This Course Life Cycle (CLC) feature focusses on the Moodle plugins while the category structures is sorted in the separate feature TI2 - 2021/22 - Must Do - CLC - Category structure creation & category-level roles rollover.

We need to pick up where we left off and finalise a spec for Moodle Partners to develop for us.

Course rollover, course lifecycle tools information hub

Background

The overall aim of  the course life cycle/end of year is to deliver a tool or tools to modernise, digitise and automate end of course life cycle activities on any Moodle course. This activity will facilitate business change specifically in end of academic year processes creating time savings across all Moodle course users and Moodle support teams measuring hundreds of hours per year. 

• Automate course reset activities 
• Automated course archiving 
• Automate new course creation 
• Remove the requirement for a yearly second Moodle platform (Snapshot/LSA server) thus significantly reducing support, maintenance and dual running infrastructure. 
• Prevent accidental course administration errors associated with dual platform life cycle activities 
• Restructure Moodle's internal category structure to correctly match SITS and accommodate multiple years 
• Realign Moodle structure with SITS category structure to provide a basis for Moodle/SITS integration 
• Remove dual Moodle confusion and make student and staff user journeys simpler  
• Better facilitate short term “summer school” courses within the main Moodle platform 
• Support early Module enrolment plans by providing a Moodle platform that can be enrolled upon at any point in the year. 

In Scope:

• Design and Develop an integration with SITS to generate an up to date Category structure in Moodle. This would be a one-off, annual run.
• Design and Develop a tool to work in conjunction with the SITS category structure integration in order to replicate the category level roles from the previous academic year to the new one.
• Have smart logic, capable of identifying where a category has moved from/to so that where structures have changed, the roles are still carried through in the new structure.

Out of Scope:

This is not expected to go into service within the TI.

Timeless courses will be excluded from this development as they have no corresponding SITS record.

Acceptance Criteria to include

Overall Course Life Cycle Work Measures of Success

The MVP would be to complete: - 

• New Moodle category structure 
• Implementation of automation of the basic course reset requirement 
• Course copy and archiving process.  
• Automated course creation 
• Locked or restricted access to “Archived Courses” 

Success Criteria would include: -  

• Single Moodle Instance 

• Past, Present and Future courses all within one Moodle 
• Late Summer assessment activity and summer schools all within production Moodle 
• 2021/22 archive located within production Moodle 
• All 22/23 courses using a course end date (Mandatory field) 

• No replicated/split instance postgraduate courses 
• No Snapshot activities undertaken by CTP Product team 
• Reduction/removal of course request/creation support tickets 
• Time savings for Moodle course teams 
• Time savings for Digi-Ed support team 
• Reduced confusion for staff and students on course location and activities 

Success will be Measured by 

• Review and feedback from our stakeholder groups: 

• BA work with Moodle administrators and academics, focus groups etc 
• BA and LT engagement with FLT’s 
• Evaluation's Manager or Janina feedback from student groups 

• Measured reduction in support requests associated with end of course life cycle and course creation