manually enroll the teacher in the course.

Furthermore, I reset the course to remove any previous year’s student data, typically selecting the default options, which include quiz scores, forum contributions, and submitted assignments.

I also remove previous year enrollments. While Moodle makes this a somewhat time-consuming manual process, I hesitate to use a script for bulk removal. This is because, when using the Moodle interface, there might be additional tables besides “mdl_enrol_user” where records are deleted, and a script might not catch all of them.