Feature: new tiggers and steps

[noisyjerm]

I am looking at extending your plugin to meet our end of semester workflow whereby we retain the course and put it into a kind of read-only state. The actions we will take are:

• Lock the grades
• Change the student roles

By adding a few sub-plugins, I believe I can achieve this workflow. The sub-plugins I am considering developing are:
Triggers

• Course end date – This would be similar to the existing Course start date
• Course custom field – If the value of a specific custom field matches the supplied

Steps

• Lock user grades – lock all records in the grade_grades table for the course
• Change student roles - not sure how I will approach this yet. We use cohorts so it could be an update cohort step
• Set custom field – change the value of a custom field

I’d appreciate any thoughts and guidance from you before I start development so I can make sure it is useful for others also. Please let me know if you think these triggers and steps will be useful or if you suggest any changes.

Many thanks

Jeremy

[NinaHerrmann]

Hey @noisyjerm :)

Triggers:

• course end date should be easily feasible when looking at course start date
• course custom field should be easy when looking at https://github.com/moodle-an-hochschulen/moodle-lifecycletrigger_customfieldsemester I suppose you would just need a drop down selecting the field :) The mentioned trigger assumes there exists a field semester

Steps:

• locking grades -definitely very good one, I would be highly interested!
• change student roles - I am not sure why this should be done 🤔 - could you give further reasoning for my interest? But of course we would like to link it.
• Set custom field - yes this sounds reasonable

How can I help you discussing the plugins, is there anything else I can comment on?
Cheers,
Nina

[noisyjerm]

Hi Nina

Thanks for your reply. Your plugin is pretty easy to work with and I have made a start on 3 plugins

• https://github.com/noisyjerm/moodle-lifecycletrigger_enddatedelay
• https://github.com/noisyjerm/moodle-lifecyclestep_lockgrades
• https://github.com/noisyjerm/moodle-lifecyclestep_updatecohortenrol

I used a translator for the German language pack so apologies if the language strings are a bit strange. Also, I'm not so experienced in writing the tests but I'll give that a try this week.

I am not sure if I will need to develop the custom field trigger and steps. The email step gives me most of the functionality I need for managing the flow. I just need to decide on a way to limit the number of courses to be processed. This could be done by custom fields, or a new "start date is after a given date" tigger, or just re-organising our categories and using the existing categories filter.

As for the changing student roles, here is a use case:

• As a student in the second year of my degree I want access to my last year's course material and work so that I can review previous learning.
• As an admin I want the students to not change or add anything to a "closed" course so that records remain accurate.

So to do this we do not delete the course but "lock" it. We can create a custom role similar to guest role and give the students this new role. They can now view everything in the course but not post or submit.

Thanks

Jeremy

[NinaHerrmann]

Hey Jeremy,

You are working fast!
I can look over the German translation if you want me to 🙂

Ah so you have a special role which prohibits editing activities 💡 That is indeed a good use case. I guess it is not to complicated as you would just need to get all enrollments of the course and change all student enrollments to role x. However, I am not sure about the performance of changing enrollments so you might want to batch process them.

I hope this help, best regards, Nina