Here’s a plugin that allows you to set a max enrollment number for a course.  It’s a way to limit the number of total students who can self-enroll in your course.  According to the entry, once extracted/installed:

This setting specifies the maximum number of students that are allowed to be enrolled on the course. The number of available places will be displayed when a student tries to enroll on a course. When the number of students on a course reaches the maximum limit, no student will be able to enroll on a course (although an administrator will be able to assign a student). Note that if the maximum number of students is zero, there is no limit.

A few use-case scenarios for this cool tool from available in the Moodle addons repository [link: http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=1241].

1. If you’re selling courses it’s a great way to ensure that your course isn’t overbooked
2. You could use this feature to allow students to signup for their own courses in a high school setting, each course having the max enrollments based on the room and becoming unavailable once capacity is reached
3. If you’re using Moodle to let participants register for a face-to-face event in advance you can control the number of participants who can sign up

View the whole resources (full size) at http://www.synergy-learning.com/blog/moodle/the-moodle-2-1-administration-map/

Moodle Flavours, which was one of the Google Summer of Code projects for 2011 by David Monllaó has just been released.  This is a pretty cool tool for managing multiple Moodle sites and sharing the settings between them through an import/export process.

According to the documentation page,

With this plugin Moodle Administrators will be able to create a flavour from their installation, selecting which settings, plugins and language packs will be packaged into a compressed file. They can then, share the package with the Moodle community, store it as a backup or use it to replicate the flavour to other installations they manages. It could also be useful for administrators with little Moodle experienced, allowing them to explore Moodle settings and setup recommended by others.

One cool advantage of this tool would be replicating the specific settings and administration settings that make a Moodle ready for self-enrollment or to sell courses.  It’s easily replicable and share-able between sites saving time and effort for the Admin.

Learn more at http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_flavours.

For information on the other two SCORM related projects that took place this GSOC session: http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/GSOC/2011

David was nice enough to answer a few questions about his experience with Moodle development and Flavours so far.  You can check out the interview Q&A below. It’s always great to get a peek behind the scenes of a cool project.

1. Where/when did you start Moodle development?
I began working on Moodle when I was hired at the Educational Resource Service (SRE) of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Catalonia (Spain), where I’m still working; it was 2006 and they were using Moodle version 1.5.4; since then Moodle has changed a lot and even more with the 2.0 release, we the developers are going to have fun migrating code.

2. Where did the Flavours idea come from?
It came from a 2009 GSOC idea called “XML administration settings export/import”, I thought that it was a good idea but if we add other stuff like modules or themes it becomes a powerful tool to create Moodle distributions, like GNU/Linux: the linux kernel and the GNU tools are common, but it’s not the same to use backtrack than edubuntu, it depends on the use (universities, language teaching, as any other CMS… more examples on http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Moodle_flavours#Examples) Another point, Moodle has grown a lot and it could be used for different purposes, a newbie administrator will probably get lost with all the possibilities it brings, with flavours that barrier does not exists. About the “flavours” name, is the result of a summer with Maven & appfuse, and frankly, because I love to eat. There is another cooking reference on the project: an ingredient, is one of the flavours components, a language pack, a theme…

3. What other projects would you like to work on?
In September I will start my end of degree capstone and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to work on something that will end in up in a drawer so I am looking for projects that will meet a demand/need, I’ve got proposals but I haven’t decided anything… One attractive idea is the technology used by the real-time collaborative assignment to synchronize data between users, I don’t know about other open sourced technologies like that to compare, but there are a lot of possible uses.

4. What would you like to see Moodle accomplish in the next year, decade?
I hope that this and the next year will consolidate Moodle 2.0 as the real HEAD version for users, and for the next decade I would like to see Moodle eating the lunch of all the non open source VLEs

Thanks, David!

A Moodle that needs zero storage space.

“Wait, what?” you might ask.  Imagine if all of your files for your Moodle classroom were hosted in the cloud, but accessible from any computer on which the Dropbox desktop client was installed and synced.  Need to update your PPT presentation, Word document or replace an out of date PDF?  No problem, just modify the copy in your Dropbox folder and voila: instantly updated on your Moodle wherever linked as well.

Benefits:

• Easy to setup
• Auto syncing
• Easy to access files
• No need to edit resources over and over as files are updated

That said, there is one major downside to the simplest configuration of the Dropbox repository as described in the perfect intro video by Mary Cooch (@Moodlefairy) [video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V221JLCywWs] which is embedded below and in the Moodle docs online [http://docs.moodle.org/en/Dropbox].  The Dropbox file repository works great as long as every editing teacher has access to the same Dropbox username and password.  So if I’m the administrator I can setup the Dropbox API Secret and Key (as highlighted in the video) but the account in which that Dropbox App is created (following the directions of the video) must be used to access the Dropbox course files by every other user as well.

