External Database Enrolments

Alex WalkerCity of Glasgow College

The City of Glasgow College

• Colleges in Scotland merging into regional super-colleges.

• City of Glasgow College formed in 2011, when three Glasgow city centre colleges merged.

The City of Glasgow College

Bb8.0

m1.9.8

m1.9.8

469628

CoursesSta! Accounts

672363

CoursesSta! Accounts

609157

CoursesSta! Accounts

The City of Glasgow College

m2.4.0

3,93216,102

CoursesActive Users

The Merger

• Colleges merged in Summer 2011.

• We had to launch a new Moodle while every other IT system in the college was changing.

• New Novell login system, new student record system.

Plan A

Student Record System

MoodleLDAP

Plan B

• Lots of IT systems changing at the same time made it hard to get time to discuss Plan A with the IT team.

• Too many ‘fringe use cases’ (e.g. students with multiple part-time courses).

Plan B

• Pull data from student record system into ‘middle man’ database.

• Use the database structure to manage enrolments.

• Gave our team much more control over enrolments.

Plan B

Student Record System

MoodleSQL DB

Plan B

• Moodle comes with several enrolment plugins.

• One lets you take enrolments from an external database.

Plan B

Student Record System

MoodleSQL DB

Data getsexportedfrom MIS.

Exported ina format

Moodle understands

Database Structure

• Required data exported from UNITe student record system.

• Relational database structure used to manage enrolments

Database Structure

• Students belong to the class group.

• Class groups get assigned to a course.

• Courses may be associated with one or more units.

Meta Link Mayhem

• Our database structure has its own meta-link system.

• Don’t do this! Use Moodle’s built-in meta-link facility.

• There were reasons we had to do this.

Meta Link Mayhem

• In Moodle 2, you can add users directly to metalinked courses. You couldn’t in Moodle 1.9.

• We were merging three Moodles, with thousands of courses and existing metalinks.

• mdl_course_metalink table was removed from Moodle 2.

city12345

city12345

city12345

HNDPHO student

student

student

HNDPHO11

HNDPHO12

Student Enrolments

Moodle

student › cohort cohort › course course › unit

Data export from student

record sys.

Lecturers add cohorts to

courses

Migrated from old systems.

awalker

awalker

awalker

HNDPHO lecturer

lecturer

lecturer

HNDPHO11

HNDPHO12

Sta! Enrolments

Moodle

lecturer › course

Data came from legacy

systems.

course › unit

Migrated from old systems.

Getting Data from MIS

• Central College (Glasgow) developed a front-end for the Unit-e student record system, called Enquirer.

• Central College is now part of the City of Glasgow College.

• We get Enquirer for free.

Getting Data from MIS

• Enquirer generates a CSV of the student usernames and their class cohorts.

• This CSV is automatically picked up at midnight by our Moodle server, which adds these records to our enrolment database.

Getting Data into Moodle

• Moodle expects to read from one database table.

• We used a view to pull the sta! and student lists into one table.

Scalability

• 16,000 students.

• 20,000 student:cohort records.

• 1,500 cohorts added to top level courses.

• About 30 ‘All Student’ coursesx 16,000 students = 480,000 rows!

Scalability

• Entire view contains 715,604 rows.

• Takes 5 seconds to generate.

• Moodle generates this view every time a user logs in.

• During peak times, Moodle was slow and unreliable.

Scalability

Scalability

• Cache the contents of the view in a regular table.

• Index the username column to speed up Moodle’s query.

• Update the cache regularly with the latest contents of the view.

Scalability

• select * from allEnrolmentswhere username=“awalker”3.03 seconds

• select * from cachedEnrolmentswhere username=“awalker”0.01 seconds

Administration

• When using the SQL database, only the developer could look into issues or change enrolments.

• Wrote a front-end, allowing the Learning Technologists to modify and troubleshoot enrolment issues.

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Building Finder 2.0

• Finder can’t be easily released, because it’s tightly tied to our custom enrolment database.

• Work has just started on Finder 2.0, which is modular and can be released for those just using Moodle.

Building Finder 2.0

• Renamed ‘Finder’ to ‘Inspector’.

• More detailed reporting tools.

• ‘Course info panels’ to show number of assignments, forum posts and "les in a course.

• New ‘Timeline’ feature to see what a user has done, or what’s done on a course.

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Finder Tool

Advantages

• Latest enrolment data automatically pulled from MIS every night.

• Lecturers can add students to their courses themselves, by cohort.

• New students automatically see their courses when they log in for the "rst time.

Advantages

• Non-developers have the power to check, modify and troubleshoot enrolment issues.

• Learning technologists have the power to check and "x issues themselves.

• No waiting for a developer to check issues.

• Developer able to take holidays.

Disadvantages

• Lecturers and students don’t show up on list of participants until they log in for the "rst time.

• Newly enrolled users won’t show up until the next time they log in.

• Can’t manage database enrolments through Moodle. Have to edit them at the database level.

Finder Tool

Disadvantages

• ‘Yet another system’ for Learning Technologists to use.

• New Learning Technologists already familiar with Moodle still have to learn Finder.

• Requires a developer in-house to oversee and manage.

Future Improvements

• Working on Finder 2.0 (Inspector), with a greater emphasis on reports and a smoother work#ow.

• Get rid of meta links at the database level. Use Moodle’s meta links, or don’t use them at all.

Questions

Alex WalkerCity of Glasgow College