Best Moodle Innovation for 2019 -- Nominations

Developers: Ponlawat Weerapanpisit, Adam Jenkins

This plugin is mainly for institutional Moodle administrators.

At the end of a semester, courses are typically full of user content: submitted assignments, quiz attempts, forum posts etc. If the same course is to be reused in a following semester, it then becomes necessary to clear out the data and unenrol the previous semester’s students. Moodle has the built-in course reset function that serves this purpose, however it must be done course by course. Even with course upload with CSV files, there is no way to specify what is to be reset. For small sites this may not be a problem, but for sites that are centrally administered with several hundred courses, the task of resetting courses becomes unfeasible. This plugin solves the problem of centrally resetting courses by enabling the administrator to reset multiple courses simultaneously.

First, the courses to be reset are selected from a list of all courses. They can be selected one by one or by categories. Next, the options for resetting every module in the selected courses are set. Also, the date and time when the reset should happen is set. Clicking continue sets a scheduled task that will reset all the selected courses at the specified time. The reset is run as a scheduled task and cannot be run directly through the interface. This is by design as running the reset by cron prevents problems with PHP timeouts.

※ A second plugin to allow defaults for course resets to be pre-specified by the admin has also been developed.　↓

https://github.com/ponlawat-w/moodle-tool_resetsettings

Development of this plugin was funded by a 2019 MAJ Research Grant.