It’s not make or break situation really…Think of it as your intranet folders, online.  A savvy administrator might just create a folder for each teacher using both Dropbox and Moodle and share those individual folders with the teachers’ personal Dropbox account (solving any synch issues, etc.).  But there is a measure of honor code required to ensure that Teacher A doesn’t delete or edit Teacher B’s files on the Dropbox.

The end result might look something like this within the Moodle file picker:

Better?  It might be.

To try it out ourself I encourage you to watch the video by Mary Cooch below:

Last week we looked at the reports and logs in Moodle as a way to find out how your courses are being used. I wanted to extend the idea slightly this week by looking at Google Analytics. Analytics is a free tool that you can add to any website to help track in a huge amount of detail what your visitors are doing. I use it on this blog, it’s on our school website, and we use it on Moodle too.

You can find out more about Analytics as a product and set yourself up an account here. Technically very straight forward if you are the administrator for you Moodle site- it just requires you to put some hidden code into your theme header. What I wanted to do is share a few of the things you can get from it that we can’t from the Moodle logs.

Dashboard

Our Moodle Dashboard

On logging in to Analytics you are presented with your dashboard. It contains a set of graphs and information as a general overview of your site. You can see some pretty clear patterns from this immediately, and the average time on site is a really interesting statistic for Moodle admins.

You can drill down through all the links here, including the graph. For example, drilling down through the average time information I can see that users are spending much more time on the site during evenings and weekends than they do during the school day. More interestingly, I can see time on site is decreasing as the term goes on. This is why I really like this tool- I’ve seen a pattern, I can now compare it to this time last year, then look at what is happening in the school to find out why, and finally do something about it.

Visitors

Mobile usage in the last week

As you would expect this section deals with people on your site. Number of visits, visitors, average page views, etc. All pretty simple, and not really beyond the scope of the Moodle logs.

But, further down the links on the left you can get some other really interesting data. You can overlay your information on a map, interesting if your users come from a wide range of locations. The tools that really interest me though are the ones that track what browser and Internet connection speed your users have, and also the page that details the mobile devices being used.

Traffic Sources

Possibly not the most important in education, but traffic sources deals with where you visitors came from to get to your site. Interesting for us that even though we have Moodle links everywhere on school homepages/etc 40% of our visitors still come from Google.

Content

The content section somewhat overlaps the reports in Moodle, but you can use this section to get information about your most popular pages, how visitors get in, and where they go.

The ease in which you can view data over a timeline is a real strength of Analytics for viewing content. For example, I can look at the popularity of our GCSE courses for the last year to see just how the students were using them for revision.

Other Features

The last thing I want to mention about Analytics is it has the ability to generate reports for you and then email them on. With a little bit of playing you can get it to do all the work for you, and once a week get a nice little PDF explaining the movement in key pieces of data you’re interested in.

Google Analytics is a hugely powerful tool, this post barely scratches the surface. If you’re a Moodle admin I would recommend getting it installed and giving it a go, surprisingly easy to lose quite a lot of time to playing with this!

In previous Moodle releases, site filters allow the embedding of content, auto-linking of terms and resource names, and more advanced math notation, but are set at the site level.  So turning ‘Database Auto-linking’ on for example would institute the change site-wide (potentially causing some strife for users that do not want glossary items auto-linking in quizzes or lessons.

To fix this, in Moodle 2.0, Filters have been moved to the course level and editing teachers can easily control which filters are on or off.  To access this, click “Settings” when logged in.

Below you’ll see the various options that are available on a standard install (as seen at http://qa.moodle.net):

As you may recall, even if filters are turned on (at the course level in 2.0 or at the site level in previous versions) there is a manual override for text by using the “prevent auto-linking” button in the text editor (this is available with Moodle 2.0′s new html editor as well)

For more information check out

• Moodle 2.0 First Look by Mary Cooch
• http://docs.moodle.org/en/Filters
• Try it out at http://qa.moodle.net

It’s a short survey, but from it we hope that Moodle administrators will help us to answer the important evaluative questions like:

• How much does Moodle cost per student?
• what are the hardware costs for Moodle?
• how many staff members should we have ready to support/administrate Moodle?

MoodleNews is conducting this survey in collaboration with Michael Fisher a graduate student at the Oregon Institute of Technology. All results will be shared publicly once the survey has ended on 8/31 (two weeks).

If you could send the survey link onto any Moodle administrators you know, please do!  Here’s the link: http://goo.gl/F3ly

Here’s a direct link to the video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1G5R13iqUU

Check out Moodletuts.com for more great content.

If you’ve never created a course from the Administrator view or embedded video this is a quick and easy tutorial that can illustrate how.

You might also want to check out:

• @Moodletuts on Twitter
• @Moodletuts on Screenr
• http://moodletuts.com/