Moodle

Hi!

Roles were designed to give users much bigger freedom in defining who can do what. Resolving as fixed.

skodak

reopening,
after thinking a bit more about it - there is no capability yet, that would do exactly this yet

I like the backup option.

I have some other favorites for a course but this might help promote Moodle and speed the learning curve with other teachers. I think in the US there are real privacy issues with students, even if the teacher feels comfortable in giving away copyrightable material.

This is a GREAT idea.

The abilty to backup aliased courses would permit to share Moodle interactive pedagogic activities among us, which lacks so much today :

For my part, after one year of Moodle practice, I created a site (french speaking http://moodest.virelibre.eu) cloned from my real K12 school site (http://virelibre.eu). Both are forbidden to guests (hidden button and closed courses) but :

• In the demo site, I created two virtual identities, which are published on site home page : one for my class call it C3 non editing teacher (profc3 profc3) and one for a C3 virtual pupil (eleve eleve).
• The demo site has been anonymized (sorry for my approximative english), as far as pupils are concerned. Adult identities remain real.
• To create it from scratch, I created a subdomain, dumped and imported my real database, copied moddledata structure to new subdomain place, modified config.php and replaced any pupils identities by their Initials, and suppressed pupils' photos.

From then, : to update demo courses from real ones when a new activity is worth it or valuable social development has occured, I backup from real and restore to demo : The demo identities remain unrevealed.
This demo site costed me some work, which motivates my vote, since advantages are to be awaited for Moodle users community :

• In Moodle french community, this demo site revealed to be appreciated by Moodle technical advisers to schools, who inspired from its Moodle dedicated to K12 pupils implementation structure. That's why I share with you this Moodle forbidden-to-guests-welcome-to-workers wish !

Concerning backup functions and Moodle promotion among education community, I'm at the moment thinking about one Prêt-à-Porter Moodle :
For primary level for example, in France, programs, general instructions and referenced how-to are widely spread. If Moodle community creates à Standard Moodle structure dedicated to beginners, based upon both experienced use of Moodle and reference to standard Minister of Education instructions, it offers beginners to advance at wide step : for my part, I created such a start point toward such structure, which costed me one year learning curve.
In this sense, backup reflexion could cover how to deliver a one-button-whole-start-site backup and from scratch installation.

These are all good ideas, but let's not lose sight of the main issue: We need a mechanism for the protection of user identities that will allow us to relax restrictions on backups and guest access.

+1 on this. Besides making it easier to share pedagogic models among teachers, this would greatly simplify things for those of us who do research on Moodle course.

See discussion at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=64964
This would only provide partial anonymisation since we reveal our identities in many ways within dialogue.
We found this when using data for research presentations.
The processing could provide a useful first step but I think the content would then have to be inspected by a human being.
As well as privacy, authroship may also be an issue for students as well as teachers.
Traditionally students have had little say in what is done with their work, but they may not wish forum postings and assignments to be published.

As Frances points out, student data can never be perfectly anonymized. However this should not preclude Moodle from providing this feature. Like other features, it comes with a caveat. It is up to the teacher/administration to decide whether its use is appropriate in each situation. For example, I teach a course with adult students. My site policy clearly states that I may use their anonymized data for research or publication. Once they agree to the site policy, I am covered.

Now that I've had a chance to use Moodle 1.7, I'm wondering if our objectives can be met by adding additional permissions to the roles system. Current permissions include "view user profiles" and "see all user posts." Currently, we can create a role that prevents viewing user profiles and allows seeing all user posts. Unfortunately, posts contain user names and the pictures. This loophole can be closed by adding permission "see profile information in user posts." I'm sure there are other cases where information "leaks" out of the profile. If so, these could also be closed with additional permissions. Or perhaps with a single permission "see profile data outside of user profile."

This says it affects 1.6.3 - it also affects 1.7+