The other day I was reading an article about creating new courses on Moodle from a colleague here in the UK.  This got me thinking about how I went about adding courses to our college's installation.  Some of the issues that Suki presents in his posting are valid and i learn alot reading it, but I want to take it a step further on this post and let you know how we accomplish it at The Sheffield College.

Since March this year the I've been working with colleagues to rebuild the Sheffield College VLE to bring it up to a standard that the College can be proud of.  We've been looking at the design and how it functions to hopefully give the class of 2010 a better experience working online.

One of the issues that we encountered when we looked at it was how new courses were created.  This often involved a teacher sending an email to whoever was looking after the site and asking a new course be setup for them.  Very wasteful and it also rested on the fact that the administrator was checking their emails.

Well a few weeks ago I was working with @lewiscarr and we came across the 'Create Course Request' feature.  What we've implemented is a block on the myMoodle page which has the above button.  This launches a form where the Teacher fills in all the relevent settings; course name, title, summary etc.  Then they submit that form. 

Once done, all the adminstrator has to do is go to their pending.php page and it shows them all request for courses that are outstanding, no remembering where you filed the email, no spending time entering all the course details into a new course.(it may not seem like much but when you have a large number of courses it adds up) You simply click approve or deny.  Approve and the course is setup, the requesing teacher is added to the course as a teacher, all setting are ready and the lecturer receieves an email with the link of the course.  If you deny it you can give your reasons and again moodle will email the teacher with the reasoning behind why you have denied the course request.

Adding Blocks

While I don't go as far as Suki does in his posting, regarding adding a banner to the course we do add certain blocks to each and every new course.  But we don't go in and add them manually.

There is a setting in the config.php file which lets you set which blocks to add when a new course is created.  Its very simple as shown below.

$CFG->defaultblocks_override = " : instructor_contact,online_users,upcoming_events, admin"; 

In the code above I am adding the 4 blocks to the right side of the course automatically for each course I create.  Depending on which side you want them to appear you either add them to the left or right of the semi-colon.  You can also make the block adding more specific by changing the config from defaultblocks_override to defaultblocks_topic or social etc.

Using both these techniques we have speeded up our course creating quite significantly.