Lessons learnt as a Cool Course Competition admin

With just three days left till the close of the Cool Course Competition on Tuesday 19 January 2010, the site now has 35 courses in nine different languages. Bearing in mind that the courses will be the start of our community hub for Moodle 2.0, restoring each of them to the competition site has proved a useful experience!

Although the competition rules stated that ‘Your course may not include user data’, I realised that glossary and database activity entries could still be exported from people’s Moodle sites then imported, via XML or CSV file, into their course on the competition site (see the documentation on importing and exporting glossary entries for details).

Most of the courses make use of one or more of Moodle’s filters and so the competition site needed the following filters enabled: glossary auto-linking, TeX notation, multimedia plugins and multi-language content.

Several courses included RSS feeds blocks. RSS feeds are not included in course backups (anyone know why?) so they needed adding manually before configuring the RSS feed block.

Further issues that I encountered are listed in the Community hub page comments, together with backup expert Eloy‘s response.

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Moodle Exchange

Looking for inspiration for your Moodle course? Or perhaps you have a great glossary or other activity which you’d like to share? If so, please check out the Moodle Exchange, where you’ll find databases of glossaries, database templates, Scorm packages, quizzes and even courses. A big thank you to Paula Clough and Dan Marsden for developing and facilitating the Moodle Exchange.

We can look forward in future to being able to share courses very easily via a community hub. See the community hub specification for full details.

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