What steps to merge several Moodle instances?

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.
;-)