What steps to merge several Moodle instances?

danmcguire

I have a similar situation although the size of the Moodle site in the cloud is much smaller. The cloud site is a MoodleCloud site. We have three schools in the Northern Region of Ghana running MoodleBox; one of them is just beginning so they have nothing to report, yet. The other two have only one Moodle course for 25 students each. Periodically, once every two months, so far, the teachers back of their courses and send me the course file which I then upload to the 'main' Moodle site on the MoodleCloud site. So far, the uploads are individual courses.

Our current problem is determining what reports to run from each course backup so that we can compare utilization from period to period. We are primarily interested in teacher activities on the course and student activities on the course.

This is not an automated system, but I'm fine with that. After we determine which data from the courses is most useful, we can focus on making the process of collecting the data and merging it with a larger database of teacher and student activity.

Ratna

danmcguire Although I've investigated different szenarios, I haven't implemented one for real use. Therefore consider what follows as "thinking aloud".

So you have a couple of Moodle sites running, all off-line. The questions are: a) How to bring them to a central site, ideally in to another Moodle? b) What are the reports you could run at the central site? Is that right?

Assuming that is what you want, let's look at a) How to bring them to a central site, ideally in to another Moodle. The million dollar question is, can those school sites go on-line sporadically or does it have to be some sort of a sneaker-net where files are sent back?

Whatever the answer to the above is, I fear that some low-level access to the central site will be needed. Which excludes MoodleCloud and most of the shared-hosting offers. It has to be DIY, meaning a VPS.

P.S. Let's exclude the discussion on the "Cloud". People have fallen in love with that term and call everything the Cloud, causing a terminlogy havoc. Read e.g. Which hosting do You Recommend?.

Nicolas

Ratna People have fallen in love with that term and call everything the Cloud

As one says: "There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer." 😆

danmcguire

Ratna

Thank you, Ratna, Your 'thinking aloud' is allowed and very much appreciated anytime time in any discussion with me. To clarify: we have two remote Moodle sites (and more in the works) and one 'live' Moodle site. Where the 'live' Moodle site lives is not particularly important, I think. I've just got in on a MoodleCloud site that is provided for free by Moodle HQ. I could move it to another site that I pay for that I use that is hosted on BlueHost; I don't know where their servers are.

All of the teachers at the remote sites can access the internet periodically. The MoodleBoxes themselves are not connected to the internet. The current process is for a teacher to download a backup copy of the course to their laptops when they're connected to the MoodleBox. Then, they connect to the internet and send me that backup course file as an attachment to an email which I then upload to the 'live' site. The teachers could do that themselves, I'm just doing it for them for now to make their work a little easier.

Some of the teacher and student activities that we're considering to measure, record, and aggregate are:
Has the teacher has created a learning activity for students:
-Set up a book to read
-Created a forum with appropriate prompts for student discussions
-Created a quiz with meaningful questions for students to respond to a topic.
-Modified a math lesson
-Aligned a math lesson to appropriate standards
-Analyzed student work in a forum, quiz, assignment
-Modified a science lesson/project for students
-Generated a report of student achievement in a digital format that can be shared
-shared their experience and thoughts with another teacher or admin
- translated a quiz or assignment into the students’ mother tongue
-How much time have they spent doing any of the above?

Student activity might include:
-have they logged onto a MoodleBox site with a digital device
-Read a book posted on the course
-Responded to a discussion prompt
-Taken a quiz about a book, math, or science topic
-Replied to another student's post or question in a forum
-Done any of the above in their mother tongue
-Worked collaboratively with peers to produce a report ?
This list could and likely will be expanded. Our present question is where and how to start collecting the data that represents the above activities.

I hope you're enjoying your summer. Dan

Ratna

danmcguire Glad that my "thinking aloud" helps. It is no magic, thanks to our earlier communications.
;-)

From the information you provided, now we can go in to specific details:

On a) How to bring the data in the remote sites to a central site?, you have a working solution which has lot of manual interaction. Here is an idea on how to cut the e-mail part. Create a File system repository in the central site and give the remote teachers SSH access to it. Ask the remote teachers to upload their course backups using WinSCP, FileZilla or similar programs. When you want to restore them, the backups will be available in the File picker.

Thanks to the way Moodle set the file names of course backups, with time you will also have a nice history in the File system repository.

The down side is, it excludes MoodleCloud, they won't allow it. There may be shared hosting packages which would allow it. Otherwise you have to go for a VPS, which is more expensive. But in the long run, VPS gives you real DIY freedom.

