Course Retention and Sharing

Stephanie Friedman and Kevin WiliartyHampshire CollegeFebruary 27, 2018

Evaluations: bit.ly/nercomp_Moodle18#NERCOMPPDO4

Introduction

● Who we are● Outline

○ Stakeholders○ Solutions○ Implementation

Stakeholder: Faculty want backups

Interaction with Faculty member about practical details, policy & rationale at the same time

● Reference● Imports● Portability

Stakeholder: Central Records wants syllabi

● Providing syllabi for accreditation team○ For some faculty, Moodle is the syllabus.○ For the accreditation team, PDFs would be ideal.

● Tenure and promotion● Transparency

Stakeholder: Faculty want to share their courses

● Guest speaker● Openness ● Tenure and promotion● Professional portfolio

Stakeholder: IT wants to expire old courses, share

responsibly

● One multi-year academic Moodle○ Maintenance challenges○ Course degradation

● Allow sharing while respecting FERPA and Intellectual Property● Self-service solutions

Redefining the problem/solution space

Sunsetting courses

Course backups

Guest/open access component

Accreditation, tenure & promotion

Print course page

Download instructor files

Moodle course archive

Python script *

Printing the course page

● CSS for print media● Not reinventing the wheel● Custom theme● Site administration > Appearance > Themes● Works nicely with our custom Course information block

Site Administration > Appearance > Themes > Clean > Custom CSS

Downloading instructor files

● Started as a patch (Longfei Yu, UMass Amherst) ● CLAMP maintains plugin (Charles Fulton, Lafayette)● https://moodle.org/plugins/local_instructor_files● Produces flat (zip) file of resources

● Who is an ‘instructor?’○ by default, only teacher and editingteacher roles, but configurable

● Cautions: ○ Lag time○ courses with many large files (like media) may not work (trouble at around

500MB totals)

Downloading instructor files - Considerations

Administration Block Link

File structure of Download Instructor Files Export

To configure roles:

Site Administration >

Plugins >

Local Plugins >

Download Instructor Files

Moodle Backup Files

● .mbz files● Currently enabled for our faculty● Multi-step/multi-click process● User tours to assist faculty● Requires active Moodle to restore into

User Tour Steps

Python HTML exports

Github: https://github.com/Swarthmore/extract-mbz

Online: https://imd1klc2uc.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/static/index.html

The online version is currently limited to 100MB, but it may eventually be increased.

File structure of a Python export

HTML export

Online version

Implementing course retention

● Navigation● Documentation● Getting the word out● Coordinating with administrators

Navigation

● Filtered course list○ Disambiguate course names○ Filter courses slated for expiration○ Faculty response: “Awesome! Thanks Just saw that. Really helpful.”

Filtered Course List

How it’s done

Documentation

● Policy with links to documentation of each process, and short summaries● User tours

Getting the word out

● Intranet announcements (with video)● Drop-in sessions (and the challenges thereof)● School meetings (?)

Co-ordinating with administrators

● Meetings● Published policy

https://www.hampshire.edu/it/moodle-course-retention-policy

Thank you!

Evaluations: bit.ly/nercomp_Moodle18#NERCOMPPDO4