Minted - Moodle Integration with Enterprise Data

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Minted - Moodle Integration with Enterprise Data

• A JISC funded demonstrator project in the
  Toolkits and Demonstrators strand
• Carol Shergold and Paolo Oprandi
• University of Sussex

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Background to the Minted project

• Moodle already in use in our Life Science
  departments (LifeSci Interactive)
• Planning an institution-wide roll out
• Needed to link our enterprise database with
  Moodle to get accurate and updated information on
  courses, students, staff etc
• Keen to use a standard data format for ease of
  portability etc

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IMS-Enterprise

• IMS Enterprise (IMS-E)
• Person
• Group
• Membership
• IMS Enterprise Services (IMS-ES)
• Support for creating, reading, updating and
  deleting information for person, group and
  membership
• createGroup(groupid)

The service implementations typically expose
information held by a directory service (e.g.
OpenLDAP) or an MIS application (e.g. a student
records system) http//www.elframework.org/commo
n_services/person/scope_and_definition.html
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CETIS-ES Toolkit

• Written by Scott Wilson
• A toolkit to make it easier to write servers and
  clients that implement IMS Enterprise Services

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Aims

• Demonstrator project for CETIS-ES SDK
• Develop software of benefit to the community
• To integrate our enterprise database with Moodle
  in a scalable and secure way

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Getting started with the toolkit
Steep hill ahead!
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Getting started

• It took some time to get the minimal example
  running
• The learning curve ..
• Various versioning and application server issues
• Original distribution didnt have a sample
  client, so the only way to see what was happening
  was to use a TCP monitoring tool such as to
  inspect the messages
• Results
• Great support from Scott, collaborative working
  with JoinIn
• Blog and forum postings that would help potential
  new adopters
• Enhanced documentation for installation
• Scott worked on making toolkit run under Axis 1.3
  
• and on providing fuller installation examples

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Minted - test service
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REST-style approach
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Integrating Moodle Minted enrolment plugin
Introduction

• Concurrent Enterprise data
• which schools and departments exist
• which courses are running
• who are the teaching staff and the students
• which courses are Moodle-ized
• Standards available? IMS- E sig
• IMS Enterprise enrolment plugin developed at UCL
  - Dan Stowell

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Integrating Moodle Minted enrolment
pluginAdding new records
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Integrating Moodle Minted enrolment
pluginUpdating existing records
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Scaling Moodle Minted enrolment pluginExample
user
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Scaling Moodle Minted enrolment pluginExample
course
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Scaling Moodle Minted profile pluginDefault
course and user records
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Where we are now

• Both plugins are in use in our live system and
  working well
• In the process of getting the Minted plugins into
  core Moodle distribution
• Batch process rather than live look up
• Two way transaction - introducing XMarks

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XMarks background - the MLE
A shot from our MLE showing the assessments for a
given course - data from enterprise
database. Contributory or non-contributory
Staff use the MLE to enter marks and to
progress assessments through the Exams
System Students use the MLE to view their marks
and overall Course and Programme results
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XMarks background - the LMS

• Tutor sets up a new on-the-fly activity to
  provide formative feedback, e.g. MCQ
• Details of this activity and its marks are only
  visible in the LMS, but students are used to
  seeing all their activities and marks in the MLE
• Tutor sets up activity to implement an assessment
  that is already required for course
• The activity is visible in both the MLE and the
  LMS, although details may differ as it has been
  created twice.
• Marks are only visible in the LMS, until the
  tutor re-keys them into the MLE

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Summary

• Potential for confusion and even inaccuracies in
  the presentation of activity and marks data to
  students
• Duplication of effort by staff
• Data transfer method is required
• Hence Xmarks!

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A data model for Xmarks
Is there an existing marks/assessment data model?
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Scaling Moodle Minted profile pluginUser
defaults
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Scaling Moodle Minted profile pluginCourse
defaults
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Key functions for an assessment service

• getAssessmentList(courseid)
• addAssessment(param)
• editAssessment(param)
• deleteAssessment(param)

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Key functions for a marks service (a)

• getMarks(params)
• Return all student marks for all assessments
  within given course
• Return all student marks for given assessment
• Return marks for given student on all assessments
  within given course
• Etc
• getMarkProcessStatus(params)
• E.g. under-review, released-to-students,
  in-exam-system
• The process status will alter the set of legal
  operations on the data

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Key functions for a marks service (b)

• addMarks(params)
• Add one or more student marks to existing mark
  set
• Error if marks are added for student where they
  had already been supplied?
• editMarks(params)
• Change one or more student marks in existing mark
  set
• Error if marks are supplied for updating where no
  record already exists?
• deleteMarks(params)
• Delete marks for all students for given
  assessment
• Delete marks for specified students for given
  assessment
• Error if marks do not already exist?
• Error if marks are no longer in state where
  deletion is possible,e.g. committed to final mark
  within exam system?

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