Thursday, 10 January 2008
Duplicating or copying resources & items within a Moodle course
I think I've solved a problem here that a lot of Moodle users may be having. Duplicating or copying resources and items within a Moodle course has been difficult. Here's how to use a topic template to duplicate items in topics within your course. (It's a workaround - I suspect this feature will be available in later versions of the software.)
It's easier now to duplicate or copy a course or elements of one Moodle course into another course by using the Import feature.This transfers your chosen course elements, such as forums, resources or quizzes, into the corresponding topics in the new course.
- As an administrator, in the course you want to fill, click Import
- Choose the course you wish to import from
- Choose the elements of the course you want to transfer (e.g., ALL)
- Choose whether you want to transfer course files
- Click Continue lots of times
This is great if you wish to recreate a course for a new cohort or copy items that have taken a long time to create and modify them.
But there isn't so far as I can see, a way to copy items, elements, resources etc. within a course, from one topic to another, or within a topic.
I had a nicely designed resource that I wanted to use as a template, plus a series of other elements such as a forum, and labels, e.g., Resources and E-tivity, that I needed to duplicate every week (or in every topic).
It may help here if you have two windows open, one for the real course and one for the template.There was no need to move items about individually. In the end I had 12 topics with templates that I could adapt. Much less laborious than copying the content of a one resource into another!
- I created a new course called Template, with the same number of topics/weeks as my real course,
- I created the topic template as Topic 1 in there (in this case, containing two resources, two labels and a forum with a template description). The only things in this template course were these template items in Topic 1.
- Then, from my course, I imported, in the way described above, from the Template course, importing ALL. I was then left with the series of template items in Topic 1 of my course.
- Back into Template course, and with editing on move Topic 1 to the position of Topic 2 (one click on an arrow).
- From my real course, repeat the import, which added the template items to Topic 2 of my course.
- Back into Template course, and with editing on move Topic 2 (containing the templates) to the position of Topic 3.
- From my real course, repeat the import, which added the template items to Topic 3 of my course.
- Repeat for as many topics as you need...
Hope this helps someone - if it does - comment and let me know :)Labels: copying, duplicating courses, Moodle, templates
posted by Helen Whitehead 5:45 PM
