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Posts Tagged ‘backup’

How to use MS-Skydrive with your university account here

2012/11/29 Leave a comment
  1. One of the benefits of live@edu is institutional access to file storage space in the cloud. You need not set anything up for that. Just go to http://skydrive.com and log in with (1) your university account, here is what you get: Screenshot - 11_29_2012 , 5_01_18 PM
  2. You can create (or upload) folders and files (this one is from a long time ago, since I briefly could log in when live@edu was first introduced. Students always could log in).
  3. 7 GB of free space in the cloud should be plenty, including
    1. for teachers looking for a convenient way to bring files to the classroom beyond the limitations of the H: –drive “ My documents”
    2. for film students misplacing they backup hardware. No more hogging of checked out cameras just since you did not bring your portable hard drive. Just upload your clips to skydrive.com, access them from home.
  4. If you install the optional free Skydrive app (available ofr Windows Vista and up and MacOS X.7)
    1. the file size limit is expanded from 100MB to 2GB.
    2. files can be automatically synchronized between your classroom and home computer.
  5. To access files on classroom computers without the skydrive app, just use skydrive.com
Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, Film-studies, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, service-is-applying-learning-tools, service-is-documenting Tags: ,

How to recycle your Moodle Course using backup/restore

2012/08/20 Leave a comment

Better do this before the first day of classes, but if you need a quick refresher:

Categories: audience-is-teachers, lms Tags: , , ,

Sharing and reusing Moodle learning content using backup and restore, part I: Backup

2011/12/15 4 comments

To reuse your own content, you can import. To use somebody else’s content, the other user can backup his content (even though not shown below, a subset of the content of a course can be chosen) and share (by downloading the file created within the course file area) the backup file with you (a zip-archive that contains an xml file), for the other user to restore. Like so:   backup1 backup2a backup3a backup4a backup5abackup6backup7backup8

Categories: audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-infrastructure, lms, service-is-learning-materials-creation Tags: ,

What are best practices for recycling Moodle course teaching content? A running log

2011/12/08 Leave a comment
  1. Guiding Questions:
  2. I am in the process of creating Moodle assignments with instructors. I am inclined to tell them that this is best done now, before the term starts. I have met several instructors who seem to redo all their Moodle assignments and other content, for each term and each section, and who change Moodle courses on the fly, in the middle of the term, adding identical assignments to multiple sections. When I taught with the LMS (in Blackboard environments), the entire course (content) was “rolled over” between terms (and copied into sections), after subtracting student data. What are best practices in Moodle for reusing/recycling such course content, across terms, sections, and instructors? 
  3. Is it possible to get entire course+instructor combinations recycled centrally and automatically, whenever an instructor teaches a course again, from the archive of the last version of the course, sans student data?
  4. Or does each instructor, any time she reteaches a course, have to manually reimport all materials she wants to reuse from her old courses? So far, I have followed this page: http://teaching.uncc.edu/Moodle/how-to/importing-Moodle-course (here is an example of using the import feature when adding assignments into multiple sections in the middle of the term: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/importing+moodle/). Can this be done before term start at least into one section, from which the other section is created by copying? What would be the cut-off date for that?
  5. Would instructors use the last live version of the course to go forward, like I did with Blackboard, or are instructors advised to develop all content in separate development courses, and selectively import content from there into live courses? Does each instructor have a development course by default? Is it possible/advisable for an instructor to have one development course per actual course she teaches (repeatedly)? Does access of instructors to past courses expire when they get archived, and when would that be?
  6. Finally, how could assignments be exchanged between instructors who teach the same courses? 
  7. Courses seem to be complex packages. Repackaging individual assignments from one generic development course into course packs while importing seems administrative overhead, unless there is a in-built support for packaging that allows to add course tags to content. On the other hand, courses need to be easily updateable: student data needs to be added and removed easily. Teacher content needs to be refined, possibly updated with some current materials each term.
  8. Exploration:
    1. files planning:
      1. When publishing files, I have been trying to restrict all information that needs regular updating (dates, fine tuning of assignments and grading) to the syllabus files which I upload every term. So that I can “roll over” the rest of the course, including its files. 
      2. observe the (max 64mb) file size limit in your Moodle courses
      3. You cannot use this procedure to share Kaltura videos, not even the ones a teacher made
    2. importing
      1. importing steps see here.
      2. To be seamless, source and target course need to have the same format (settings / topical, weekly or other). Otherwise, your exports from a weekly formatted course into a topically formatted course will get put into the topic number corresponding to the week # (which, if you have set to fewer topics than you had weeks, may effectively hide them. Not to worry, you can still retrieve them by adding topics to your course, then moving the assignments where you want them).
      3. backing up/restoring
        1. backing up see here 
        2. restoring see here
        3. more on backup/restore from the Moodle docs FAQ
        4. primary instructor can use assign roles to add other teachers to give them access to importing; better create an intermediate, not student-accessible Moodle course for sharing instead
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, e-learning, lms, service-is-learning-materials-creation Tags: , , ,