Using Moodle's cohorts / groups / parents with Joomdle

Hi.

I'm currently in the planning stage for a project that will use Joomdle.

The system will be used by a large organisation with users divided into teams. There will be team-specific areas in Joomla for team collaboration. On the Moodle side everyone from all the teams will be able to access any moodle course, and each team will have a user with a supervisor role who will have access to see things like the course completion stats for his team members.

What is the best way to set this up in in a Joomdle system?

It seems obvious to use Joomla's groups functionality and Moodle's cohorts and/or Moodle's Parent role feature. However I'm not sure whether Joomdle will allow these to be linked? Is it possible? Or is there some other way I can acheive what I'm wanting to do?

Thank you./

Joomdle has a corresponding feature for Parents that can be used by supervisors or hr managers. This is designed to work with Moodle's parent features and allows the parent / supervisor to purchase and assign courses to children / staff.

On the Joomla side, you did not mention if you are using any extensions to manage groups whether it be kunena for discussions or a social tool like EasySocial or Jomsocial and their groups features. Depending on how you plan to support the groups in Joomla, Joomdle may have specific integration features too.

You can look through the Wiki or best would be to install on a test environment and play around a little to become familiar with Joomdle.

Hi Chris. Thanks for the reply.

What I'm looking for is to make sure that the Moodle parent/child structure is mirrored within Joomla's groups, so that we don't have to maintain the same relationships in two different places.

This is my plan:

* In Joomla, we would use the Multi Usergroup Registration plugin* (or similar) to allow users to specify which team they belong to when they sign up, and for us to specify a password for each team.

* This would add the user to the relevant Joomla group for that team.

* Being in a team would give them access rights to the team-specific area in Joomla, and to all the courses in Moodle.

* Each team would have a supervisor user who would have admin rights to the team-specific area in Joomla and the permissions to see the course scores for his team members.

* Thus a supervisor would be in a higher-level Joomla group to his team members, and also be a parent to them all in Moodle.

* We don't want to maintain those relationships manually every time a new user joins -- the user should be able to sign up, specify the team they're in, and that should be enough to give them access to the right areas, and give their supervisor access to their scores.

We haven't made a decision yet on which Joomla plugins to use -- as you say, there are lots that can extend Joomla's group functionality. I think Joomla's standard grouping structure is sufficient for what we need though, so I don't know whether we will need any plugins. We're not planning to use forums or social networking features at all (the subject matter of the site doesn't lend itself to any of that kind of thing); the only relationship that matters is the supervisor one I described above.

I can't see anything in Joomdle that does what I'm looking for. Do you have any suggestions? It doesn't have to work exactly as described above, as long as it meets the goals of what the supervisors can do, and not having to manage the relationships manually (and certainly not in two places different).

Thanks again,


Simon C.

* To save you searching, the Multi Usergroup Registration plugin I mentioned earlier is here: extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extensi...ergroup-registration
It does exactly what I described; it allows users to pick a group when signing up. It doesn't extend Joomla's native groups feature in any way beyond that.

Hi again.

I'm still looking for help on this. Can anyone give me any more advice? Thank you!

Hi there,

Currently there is not a plugin which will add uses to courses automatically when they join a Joomla group - unless Antonio has slipped one in without me knowing I shall check to ensure.

Some things that could be considered are:
- to use a membership system such as payplans which when joining as a "member", you will get access to the courses and it can also add you to a Joomla group, kunena, etc.
- to use bundling of courses in the process so that a user gains access to many courses

I suspect that there would need to be some customisation done for you given that the typical process starts with a 'purchase' of something such as a course, a bundle of courses, or a membership. One work around might be to create a bundle of courses and let the user "buy" courses with a digital coupon if no payment is being made. This would allow you to move through the process. You could set up different bundles for different groups.

Of course the nicest way seems to be to build a plugin which integrates to the multi usergroup registration extension and then leverages the bundling concept and/or membership functionality that is in Joomdle already.

It would be best to have a simple process document with actions you expect users and managers to take to be sure.

Hi there,

I looked further into the apps for Payplans (you can visit the readybytes website for further details) to establish a feasible process flow:
- User visits your site in which he is directed to choose a Payplans membership type (based on your teams)
- Once the membership plan (this could be called your department names / teams if you wanted) is chosen, Payplans will add the user to the Joomla Group
www.readybytes.net/payplans/apps.html#/app/pp-jusertype
- Payplans will hook up with Joomdle to create the user in Moodle and add the user to the defined courses.
www.joomdle.com/download/category/23-payplans

This should do what you want without the need for the Multi User Group Registration Plugin

Hi Chris.

Thank you for the replies -- sorry it's taken a while for me to respond; I have been busy looking into your suggestions and trying stuff out.

I'm not sure that I've quite got what I need yet, but with your help I am a lot closer than I was, so I wanted to post a really really big thank you for the time you've taken to help out. I really appreciate it.

As I say, I need to do some more experimenting to get things how I want them, but thanks for helping me get this far.

Regards,

Simon C.