Cohorts are collections of users in the Moodle system. The obvious cohorts are “all students”, “all staff”, “class reps” and perhaps other generic cohorts. This will allow enrolment of all students on global courses e.g. induction. For course enrolment the system we aim to use is much simpler than the current unit based enrolment method. The principal of the new structure is that if a student is enrolled on a course e.g. DACC, they will be added to the “All…

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PROPOSED MOODLE SITE STRUCTURE Objective The new LearnNet Moodle version 3.9 is being laid out by Curriculum Area and Course (programme) rather than the old unit based method. We are moving away from the current, totally automated approach as this has caused confusion and led to the implementation of countless workarounds. Detailed information about the why the current unit based approach is difficult to maintain can be found here. Solution The proposed structure is as follows. All courses are contained…

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For information about the 2020/1 proposed course layout please read this blog post. At the moment we create a Moodle “course” for every taught unit. This leads to thousands of Moodle “courses” being created which may or may not be used. Within each unit we create Moodle “groups” which separate students into separate “instances” of their course. An example: DACC (HND Accounting). The following units would be created automatically: F7J735: Business Culture and Strategy F82H35: Management Accounting for Planning and…

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I had a bit of an issue with an Ubuntu box used for digital signage where I need the machine to come up after a restart, automatically log in a user, then launch a full screen web page in Chrome. I initially added a shell script which launched Chrome as part of the user session. Unfortunately, this did not allow enough time for a network connection to be made.  I tried adding a sleep 20 to the script but all…

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There’s probably a far better way of managing your Subversion working copies but I find this command is very useful. I often diff two directories with the diff -wbur command This produces a lot of output if there are many changes (pages of it). To limit the output to the lines in the output which point out the changed files I would do: diff -wbur /var/www/moodleupgrade/mod/vqpack/ svntrunks/moodle3modstrunk/mod/vqpack/ | grep diff This produces an output like : diff -wbur /var/www/moodleupgrade/mod/vqpack/view.php svntrunks/moodle3modstrunk/mod/vqpack/view.php…

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I have renamed a Moodle module I’m writing from mod_dumgalinduction to mod_dumgalchecklist because it seems to have more use beyond the original idea (move the student induction checklist off the paper form). To search and replace all of the text within the php files is quite easy: I renamed the lang file from dumgalinduction.php to dumgalchecklist.php manually. I always get in a muddle changing the names of the files in the backup folder so I used this rename command to…

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I need to append the contents of a text file to a string in php line by line. awk and sed are very useful for such things. Here is the content of the file. It’s a fairly standard bit of bootstrap HTML. I need to replace all of the ” characters with ‘, then start each line with $string.=” and end each line with \n”; Cat divs.txt simply prints the content of the file. This is piped into the sed…

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I often have more than one zip file in a directory to unzip – usually Moodle modules or the like. e.g. To unzip all of the mods into their respective folders in one line:  

It’s really inconvenient to continually enter your password when ssh’ing among internal servers. Especially if your password is long. I have set up password-less login on some of our linux servers using this excellent guide. I had already set up a private/public key pair on my mac in the .ssh folder in my /Users/ folder: It’s necessary to send your public key to the server you intend to log into. The provided command does not work because the hidden directory…

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I have recently encountered a problem loading BLOBs from SQL server 2012. Until moving to PHP 7.x we previously used the mssql libraries. Now we are using the dblib driver in PDO the php_mssql libraries are gone for good. It appeared that, once again, files were being truncated to 60Kb (an old problem). It’s not clear why this started to break again. No new packages have been installed. Using php_mssql it was possible to: These ini_set statements don’t have any…

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