AUTOMATION OF THE CREATION, FILLING AND ADMINISTRATION OF COURSE CATEGORIES ON THE MOODLE WEBSITE

Abstract

The choice of course categories structure of the Moodle site largely determines its effectiveness and ease of use. There are two main approaches to choosing the course category structure on the university website. The first one structures them from the point of view of teachers: the categories of courses of departments are placed in the categories of courses of the faculty. The second is from the point of view of students: the categories of courses of educational programs are placed in the category of courses of faculties. The paper considers a structure that best combines these two approaches. It uses the first approach as a basic one, and the lists of courses for educational programs are formed in the form of hyperlinks, which are implemented using the elements of the Subcourse course placed in service courses specially created for them. This makes it possible to import the resulting grades from all disciplines of a certain educational program and year of study into the gradebook of the service course and calculate the current rating of each student on their basis, which the Moodle system updates every minute, and to export lists of students in the opposite direction. Then enrolling or withdrawing a student in a service course causes the same actions in all courses of this educational program. Such site structure has significant advantages, but its creation requires a large amount of work by the administrator, so it needs automation. For this, the Moosh utility is used, designed for the administration of the Moodle site through the command line interface, which significantly speeds up the administration process compared to performing the same actions through the native Moodle interface. An even greater speedup can be achieved by running files containing many such commands for execution in Moosh. But the main content of this work is the automation of the creation of the command files themselves. This further speeds up administration processes and improves their quality by reducing the number of errors that occur during manual typing of commands or site administration with Moodle's own tools. The work describes the process of creating command files that ensure the automatic execution of all work related to the creation of the above-mentioned site structure: creation of course categories, creation of service courses and their filling, as well as further site administration related to student enrollment for courses of the new academic year, their deduction from last year's courses, etc. New plugins that support the functioning of such a site structure are also being considered.