On b) What are the reports you could run at the central site, I see that your "reports" are very much teacher-oriented. Have you looked at the two board tools in Moodle core, the Grader report and the Activity completion report?

They may not answer the list of questions you provided, but in the next iteration you can design the courses in such a way that those reports contain more of those answers.

danmcguire

Ratna Thanks, Ratna, the Grader report and the Activity completion report are great suggestions.

Ratna

danmcguire Yep, the term "report" could take one in the wrong direction. Indeed in my school days we used it to mean the report card. I think the "grade" is more a US term. But the "grader report" at least kept the term "report", so unmistable for the teacher. The confusion comes from the Enterprise, where the managers look for all sorts of beautiful dashboards with columns, clockfaces, waves, animations, etc. ultimately representing numbers but annonymous. The teachers are interested in the persons!

Anyway, that was off-track. The point here is, what the Moodle has already built in to its core. But a limitation you should keep in mind is that Moodle is strongly course-based. If you "merge" Moodle instances in to one by transfering the courses, it will be very difficult to get separate reports per satellite sites. Those schools have merged in to one!

This is really a Moodle discussion. Since the main application of MoodleBox is off-line Moodle sites, I hope, we are not off-topic.

Nicolas

Ratna This is really a Moodle discussion. Since the main application of MoodleBox is off-line Moodle sites, I hope, we are not off-topic.

No worries about this, but we'll get more traction and discussion on moodle.org for such a general topic about Moodle.

Ratna

Nicolas .. and attract more Moodlers!
:-)

More seriously, reports are in high demand, I see. This is from yesterday:
https://moodle.com/news/why-you-should-use-reporting-to-improve-your-learning-programs/

danmcguire

Ratna That article on Reports is very good. Thank you. Very helpful.

I'm happy to discuss on any forum. There doesn't seem to be a MoodleBox topic section, thought, on Moodle.org. We need a 'Teaching with MoodleBox and Moodle' some place.

Nicolas

danmcguire There doesn't seem to be a MoodleBox topic section, thought, on Moodle.org. We need a 'Teaching with MoodleBox and Moodle' some place.

As this is not specific to MoodleBox, it is not a problem. However, I think this is more an administrator or developer issue, and we need more a generic topic "Merge two or more Moodle instances".

danmcguire

Nicolas I think there is an aspect to this that is specific to MoodelBox. It is true that multiple Moodle instances of any kind might want to merge data, but when one of the instances is MoodleBox there are considerations that are different from instances where both are standard Moodle instances. I want to focus on solving the problem of collecting data from a MoodleBox instance(s) into a larger database that doesn't necessarily need to be a Moodle instance. A simple spreadsheet might be better.

And, the data I'm interested in collecting from MoodleBox is the data that represents an activity of either the teacher or students. Thus, the focus on teaching with MoodleBox. It might be useful to have data about the hardware or software operation collected, too, which I would put in a category for developers.

Ratna

danmcguire For that kind of flexibility one has to collect raw data at the central site and generate reports there. So the switch "Keep logs..." should be set.

Related to the topic there was an interesting discussion recently: Migrate users and passwords. It was about migrating from one DBMS to the other, but you'll can think of the "merging" here as a repeated migration.

Yes, generally speaking, the central site does not have to be Moodle. But I think, it is worth exploring its possibilities Moodle offers, becase writing your own application isn't going to be an easy task.

Talking of Moodle, the recent upgrades, 4.2?, got a push in report creation. Worth exploring them.

danmcguire

Thanks much for your engagement with this topic, Visvanath. The initial data I'm most interested in is - # of students in the course, # of 'books' (pdf files) created by the teacher in the course, # of quizzes of reading comprehension, # of quizzes of math problems completed by students, # of problems in the quizzes, # of forums related either to math or reading, # of posts by students, # of comments by teachers.

I'm thinking it would easiest to generate reports of the above at the remote site, export as a csv or spreadsheet, and then send that file to the main site which would then aggregate the data from similar reports.

Ratna

danmcguire Now I understand why you were talking of spread-sheets. If the reports are always the same it makes much sense to extract the data at the remote sites and sent to central place in a much aggregated format. The classic is the Ad-hoc database queries and the associated Custom SQL queries report.

The newer reporting features Moodle got are called Custom reports. Again we are at a Moodle topic. Better research the Analytics and reporting forum specially Learning analytics.

For quick orientation you can search that infamous video repository for short videos made at Moodle HQ like "Moodle LMS 4.1 Custom reports", "Moodle LMS 4.1 Gradebook", etc.
;-)