Faculty Committees Notes from Moodle Transition Group Meetings

 E-reserves:

• Evaluating options with Librarians, ADCs, and faculty
• Music e-reserves system
• Can link to print e-reserves in the Library and course/subject guides.

Course rosters:

• easy to give librarians, ADCs, etc. access to course rosters
• student photos are already there
• Give them access by default and allow faculty to remove them if so desired or place the onus on faculty to add them explicitly?
• Is there a need for class listservs?

Syllabus (selectively exposing course activities and content)

•  Any element (resource, activity) in a Moodle course can either be exposed or restricted.

** Is there a way to my default expose the syllabus, but not other content?

David's Comments below:

• ereserves
  • complex permission issues: many types of users can create ereserves for courses. Who can view the
    • data integration with videofurnace
    • data integration with print reserves
    • data integration with Aleph (Library catalog)
• course rosters - complex access rules going on with these.
  • Many kinds of support staff can get at them.
  • Some kinds of support staff can use them to send mass emails to the students, without getting responses back (ie ADC's sending emails on behalf of faculty).
  • faculty and staff use them to see which students dropped the course. Students can't see this.
  • Faculty and Staff can see all student photos
  • students only see the photos of the classmates who choose to allow it (almost all do).
  • Data export stuff for faculty grading tools.
  • Data integration with listserve
• syllabus (really more an issue of policy/strategy which goes something like this: admission/others would like as many faculty syllabus available publicly as possible, for many reasons including search, public course content, etc. Many faculty are ok with this, so long as it requires little/no effort on their part. Some faculty are opposed to public syllabi, and don't want to have to do anything to make sure their syllabus is not public).
• Portal and data integration
  • which is the real portal? Do we want to start doing a bunch of data integration work on moodle, or do we want to continue extending the data integration work happening on the myamherst page
    • If the former, lets discuss the issues:
      • not everyone has moodle - even if we choose moodle, we still have to do myamherst
      • there are more sources of data that need to go onto the portal than their are sources of data from moodle (I think?)
    • If the latter:
      • would we be stuck with two portals, the moodle one and the myamherst one, no matter what we choose?
• Calendaring - at present the college has:
  • EMS Calendar (room scheduling for many but not all rooms)
  • UNL Calendar (events publication)
  • CMS calendars, w/ data integration for things like course times, holidays, etc.
  • Soon we'll also have Moodle calendars, yes? This problem is then similar to the portal problem, with the same set of questions (data intgration? Which way? More sources of calendar data outside of Moodle than in it, (again, I think? Needs research) We're presumably stuck with CMS calendars no matter what meaning maybe we're stuck maintaining multiple datasets? Ideally a user has to only look at one calendar to see all their 'stuff')
• Gradebook
• Quiz engine
• Webform/data collection (course evaluations for example)
• Search: right now the college site's indexer respects permission of searchers: if you search, you can find all materials that apply to you, including materials locked up in course sites. Can we do this in moodle? Using our existing infrastructure? If not, how do we handle this? Write extensions to the indexing stuff Anita has written to handle moodle? Or abandon this? If so, some sort of community conversation or at least communication about it seems necessary.
• Public course materials - broadly similar to the syllabus issue.