I am fairly new to Moodle. I want to know if I can use Moodle for multiple Branches of a School. Say School A has different Branches A', A" .. Can we use the same Moodle install for all of them ?
I read online in forums they said we might want to have different installs for different Branches ? But I think that will be overkill. Can I not directly add a Branch Name to the login Form and show a person only his Branch's data ?
With the utmost respect, it sounds like you don't 'get' how Moodle is structured so I would suggest at the first instance that you seek assistance from a Moodle Partner, and many of them will be happy to do a free consultation, if that's any consolation.
Now to address your question.
The short answer is yes. Moodle can indeed support 'branches' as you put it.
There's three ways you can do this. The first two are relatively straight forward. The third is more technical.
Method 1. You can have a single Moodle site with each course being duplicated. So you would have courses like so:
Maths Category
Maths 101 (New Jersey)
Maths 101 (New York)
English Category
English 101 (New Jersey)
English 101 (New York)
This method is clean as it's simple to set up, but it's ridiculously high maintenance as you'll need to keep both courses up to date. Any updates will need to be applied to both courses. This is OK when you have two separate teachers that are precious about their content.
Method 2. You can have a single Moodle site, and one Moodle course per course taught at both schools, but have 2 groups in each course.
Read more about Moodle groups here: https://docs.moodle.org/23/en/Groups
This means you have one course, you make your changes once, all students will see the same thing, but the two classes will be dealt with individually in terms of learning records and collaboration.
Method 3. You can install multiple instances of Moodle on the same server. If you would like to consider this option, please contact a Moodle partner who will be able to walk you through the process - as I would suggest it's not something you can DIY.
Related
Background
We are a B2B company with no in-house developers. We're current outsourcing all our development work to a small software company. They've built their own custom CMS, which we are using.
At the moment, we're in a redesign phase where a new website is being build by this same software company, again tailored to work with their custom build CMS.
At the same time, we are planning to have a webshop, which is going to be built by a different company, a big E-Commerce software company.
What we need
In the end it should be one website, on the same domain. Where content and commerce should go hand in hand. Everything should be seamlessly integrated with each other, for example the search function (they both offer their own search engine), content and products.
Wouldn't it make more sense to let one company build everything instead of two different companies? What are plus or downsides to work with one or two companies in this case? Where could it go wrong?
I'm a bit scared when we work with two partners, that the total cost of ownership is going to rise to the moon. That it will bring a lot of inefficiencies with it and we're hindered when it comes to further scaling.
P.S. I'm not a final decision maker within this company, but I'm looking for input in order to change the current plan (which is working with two partners).
An interesting scenario that you are in here.
Wouldn't it make more sense to let one company build everything instead of two different companies?
Based on your description there is nothing in this that is particularly out of the ordinary. A website for your company with an online shop. There is no good reason why you need two contractors. What I mean here, is that there is no reason why one company cannot provide the expertise to deliver both parts. Adding a second company / contractor will add more complexity to the situation and therefore breaks the generally good rule of keep it simple. (More on this later).
What are plus or downsides to work with one or two companies in this case?
The positive of working with two companies is that you can get experts in the different areas. For example if company A is an expert in one part of the solution and company B is an expert in another you get the combined expertise. However, in this case there doesn't seem to be a need for this.
Where could it go wrong?
This is very much the downside of having two companies working on this. The two companies will need to work together to provide the solution. This is likely to require some management from you (or your company) which you correctly identify the cost of ownership can significantly increase. You run the risk of both of your contractors pointing the finger at each other when things go wrong.
I would strongly recommend at least considering using a single company for the whole project delivering a combined website and online shop.
In Moodle, I can see the following roles - Student and Manager. I have created 2 managers and 5 students. Is there a way to assign 3 students to 1 manager so that whenever these 2 students send any requests for approval, it will be shown only to their respective Manager?
Groups may do the trick or get you close, especially if aiming to launch only a couple unique courses or activities across multiple managers:
https://docs.moodle.org/34/en/Groups
https://docs.moodle.org/34/en/Groups_FAQ
Thinking of "managers" as "teachers" and and "employees" as "students", you could setup groups so that each has a manager with employees, and you'd enable certain separations between teams of managers/employees.
As gnuwings mentioned, there are definitely limitations, for example, each Moodle activity (like a quiz, assignment, etc.) can implement groups differently, so usefulness likely will depend on your goals.
