Self service for new courses

[christianwolters]

Hey learnweb-team,

I am currently looking at options to implement a course request system at our uni.

So far I've looked at

• the builtin course request (not enough options)
• https://moodle.org/plugins/block_cmanager (cool, but not all functions i'd like to have and probably not actively maintained atm)

This brings me to your plugin. I know deprovisioning your main use case but maybe I could implement a way to start a course life with this plugin, too.

As far as my understanding goes: there would have to be another starting point for the self service, as there is no course to bind the workflow too.

Have you thought about that? And do you think it would be feasible?

Cheers
Christian

[christianwolters]

I have this use case in mind:

Manual trigger:

• As a user with a specific capability in system context
• I can enter a self service page with a custom form to start my request

Step:

• that request gets approved or edited by an admin

Step:

• course gets created

[tobiasreischmann]

Hey Christian,
I had already the idea to include a manual trigger that is not bind to a course to the plugin.
This would result in a button on top of the self service page and would make this self service page as the general page for managing the courses of a teacher.

We will be (someday) be in the need to include a course request system for SAP. I would like to build this request system within tool_lifecycle. But there are no implementation details right now.

For you case you could already use and extend the subplugins for approveadmin and maybe duplicate course if the requested course should be a copy of a course from last semester.
I would advise you to implement some type of automatic authorization that a teacher is allowed to create a course. Otherwise, the system will not really scale. We currently use the data we get from our HIS-LSF and will switch to SAP as soon as this is ready.

[christianwolters]

Hi Tobias,

thank you, I‘ll look into it.

Regarding the authorization for teachers:

• ATM, we have no CaMS at all (so sad), only some HIS modules, but teachers decide themselves if they need a course this semester.
• Do you mean, that they need the capability to create a course? (if this is the case: why?)
• or just a capability that enables them to use the self service?

[tobiasreischmann]

What I meant related to your step: that request gets approved or edited by an admin
If you have too many requests, you or your fellow admins will become the bottleneck. Thus, if there is some other way to automatically authorize specific users to request specific courses, than this would make things much faster. ;)