CRN-based Moodle shell creation and enrolment

(Time to Read: 3 mins.)

Moo­dle course shell cre­ation and enrol­ment are the most crit­i­cal and com­mon­ly-need­ed tasks for online learn­ing at Van­cou­ver Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege.

At VCC, we use the term shell to refer to the web site con­tain­er that’s used in Moo­dle to present learn­ing mate­ri­als to online stu­dents.

In the past, at the start of each new term, depart­ments would be told a dead­line by which they would have to sub­mit their requests for new shells for their upcom­ing online cours­es.

At that time, new shell requests were com­plet­ed man­u­al­ly by CTL­R’s eLearn­ing Sup­port team (“eLSup­port”). A shell might be cre­at­ed man­u­al­ly from a copy of a pre­vi­ous ver­sion of a course, or from an emp­ty tem­plate into which the instruc­tor could add their online con­tent. Regard­less of how they were built, online cours­es all had to be cre­at­ed man­u­al­ly.

As enrol­ment steadi­ly increased at VCC, so did the num­ber of online cours­es being request­ed, and we became a vic­tim of our own suc­cess. In pre­vi­ous years, cre­at­ing online cours­es man­u­al­ly, one-by-one, for an upcom­ing term might take our team over 140 hours to com­plete. Man­u­al course shell cre­ation was not a prac­ti­cal method for the long-term. eLSup­port need­ed a more-auto­mat­ed solu­tion to scale-up with the col­lege’s increas­ing demand for online cours­es.

Developing a scalable solution for shells

By work­ing with VCC’s IT team and BCNet and con­sult­ing with col­leagues at oth­er BC post-sec­ondary insti­tu­tions, eLSup­port devel­oped a strat­e­gy to tie new course shell cre­ation to Term Codes and Course Ref­er­ence Num­bers (CRNs).

At VCC, cours­es that are sched­uled for an upcom­ing term are always assigned a Term­Code and a CRN. Com­bin­ing those two num­bers cre­ates a unique iden­ti­fi­er for each course and its relat­ed Moo­dle shell. eLSup­port is then able to know that a course shell is required for a giv­en CRN, and can cre­ate a new shell to con­tain its con­tent. Using those iden­ti­fiers, it becomes pos­si­ble to make a list of all the cours­es that are sched­uled for the upcom­ing term and to batch-cre­ate thou­sands of course shell tem­plates all at once.

With this automa­tion in place, eLSup­port had trans­formed 140 hours of work down to just one or two hours. We now had a scal­able solu­tion for the mass cre­ation of thou­sands of new Moo­dle course shells.

What about the content and enrolment for each online course?

As far as the con­tent that would be pro­vid­ed in each course, it was decid­ed that this was best left to the instruc­tors and their home depart­ments to devel­op. Instruc­tors who will be teach­ing a course in the upcom­ing term must locate it in Moo­dle by search­ing for its Term­Code and CRN, and then fol­low instruc­tions to either import or man­u­al­ly devel­op their course’s con­tent.

eLSup­port added step-by-step instruc­tions inside each new tem­plate shell to show Instruc­tors how to import con­tent from a pre­vi­ous course into their tem­plate, giv­ing them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to decide which mate­r­i­al they want­ed to re-use from a pre­vi­ous offer­ing. Sep­a­rat­ing course tem­plate pro­vi­sion from the con­tent ques­tion relieved eLSup­port of a huge amount of effort, deci­sion-mak­ing, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, putting course con­tent back into the hands of depart­ment lead­ers, instruc­tors, and sub­ject mat­ter experts.

Enrol­ments are also han­dled by CRN: Instruc­tors are enrolled accord­ing to the CRNs they are asso­ci­at­ed with, and as Stu­dents get reg­is­tered in their cours­es, auto­mat­ic scripts add them to the enrol­ment lists for their Moo­dle cours­es.

Each Moo­dle course shell remains hid­den to Stu­dents until the Instruc­tor man­u­al­ly sets its vis­i­bil­i­ty set­ting to “Show.” They can do this when­ev­er they are ready to open the course for their stu­dents. This set­ting is not con­nect­ed to the course start date set­ting, so an instruc­tor has the free­dom to open up a course a bit ear­ly if they choose.

Course Shell creation today

As of Sep­tem­ber 2024, about 80% of VCC’s Moo­dle course shells are cre­at­ed from auto­mat­ic course tem­plates that are asso­ci­at­ed with each course’s CRN.

Our stan­dard Moo­dle course tem­plate now pro­vides a con­sis­tent start­ing point for VCC instruc­tors, pro­vid­ing tips, links, and help­ful instruc­tions, hid­den from prospec­tive stu­dents. The instruc­tor has the oppor­tu­ni­ty to start import­ing or cre­at­ing course con­tent as soon as they locate their tem­plate shell.