Inspired by Using Keywords Glossary feature for language "correction" by Joseph Rézeau I started dabbling in creating a block which shows all glossaries of the currently logged in user across all his/her courses. I will use this page for scribbling some ideas.
Joseph's wishlist
10 November 2009
What I really need is something which I have mentioned on several occasions in the Moodle forums, namely a "teacher" level, where a teacher would have his own repository of resources, to share between his own courses, but not with the other teachers' courses.
Sharing one Glossary in several courses
28 April 2009
Clare, you are not alone. The impossibility to share glossaries (and other resources) between courses is in my opinion one of the main weak points of Moodle. I'm afraid the answer to your query is - as it was back in 2005 - "You can't do it".
There have been in the past years a fair number of ventures to make Moodle resources shareable between courses, but those ventures often involve complicated workarounds and I have found none to be fully satisfactory. What is needed is a strong body of moodle users who do need this feature, are are vocal enough to make their voices heard, plus an institution (or group of institutions) with the manpower or money to contribute to the necessary development to make it happen. Maybe in moodle version 3.0...
Sharing Quizzes in 1.9
13 December 2008
The scenario you describe, in answer to Howard's suggestion, implies that one course has more than one teacher. I do appreciate that this situation may occur, so it should be taken into consideration, but I suggest that this is not the dominant situation. "Normally", one given course is taught by one teacher to several students. So, teacher Fred teaches courses A, B and C. He wants to share a certain number of the resources and activities created in course A with his own courses B and C. By "resources and activities" I mean not only quiz questions but also glossaries, files, etc. At the moment, the general architecture of Moodle does not allow me to do that, which means a lot of useless and boring duplication work.
Question categories in 1.9 - am I missing something
20 November 2008
I am one of those teachers who want to share their questions not with other teachers in the university moodle site but with ... myself, i.e. my other courses on that site. And this holds true not just of questions but of a number of other resources and activities, e.g. glossaries. For instance in each of my moodle courses I maintain a so-called "Grammar Glossary" which contains entries related to the most frequent mistakes my students make when writing their forum posts in English. Each time I add an entry in, e.g. Grammar Glossary in course A I have to remember to add (or export) that very same entry in my Grammar Glossaries in courses B, C, D, etc. Why can't I have just one "Grammar Glossary" belonging to Teacher JR, which would be automatically shared between all courses taught by Teacher JR? Same for questions.
- Teacher level category
The "category" concept is no use here, since the courses I teach are spread over various "course categories" in our moodle site. I have said it and will say it again, the Moodle system is missing a very important level, the "teacher level". And yet, this level seems to exist in a way, when I import stuff from one course to the other, I can view a list of "all the course where I teach": but this only enables me to import stuff from one course to the other, NOT to dynamically SHARE resources and activities between my own courses, hence the boring duplicate operations.
Oh, and the metacourse concept doesn't help either... It is too cumbersome and does not do what I need.
I can see other teacher's categories
13 June 2006
Some people seem to think publishing a category means making it available for quizzes in their own course. In fact, it means publishing a category all over the site for all the teachers to see and to use.
One option I would very much like to see in Moodle is for a teacher to be able to "publish" question categories in order to share them within all of their own courses, not a whole Moodle site. This makes sense a) when you teach a number of related courses where you would like to avoid replication of questions and b) when you work in a large institution where "publishing" categories for the whole institution site might mean hundreds of items among which it would be hard to find your own categories, especially if each teacher uses their own naming system for categories.
Structure for courses - can a module belong to more than one course?
14 October 2005
Hi Tim,
Like you (and probably many others) I use Moodle to teach a number of classes which share a certain amount of "material". The more I use Moodle, the more I am finding it tedious and really a waste of time and storage space to have to duplicate activities and resources throught my courses.
Present situation
At the moment we have a number of solutions for sharing materials betwwen courses & students, none of which really answers our problem. Let me review them.
Meta courses
This answers some administrative problems by facilitating enrollment of a number of "classes" following different courses into a common meta course. However, it does not answer the question of automatically enrolling the students constituting a "class" into a large number of courses. For this, using the meta course option "in reverse" has been suggested here.
Groups
At the moment, the group option is not very useful for our problem, because it is not possible to allocate resources and activities to one particular group within a course, except forum discussions. There is also the question of enrollment, which would not work.
Quiz questions "publishing"
When creating quiz questions, a teacher is given the option of publishing those site-wide. This option would be useful to me if I could publish my questions not site-wide but teacher-wide. And quizzes themselves cannot be "published" or shared, which is what most people want.
A new, resource-oriented Moodle system
What would fit my needs - and maybe the needs of those teachers in the same situation - is a personal "teacher storage space" on my institution's Moodle site, where I could store the material I use in more than one course: media data (images, audio files, etc.); quizzes (and individual quiz questions); glossary (and glossary entries) etc.
This "storage space" should be accessible by one teacher (me); it might have options for sharing all or some of its directories/subdirectories with other teachers.
Let me take some concrete examples of how such a "resource-oriented system" would work. NOTE:- I am using the present tense, as if this were for real.
Examples
On my institution's Moodle site there is a Moodledata directory called \rezeau to which I have access.
Admin creates my Courses A, B, C.
In Course A I have a "Glossary of Art Terms". The entries, the links to images in some entries, are in fact stored in a \rezeau\glossaries database; the images are stored either in \rezeau\images (where I would store images used throughout my courses) or, more specifically in a \rezeau\glossaries\image directory.
In Course B I have a "Glossary of Art History & Archaeology Terms". Some of the entries are the same as the ones in the Course A Glossary, some are different, but all have beeen entered in my \rezeau\glossaries database. This means there is no duplication of resources, just links.
In Courses A, B and C I have exactly the same Quiz. This Quiz is made of questions stored in my \rezeau\quiz\questions\ database, and the Quiz itself is stored in my \rezeau\quiz\, at least the parts which can be common to all my courses. There would still remain a number of Quiz parameters proper to each course, such as date availability, score tracking, etc.
In Courses A, B and C, I have web page resources which have slightly different text versions but point to the same image files. The image links point to the same images, stored in \rezeau\images
etc.
In order to achieve what is described above, a number of teachers use Moodle only as a "front end" for their courses: they have one or several Moodle "courses" on a site, where their students are enrolled by admin or self-enrolled; they may or may not use the forums; the essential part of their course material consists in fact of various resources (HTML pages, Flash files, etc.) which reside on a totally different website, very often their own personal site. That they have to resort to such extreme "externalization" of their course resources is a reflection of the lack of a proper facility in Moodle, such as I have detailed above.
I am well aware that what I am advocating here entails radical changes in the overall structure of Moodle. Or maybe not: perhaps some genius can come up with a simple solution which would exactly answer my wish-list at the cost of minimum changes in a future version of Moodle. For instance, the new database module (forthcoming in 1.6) might solve all or some of the problems mentioned. Who knows?
I hope that the point of view expressed above, which was triggered both by personal "on-the-ground" involvement and questions and queries expressed on the Moodle forums will gather some support and lead to an even better Moodle in the near future.wink
Joseph
Follow up
Some more notes at Frank Ralf/Glossary list2, e.g. useful Moodle functions etc.
