ELIS is a Moodle plugin that was created to help large organizations automate processes for managing thousands of users and courses on their Moodle learning management systems. It addresses needs like automating user creation and enrollment, tracking learning progression across multiple courses, and communicating with users in customizable groupings. ELIS works by defining structures outside of Moodle for things like course descriptions, programs, tracks, and user sets, and then integrating with Moodle. It has gone through several generations to reduce complexity, improve integration with Moodle, and allow for more customization and automation.

1. ELIS – Managing Enterprise Level
Learning Programs with Moodle -
Mike Churchward

2. Introduction
 Remote Learner is a Moodle service provider
 Our focus is on simplifying the administration
and maintenance of learning programs in Moodle
 Our clients are large, enterprise-level
organizations that manage thousands of users
and hundreds of courses

3. The Needs
 Our clients wanted to be able to automate large
manual processes in Moodle
 Our support requests frequently involved our
techs helping to carry out large manual tasks
 Wanted to be able to manage courses and users
in groupings not provided by Moodle

4. Defining The Needs
 Interviewed multiple clients
 Clients selected on previous requests and
common themes
 Categorization of support application requests
 Gathered all data into a requirements
specification

5. Key Requirements
 Automate large processes – user creation and
management, enrolment, etc.
 Automate and track learning progression
 Communicate to users and stakeholders in
multiple grouping categorizations

6. The Concepts
 Organized into six essential structures:
 Course Description
 Class Instance
 Program
 Track
 Learning Objective
 User Set
 All managed outside of Moodle

7. The Concepts - Programs

8. The Concepts – Usersets

9. Course Descriptions
 Define the meta-data, credits, duration, and
learning objectives for a course of study

10. Class Instances
 Instances of course descriptions and are
connected to Moodle courses

11. Class Enrolment Data
 User's completion, grade, credits and learning
objective status

12. Learning Program
 Group of course descriptions to track specific
learning goals (e.g. Certificate program)

13. Track
 Instance of a program; a set of class instances
with real data

14. Learning Objective
 Define goals achieved by successful activities in a
course

15. User Sets
 Hierarchical groupings of users mapping an
organizational structure

16. The Build - Reasons
 A series of Moodle add-ons, using Moodle API's
 We have Moodle expertise in-house
 Moodle is central to our learning systems
 Moodle occasionally “adopts” ELIS functionality
 Open source provides community involvement

17. The Build - Problems
 Occasionally Moodle changes API's and data
structures that don't directly affect users
 ELIS development can lag behind Moodle releases
 Management of separate application with multiple
version releases

18. Management and Distribution
 Processes very similar to Moodle HQ
 Git-based repositories – internal and community
 (mostly) automated merge and release process
 Unit tests, user tests and Selenium-based
automated testing
 Agile/Scrum development methodologies and
processes

19. Follow-up Feedback
 Anchor clients
 Partners
 Tracker
 Market research

20. ELIS Generations – Gen One
 Learning programs and reports
 Manual processes and interfaces
 External report engine (Jasper)
 Managed with block plug-in
 Minimal core changes

21. ELIS Generations – Gen Two
 Identified problems: setup complexity, effort to
integrate large enterprise data sets, difficulty
configuring report engine
 More automation around user sets – profile data
based automation
 Integration point improvements
 Better UI integration with Moodle
 New reporting engine

22. ELIS Generations – Gen Three
 Reduce complexity / more automation
 Moodle 2 based – local plug-ins
 Results engine automation
 More data integration options with plug-in system
 Better, configurable reports

23. ELIS Generations – Future
 Adaptive learning features
 Better links to Moodle outcomes
 Dashboards with My Moodle
 More on-demand reporting
 Better, configurable reports
 Automated session start and archive
 More community involvement

24. ELIS Information
Community site:
http://rlcommunity.remote-learner.net/
Repository location:
https://github.com/remotelearner
Download:
http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=4894

25. Questions?