Reference - Moodle Terminology

General Moodle Terminology

Moodle Activity

A Moodle activity is basically an assignment give to a student where the student receives a grade upon completion.  The Moodle "grade book" lists the students scores on all activities.

Moodle Course Organization

Moodle Course ID

Moodle Course ID is a unique value assigned to each course developed in Moodle.  Any actions triggered between the SIS and Moodle require matching on the Moodle Course ID.  In PEMS the Moodle Course ID is stored in the Curriculum table "Code" field.

Moodle Category

Courses are organized into categories in Moodle.  Moodle can perform various batch functions on all courses within a category.

Moodle Student Groups

Moodle Groups

In Moodle, Groups are used to break up groups of students enrolled in a course.  Moodle can enroll hundreds of students in one course, but the teacher would be overwhelmed to grade all the work.  Therefore Moodle provides the group option. When teachers and their students are enrolled in the same group, the teacher only sees their own students. In PEMS, Moodle groups are equivalent to brick-and-mortar sections, except they are virtual classroom sections.  In PEMS we do not use the term sections, we use Moodle's term of groups.  In Summary: 1) Moodle uses Groups to hide students enrolled in the same course from other teachers.  2) Both the teacher and the student have to be in the same group.  3) Groups MUST be defined for each and every course, Groups can not be defined at the system level.

Moodle Cohorts

AIn real life, a cohort is a group of students, and can also include teachers.  Cohorts are used for batch enrollment.  There is no use case for batch enrollment in the PEMS approach. However, cohorts can be used to keep trackset of students at a specific physicalgrade location,level. orAll groupsninth graders in 2023 form a set of students, as they move through the various grade levels, we refer to those 2024 ninth graders as a cohort. In Moodle a cohort is a set of students managed byand a third party 'teacher'teacher(s).  Cohorts are primarily used in Moodle for batch enrollment.  For the use case that all students in 4th grade should be enrolled in 4th grade math.  In this case a Moodle user would define a cohort of 4th graders, then assign the cohort to a specific course.  However, using cohorts for enrollment is not useful in PEMS because each student is following a unique program. The unique program is managed in the SIS.  In PEMS, all fourth graders are not enrolled in fourth grade math. However, cohorts are still useful for reporting.  So in PEMS, Moodle Cohorts are used to identify a set of students under the supervision of a particular teacher (proctor).  In this use case, students can be at any grade level since PEMS is designed for mixed grade-level student management.  Unfortunately, Moodle Cohorts can not be used to block a teachersteacher viewfrom seeing other student's work who are not in their own cohort. In summary 1) Moodle Cohorts are a set of students thatand their teachers (proctors)  2) the students in the set can be any grade level  3) Cohorts are notuseful 'theirs.for reporting 4) All teachers can see all students in any cohort.

 

Moodle Competency Tracking

Moodle Competencies

Moodle competencies are specified in the activity settings, internal to a Moodle course by the course creator. Each activity may be tagged with pre-defined competencies. When the student completes the activity, they earn the competency.  The competency list is created in the admin panel.

In the Moodle Competency record, the ID number field uniquely identifies the competency. This field is used for integration with the SIS for tracking competency completion.

Moodle Competency Frameworks

Moodle Competency Frameworks are defined in the admin panel of Moodle.  A framework is used only to organize the competencies and flow down settings.  A framework can not be assigned to a student, each competency must be added to a template, then that template assigned to a student.

Moodle Learning Plans

In Moodle, a student can be assigned a learning plan, which is a group of competencies that may span multiple courses.  The student can view their progress towards the learning plan in their profile. 

Moodle Learning Plan Templates

Moodle allows the admin to define Learning Plans, which are sets of competencies.  Learning Plan templates are use to assign learning plans t in bulk to students.  Templates may be assigned to a Cohort of students.