Cohorts are another option; these work across a site, but there are also limitations. Have found over time when cohorts are best, customization to accomplish course-specific quiz/assignment/grading/reporting activities by cohort is common.
Good luck on it!
No such feature currently available in Moodle. Custom development is needed.
On https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/ what data type should I use for an online course (such as https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/)?
If I chose the closest, say Book Reviews, will Google think my online course is a book review instead?
The types Course and CourseInstance are currently in the pending extension (discussion about the terms), and they will likely be published (i.e., moved to core) in the next Schema.org release (3.2).
If you don’t want to wait, you could use EducationEvent for specific course instances, and CreativeWork for the creative work behind the course.
Here is the doku for courses from Google.
I'm currently designing my very first Website for a small business Intranet (5 pages). Can anyone recommend the best way to manage content for the Company News section? I don't really want to get involved in day to day content updates so something that would be simple for the Marketing guy to create and upload a simple news article, perhaps created in MS Word, lets assume the author has no html skills.
I've read about Content Management systems but,
A. I won't get any funding for purchase and
B. Think it's a bit overkill for a small 5 page internal website.
It's been an unexpected hurdle in my plans, for something that I'd assumed would be a fairly common functionality I can't seem to find any definitive articles to suit my needs.
I'm open to suggestions (even if it's confirmation that a CMS is the only way to go).
Your requirements are : small site, no budget and the need for it to be easy for the marketing guy to upload a news item.
My recommendation would be to go with an all in one CMS e.g wordpress which has the kind of functionality you're talking about out of the box.
My guess is this organisation is just getting into "intranets" so something quick and simple that can be used to justify expenditure if value is returned is the key. Perhaps look at a plugin that automatically emails a summary of the blog posts to all employees once a week would be useful ?
There are many options and you can use any one of these:
Joomla
SilverStripe CMS
ModX
Cushy CMS
Frog CMS
Drupal
Additional in what Mr. Mckinnon said, you must keep in mind that if you don't want to get involved in daily updates of the people who is going to use the platform, you should consider the following:
What kind of data you want to be displayed
Who can view/modify that data
Who can create/remove data
How you will be organizing all that data
Your intranet should not be limited to display or create data, eventually all that data can turn into a beautiful Knowledge Base (KB) for your company that eventually your coworkers can share their solutions to common and rare problems that company can present eventually. This KB is amazing and time-saving, it is recommended to start it as soon as possible, so newcomers to your Company have access to it and see the most common issues and they can enter into production asap (we all know time is a luxury in every company regarding size).
Just keep in mind too, that all that knowledge and data is beyond valuable to you and your coworkers, so you should also consider some additional login credentials so your Company System Administrator can manage those credentials and also eventual audit for unauthorized access (if applicable).
I hope this helps from the administrative point of view
This is pretty wide question, but I'm hoping to get a push in the right direction (technologies and methodology).
Ok, I have an iphone app (which I am developing) that works with a web service (c#) through http requests. The web service connects to the underlying database, extracts the necessary data depending on the request and feeds it back to the application.
Now, I need to implement a search system in the app. The user searches for some words, and I need to provide the most relevant results. The search must be performed on different tables in the database. Each table can be searched in a number of columns. For example, when searching through the people table I need to search in the first name, lastname, company, and other fields. Other tables have other important columns.
I have so many questions that I don't even know where to start.
How do I make my sql queries to make the search, but still be fast enough. Do I need to make some extra tables with indexed content somehow?
How should I add relevance factor to the results so I can ultimately filter only the most relevant results? For example, if an user searches for Smith, maybe there is a person named Smith or even a Company. They should be displayed before any other content that can have smith in the description.
I know the question is a little vague/wide but I can explain more if somebody desires.
Thank you
This kind of depends on which language/rdbms you are using on your server. You might checkout various DB search solutions like Sphinx which will do all of that indexing for you and provide a simple Search API. Sphinx for example allows you to prioritize columns, define character mappings (ß->s, ä->a) etc.
In the end I have decided to use Lucene. It's a wonderful piece of technology and even if I had some doubts in the beginning, after reading 3/4 of the book called "Lucene in Action" it was clear to me that it had everything I needed (and much more).
I know it's not a fully-functional searching system (with all the elements needed), but merely a library handling the core of a search system. It will need some work to integrate it with my application/webservice/database. I will let you know how it goes :)
Thanks for your input!