Groups Management – Enabling Moodle to Work with Groups

Natively Managed in an External Curriculum Management System

OBJECTIVES/PURPOSE Simplify and streamline our group management process by enabling Moodle to work with information natively managed in our Curriculum Management System .

METHODS We built an API for our Curriculum Management System to receive requests and send responses between the two systems. This made it possible for the individual programs to communicate with one another directly and use each other's functions. From a user’s perspective, the API allows us to complete an action (retrieving learner groups) without leaving our Moodle site.

Student Groups and Faculty Group Leaders: Student Groups and Faculty Group Leaders are managed by using a custom enrollment plugin in Moodle. This plugin identifies groups and their leaders in the external Curriculum Management System then enrolls them into specific courses and groups in Moodle. Current Faculty: The API identifies faculty in our Curriculum Management System and since they need broader access, it assigns them the participant role at the Moodle category level using the Category Assignment tool.

As users are added to our Curriculum Management System in either the faculty role or when groups are updated there, they are automatically synced to Moodle without any further action on the part of course staff.

RATIONALE This poster will display how UCSF integrated Moodle with our Curriculum Management System (Ilios) to streamline and simplify group management.

PROBLEM STATEMENT Our Curriculum Management System maps and stores the what, how, where and who of our medical curriculum, creating individualized faculty and student calendars based on complex student and faculty groups for which the Curriculum Management System is the point of reference.

Moodle houses and provides the interactivity (e.g. quizzes, forums) for our curriculum which our Curriculum Management System does not. The Moodle activities and resources require data about our learner groups from our Curriculum Management System.

Formerly, our staff needed to manually recreate groups in Moodle based on those in our Curriculum Management System, a time-consuming, labor intensive and error prone process.

Student Groups and Faculty Group Leaders: Students Groups and their Group Leaders originate in our Curriculum Management System and need access to specific Moodle courses. They also need to be enrolled in analogous groups in Moodle. Current Faculty:

Current faculty also originate in our CMS and need participant access to a broader set of Moodle courses.

RESULTS Creating an API to share information between Moodle and our Curriculum Management System provides us with the following benefits: More automation and control, fewer errors, less redundant effort with fewer people involved, simplified workflow, and time savings.

AUTHORS: Valentina Bettencourt, Sascha Cohen, David Leonard - UCSF School of Medicine

Jason Hedrick, Jonathan Johnson, Carson Tam, Stefan Topfstedt, Brian Warling - UCSF Library