Driving Moodle Lancastrian Way: automation using student information

Like all higher education institutions, Lancaster University has a Student Information System (LUSI) used by Student Registry and departmental offices. LUSI contains information about all modules, staff, students, enrolments, credit bearing assessments, and timetabling information on lectures and seminars for each academic year. We have developed a Moodle enrolment plugin that automates large proportion of administrative work in Moodle by syncing it with a web service provided by LUSI. This integration allows us to automatically control course creation and on-going updates to course categories, courses, enrolments and roles, groups and groupings, cohorts, summative (credit bearing) assignments (both standard assignments and turnitin). Each submission to an assignment will also write back to LUSI so departmental staff can run submission reports in the same system as they manage extensions, lates, intercalations etc. This integration enables faculty based learning technologists and course administrators to use their time more efficiently by eliminating necessity of doing routine tasks. The bonus features of our integration solution is automated course content roll-over for next academic year and somewhat special courses for postgraduate appraisals and applicants to PG programmes.Read less