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.

1. Driving Moodle the Lancastrian
Way
Ruslan Kabalin
Philip Tubman

2. Institutional VLE (challenges)
• Lots of courses!
• Not taught how it is recorded
– 1 course for 2 ‘modules’ (co-teaching)
– 1 course taught multiple times in a year (‘cohorts’)
• Use of Moodle for
– Departmental pages
– Career pages
– Study advice pages
– Library skills pages
– Fire Safety pages
– etc.
• Changing enrolments
• e-submission/ e-marking

3. Additional challenges
• All courses available during entire time at
Lancaster
• PhD appraisal system
• Postgraduate admissions portal

4. Principles
• Moodle does not make up the rules; the student
information data (LUSI) is king (queen?)
• Moodle will never display official grades to
students (related to above – the student portal/
interactive transcript does this)
• Departments can control their ‘VLE destiny’ (how
many, when do students get access, whether to
copy content forward…)
• E-submissions will be recorded and time-stamped
in student information system
• Naming convention is enforced

5. What is LUSI?
• Homegrown student info system
– Data owned by registry
– System owned by ISS
• Managed in departments
• Operated using LUSI Desktop (Windows VB
client)

6. Data in LUSI
• Modules
• Staff
• Enrolments
• Assessments
• Time tabling
• Current year, past and future
• PGR appraisals

7. Let’s look at some pictures

12. Moodle
• Introduced as Pilot in 2011 to replace buggy
existing VLE
• Live since 2012
• HA infrastructure
• Packaged with more than 20 plugins
• Mahara integration
• Contributions to core

13. Some stats
• Up to 350 simultaneous users at peak time
• 3700+ unique logins per day
• 4938 courses (4528 automatically created)
• 36K active users

14. LUSI Integration
• Intermediate database and sync scripts
• Enrolment plugin that syncs Moodle
• Assignments submission information synced
back to registry

15. How we sync
• Only API communication with LUSI
• XML::SAX for parsing large data on the fly
• Intermediate DB on PostgreSQL
DB
API
LUSI
Webservice
Sync
Script
Moodle
/enrol/lusi
/local/luassignsync

16. Intermediate Database

17. Moodle comes to play
• Enrolment plugin
– Uses intermediate database
– Uses idnumber filed as identifier
– Syncing various things
• Categories
• Courses
• Cohorts
• Enrolments
• Groups and groupings
• Assessments (assignments)

18. Moodle comes to play

19. Categories syncing
• Builds and maintains category tree for 5 years
– Changes visibility
– Updates category names
– Moves category items
– Deletes category items
5-year sync window
13/1412/13 14/15 15/1610/11 11/12 16/17

20. Categories syncing

21. Course syncing
• Creates courses based on LUSI data
– Rolls over content from previous year if instructed
• Moves courses between categories
• Updates courses data (full name, short name)

22. Course syncing
• Shared courses
– Contains several modules
• Non-shared courses
– Contains one module
– Same module could also be a member of a shared
course
• Students are enrolled to modules in LUSI, but
transferred to course enrolments in Moodle

23. Course syncing

24. Cohort syncing
• Creates cohorts based on modules data
• Updates cohorts data
• Remove cohorts
• Maintain student enrolments to cohorts
(based on module enrolments data)

25. Cohort syncing

26. Enrolments
• Course enrolments based on module
enrolments data.
– Enrol users and assign roles
– Update roles
– Set enrolment validity dates
– Expire users who no longer enrolled

27. Enrolments

28. Syncing groups and groupings
• Create and maintain groups
– based on event data (e.g. lecture, seminar)
– based on modules data aka cohort groups
• Create an maintain groupings
– Event groupings
– Cohort groupings
– Alternate groupings
• Group and groupings membership updates

29. Syncing groups and groupings

30. Assignment sync
• Create and maintain assignments based on
assignments data
– Normal Moodle assignments
– Turnitin assignments
• Limit assignment access to particular
grouping.
• Sync submission event with LUSI

31. Assignment sync

32. Something else to sync?

33. PG applicant web boards
• Courses for PG offer holders
• User data comes from CRM system
• Uses applicant’s account that will be linked to
real username at the start of academic year
• Courses represent faculties
• Created in LUSI similar to shared courses

34. PG applicant web boards

35. PG appraisals
• PGR record of studies
• Appraisal activities (e.g. supervisor meeting,
confirmation panel, appraisals)
• Moodle courses represent faculties
• Course sections access restricted via grouping
• Grouping is determined by LUSI data
– Students
– Appraisers
– Panel members

36. PG appraisals

37. Thanks!
Contact us:
Ruslan Kabalin, r.kabalin@lancaster.ac.uk, @rkabalin
Philip Tubman, p.tubman@lancaster.ac.uk, @philtubman