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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Cool Moodle courses in seven languages

The Cool Course Competition has had a flurry of new entries recently and the site now has over twenty courses in Catalan, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish! These courses will be the start of our community hub for Moodle 2.0.

We’ve decided to keep the competition open for another month, till Tuesday 19th January 2010, so if you have some free time in the holiday, why not enter your cool Moodle course!

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Cool Course Competition closing soon

With two weeks left until the closing date of the Cool Course Competition, there are currently just eight entries in Catalan, Dutch, English and German.

If you have a cool Moodle course which nicely illustrates how Moodle features can be used, how about entering it in the competition. There are various competition categories and some great prizes on offer from the Moodle Shop!

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Cool Course Competition opening soon!

A while ago I mentioned that we were planning a Cool Course Competition to encourage more people to donate courses for our Moodle demo site and to start building our demo community hub for Moodle 2.0. Three months on, a Cool Course Competition site has finally been set up (thanks to Jordan, our Moodle HQ system administrator) and we’re almost ready to open the competition!

The Cool Course Competition site is networked with moodle.org so if you’re logged in to moodle.org you can visit the site without being required to create an account or login. The Cool Course Competition site is now included in the list of moodle.org connected sites and already 15 people have taken a look!

We still have a few details about the competition to finalize, such as prizes, before the competition opens. If you have any comments or suggestions, please add them to the Cool Course Competition talk page in Moodle Docs.

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Coming soon: The Cool Course Competition!

We’re currently planning a Cool Course Competition to encourage more people to donate great courses for our Moodle demo site (MDLSITE-744). Please see Moodle demo courses and Development:Cool Course Competition for more details. Comments and suggestions about how the competition should be organised would be most welcome!

People often ask in the Using Moodle forums for sample Moodle courses. The recent discussion Sample Moodle courses for k-12? contains various useful links.

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