Course Evaluations & Surveys offers a Data Integration Webservice that connects to your instance of Moodle to automate the import of course, student and instructor enrollment information into your Course Evaluations & Surveys Project(s). Additionally, once the courses and enrollments are imported into a project, enrollment refreshes of the data can be scheduled to automatically update enrollment add/drops in the selected courses.
ENABLING THE MOODLE WEBSERVICE AND GENERATING YOUR MOODLE WEBSERVICE TOKEN
Course Evaluations & Surveys uses Moodle Webservices for data integration. No Moodle block is installed in Moodle for the data integration. Moodle Webservices need to be activated and configured, as well as a user created in Moodle with enough privileges to execute actions in order to retrieve course and user information.
For Moodle Webservice activation, Course Evaluations & Surveys follows Moodle’s standard Webservice activation steps.
Steps to setup Moodle web services
- In Moodle, go to Home > Site administration > Plugins > Web services > Overview > Users as clients with token.
- Go to Home > Site administration > Users to create a user for these integration purposes. We suggest the username should have EvalKIT in the name to easily distinguish it from other users, e.g. EvalKITAPIUser.
- Add the user to Site Administrators list under Home > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Site administrators.
- Go to Home > Site administration > Plugins > Web services > External Services, create an External Service and name it EvalKit Web Services .
- After adding the Functions, you will be returned to the External services page. Click the Authorized users link. Add the user created in step 3 as an Authorized User of the External Service.
- Go to Home > Site administration > Plugins > Web services > Manage Tokens to create token for the authorized user created in Step 3.
CONFIGURATION SETUP IN Course Evaluations & Surveys
To configure your Course Evaluations & Surveys Account to use the Data Integration Webservice, perform the following:
- Within the Account section, click on Moodle under the Integrations section.
- Add a name for your Moodle Site.
- Add your version of Moodle.
- Add the URL for YOUR instance of Moodle (If your instance of Moodle is behind HTTPS, make sure to insert HTTPS in your URL).
- Add your Moodle Web Service Token (This is the token that was generated in the previous section).
- Click Save.
To configure Moodle Role Settings for your Course Evaluations & Surveys Account, perform the following:
As part of the Moodle integration, Course Evaluations & Surveys follows and adheres to the standard default settings of Moodle's role short names. The standard role mappings in Course Evaluations & Surveys will appear here as follows and cannot be edited:
Name | Short Name |
---|---|
Student | student |
Teacher | teacher |
Editing Teacher | editingteacher |
Instructor | instructor |
Additional Moodle Roles can be created to align to custom Moodle roles to import users for any of the Course Evaluations & Surveys roles.
- Select + Add Moodle Role.
- Enter the Moodle role Name and Moodle Short Name.
- Click Save.
Preparing for Data Imports
The Moodle Data Import allows you to search for and import courses directly from your instance of Moodle. All necessary course, student enrollment, and instructor enrollment information needed in Course Evaluations & Surveys is transferred into your Course Evaluations & Surveys Project by pressing Import Data.
Once the data integration has been completed, you are ready to test the data import feature within Course Evaluations & Surveys. To do so, you will need to have the following:
- As an CES Administrator, create a test project within your Course Evaluations & Surveys Account.
- Under the Survey tab of the project, select your test survey, and click Save
- Make sure your Project Level Start Date is set for today’s date.
- Under the Courses tab click on Data Import > Moodle.
- On the top of the page you will see two options: Re-Sync Courses and Clear Synced Courses.
Searching Courses
The Search Moodle Courses feature allows searching for courses based on Moodle Course Name, Short Name or ID Number.Select which of these options to search on from the Filter Options dropdown in this section. You can also use operands like Contains, Equals, Starts With or Not Contains based on your desired search logic.
Finally, you can select More Options and use the large text box to paste in a text string you would like to search by.
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Search Moodle Courses: The Course Search feature allows searching for courses based on Moodle Course Name, Short Name, or ID Number. Select which of these fields to search on from the first dropdown in this section. Then, select Contains, Equals, Starts With, or Not Contains based on your desired search logic. And finally, insert the text string you would like to search by. Click Search to run the search. The courses that meet your search criteria will be displayed in the Select Courses section where you can check the checkbox for specific courses in the list, or select the checkbox in the header to select ALL courses in the viewed page of your search results.
Note: Select All only selects the number of records per page. -
Select Users to Import: You can customize your import to only bring in student, instructor or TA enrollments, and omit specific user properties in the import. The default is to import student and instructor enrollments, along with their full name and email address. Importing TA enrollments is optional.
- Moodle Student Role: Import users with custom, Instructor or Teaching Assistant roles in Moodle as Students into the Course Evaluations & Surveys Project.
- Moodle Instructor Role: Import users with custom, Student or Teaching Assistant roles in Moodle as Instructors into the Course Evaluations & Surveys Project.
- Moodle TA Role: Import users with custom, Student or Instructor roles in Moodle as Instructors into the Course Evaluations & Surveys Project.
- Create Unique Course Evaluations & Surveys Course Sections for each Instructor (optional): Using this feature will automatically create separate course evaluation sections within Course Evaluations & Surveys for each instructor enrolled within the selected Moodle courses. Important Note: If selected, students within courses with more than one instructor enrolled will be asked to take the whole survey multiple times, for each instructor/course section. This will negate the team-taught courses functionality within Course Evaluations & Surveys.
- Add Instructor to Course Title (optional): Add the instructor's name to the course title of the course section.
- Remove Meta Enrollments: Remove meta-enrollments from the courses selected to import. Within the text box in this section, paste the Moodle parent and child(ren) course IDs with a double-pipe (||) to separate the values, one per line. Example: "Px||C1||C2”
- Generate Course-Level Dates Based on Course Dates (optional): With this feature, you can automatically generate course-level survey dates within the Course Evaluations & Surveys project that control when surveys for specific courses will start and end, based on the Moodle course start/end dates. Options for generating course-level dates upon imprt of course data include:
- Import Options: I would like to receive confirmation emails for this data import. You can elect to receive an email alert confirming the import by checking this check box.
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Import Data: To import the related course, student enrollment, and instructor enrollment information into your Course Evaluations & Surveys Project for the selected courses, just click Import Data.
Note: You can upload up to 440 characters for a Course Code and Course Unique ID. These values may be truncated throughout your PDF Reporting.
Using the Enrollment Refresh
After importing data for the selected courses from within Moodle, a refresh of the enrollments can be scheduled in order to automate updating enrollment adds and drops for all Moodle courses within the project.NOTE
The Enrollment Refresh will update enrollments for courses that have been imported via the Moodle integration only. Courses that are imported or added via other means, i.e. Excel, .csv, or manually created, are not supported with the Enrollment Refresh feature.NOTE
Re-syncing courses has no bearing on the enrollment refresh and does not need to be completed to schedule an enrollment refresh. Also, the enrollment refresh will only update your enrollment numbers for the courses within your Course Evaluations & Surveys Project.- Go to Users tab within the project.
- Click on Data Import drop down menu and select Moodle.
- Add Refresh Schedule
- Choose to exclude courses from the Enrollment Refresh where the survey has ended for both course-level and project-level end dates prior to the Enrollment Refresh scheduled run date.
- Select to refresh students and/or instructors.
- Click Save.