Integrating Moodle into GCD
Tapping a square peg into a round hole — hourly!
Gavin McCullagh
Griffith College Dublin
Specification
- Enrolments, students, lecturers, maintained in a Foxpro db on another network — keep in sync
- New students registering throughout the year — need access immediately
- Standard block layout to be preset on all courses
- Email username/password to users at account creation
- Faculty administrators to have write access to faculty courses
- Populate pictures from student cards?
- 6 weeks
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Problems
- Foxpro not to be wished upon worst enemies
- Data very unclean — needs tidying up (eg merging courses)
- Data on another network — no DSN connection
- Data link not to be trusted — system must fail nicely
- Moodle has only web based tools?
- Moodle technical documentation is thin on the ground
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Solutions
- Hourly secure copy of 6 CSV files
- A suite of Perl scripts and modules
- facultyimport.pl courseimport.pl
- lecturerimport.pl studentimport.pl
- linklecturers.pl linkstudents.pl linkadmins.pl
- checkcourses.pl checklecturerenrolments.pl checkstudentenrolments.pl
- Rsync/Make (dependencies)
- make students
- make enrolments
- make hourly
- make daily
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Hindsight
- Has the system performed well?
- Should it have been written in PHP?
- Could we have managed with Moodle's import facilities?
- Is this a long-term solution?
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Future
- GCD needs a maintained solution
- All source code released to community under GPL
- MoodleUtils.pm library to quickly script Moodle database tasks
- Create users
- Create courses
- Enrol teachers/students
- Set/Check passwords
- Tidy up old users, enrolments
- Moodle Command Line Utils
- Moodle REST library
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Example of Module Usage
#!/usr/bin/perl
use MoodleUtils;
while(<>) {
chomp $_;
my ($username,$fname,$sname,$email) = split /,/, $_;
my $userID = getUserID($username);
if($userID > 0) {
updateUser($userID,$username,$fname,$sname,$email);
}
else {
my $password = int(rand(5100000));
insertUser($username,$fname,$sname,$email,$password);
sendNewAccountEmail($email,$username,$password);
}
}
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Thanks
- Griffith College Dublin
- John, Richard, Paul, Michael, Gemma
- The Moodle Community
- The Free Software Community
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