Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System: Use Moodle to manage and organize your administrative duties; monitor attendance records, manage student enrolment, record exam results, and much more

Categorization is an innate human behavior that allows us to perceive and understand the environment that surrounds us. Moodle designers must have recognized our tendency to categorize, because Moodle contains a flexible categorization system that allows for the creation of categories in which you may house additional categories and courses. Any educational program that offers courses of various varieties will invariably be using a categorization system like this for grouping courses into specific categories. A language program, for example, might group courses into skill-specific categories such as those of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. A larger entity, such as a college, would likely group courses into content-specific categories such as literature, sciences, speech communications, and the like, with additional subcategories used inside each of those main categories. No matter what the categorization system, Moodle is well-equipped to accommodate via its...

Let's get started by first taking a look at the courses and categories that exist in the default installation of our MAMP package. We'll proceed by manually creating the categories and subcategories we need for our language program example.

We could, at this point, jump to an explanation of the Bulk Course Upload tool. Unfortunately however, the Bulk Course Upload tool will not automatically create user accounts for us. Therefore, if we want to make the most of the tool, we will need to first create the accounts that we will label as teachers in the file used by the Bulk Course Upload tool.

We will create twenty users that are each going to be assigned to teach four courses. If you are only creating one user on your site, you may decide to create the account manually by clicking on the Add a new user link found via the following path: Site Administration | Users | Accounts | Add a new user. When adding multiple users however, it is a much more efficient process to use the Upload users feature found in the same list under Accounts where the Add a new user feature is located. To create the new teacher accounts, follow these steps:

Rather than creating course categories and then courses one at a time and assigning teachers to each course after the course is created, we can streamline the process through the use of the Bulk Course Upload tool. This tool allows you to organize all the information required to create your courses in a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file that is then uploaded into the creation tool and used to create all of your courses at once.

Now that we have our teacher's accounts created, we are ready to use the Bulk Course Creation tool to create all of our courses. First we need to install the tool as an add-on admin report into our Moodle site. The steps for the installation process are virtually the same as those explained in Chapter 1, Welcome to Moodle as a Curriculum and Information Management System (CIMS)! for installing Modules, Blocks, and Themes. To install this tool, do the following:

In this chapter, you have learned how to set up and organize course categories manually via the editing screen of your Moodle site. You then walked through the process of creating accounts for teachers that were going to be assigned to courses through the use of the Bulk Course Upload tool. We then introduced the Bulk Course Upload tool and explained how to get it installed on your system. You walked through an explanation of the fields that can be specified in the CSV file used by the tool and then practiced creating courses and assigning them teachers in order to get a seeing is believing perspective on the usefulness of the tool. In the next chapter, we'll continue to build on the system we have created so far by adding students and registering them in courses.