Find Empty Moodle Courses

If you use an auto-enrolment module you will often find you have lots of courses created that are never used. We have used the LDAP and Database enrolment before and both have created large numbers of courses. Some are not used by teachers,others are just used as child courses for year wide meta courses. Either way at the end of the year you may wish to identify any class that hasn’t been used. (Perhaps to delete using the Bulk Deletion options).

No Content

Following SQL code I’ve written will generate a list containing a sum of most of the resources and activities a course has, allowing you to quickly identify those with little to no content. It bases this count on having no labels, resources, assignments, etc.

SELECT m.id, m.`shortname` , m.fullname, cCount.totalcount
FROM mdl_course m
LEFT JOIN (

SELECT courseCount.course, sum( courseCount.subcount ) AS totalcount
FROM (

SELECT course, count( * ) AS subcount
FROM mdl_resource
GROUP BY course
UNION ALL SELECT course, count( * ) AS subcount
FROM mdl_quiz
GROUP BY course
UNION ALL SELECT course, count( * ) AS subcount
FROM mdl_assignment
GROUP BY course
UNION ALL SELECT course, count( * ) AS subcount
FROM mdl_survey
GROUP BY course
UNION ALL SELECT course, count( * ) AS subcount
FROM mdl_label
GROUP BY course
UNION ALL SELECT course, count( * ) AS subcount
FROM mdl_glossary
GROUP BY course
UNION ALL SELECT course, count( * ) AS subcount
FROM mdl_homework
GROUP BY course
UNION ALL SELECT course, count( * ) AS subcount
FROM mdl_wiki
GROUP BY course
) AS courseCount
GROUP BY courseCount.course
) AS cCount ON cCount.course = m.id

You may need to edit above code if you do not have an activity installed (eg homework).

No Users

The following code generates a list of all your courses together with how many students are enrolled in each. Useful to find out if you have any courses with no one enrolled.

SELECT cr.shortname, cr.fullname, count( ra.id ) AS enrolled
FROM `mdl_course` cr
JOIN `mdl_context` ct ON ( ct.instanceid = cr.id )
LEFT JOIN `mdl_role_assignments` ra ON ( ra.contextid = ct.id )
WHERE ct.contextlevel =50
GROUP BY cr.shortname, cr.fullname
ORDER BY `enrolled` ASC

You can export either of the above queries into Excel and manipulate it from there. Order by the counts then copy the short names’ of courses to delete, paste into a text file and upload to the Bulk Course Deletion addon. Goodbye excess courses.

Data Cleanup: Roles without Users

Sometimes when a user gets deleted Moodle doesn’t clean up after it self as well as it should. The following code will list all the rows in your role assignments table that no longer match to a user:

SELECT *
FROM `mdl_role_assignments`
WHERE `userid` NOT
IN (
SELECT id
FROM mdl_user
)

If you wish to the delete all of these just run following. As always make sure you have a good backup before deleting anything from DB.

DELETE
FROM `mdl_role_assignments`
WHERE `userid` NOT
IN (
SELECT id
FROM mdl_user
)

For some useful SQL queries that can be used to identify unused courses please see Some useful Moodle SQL Queries.

Some additional notes:

To use the DET mail server you can either add mail.det.nsw.edu.au to the mail section of your php.ini file or add it to the
Admin -> Server -> Email: SMTP Hosts section.
If you wish to restrict to sending to DET emails you can add following to the Allowed email domains : “education.nsw.gov.au det.nsw.edu.au“.
Make sure to test the mail server settings before adding any restrictions to domains.

If using Novell or Mac OS you will need to use a different LDAP browser as AD Explorer only works with Active Directory.
For Novell I usually use the free Windows program Softerra LDAP Browser (MSI).
There are a few Java based LDAP browsers that should work with Mac. A good Java based LDAP browser is JXplorer this should work on Mac, Windows and Linux. For some more info on Mac and LDAP look at this article on LDAP in Mac OS X Server from the Mac Dev Center, it is not fully applicable as it also has home drive mapping but it does contain some useful info.

Paul Ganderton has made his Geography HSC site avaliable for guests. You can also view some of the other course on our Moodle site. Look for this logo which means guest access is allowed.

Bulk Operations: Some people asked about bulk deletion of users and courses.
This section has been moved to Moodle: Bulk Deletion Operations.

Presentations:

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Plugins used by Moodle

Some of the items shown during talk are produced by plugins to Moodle. Below is a list of some of our favourites:

• Book: Allows structuring resource pages with chapters and pages.
• Gallery: Shows slide shows and generates thumbnails of images. You can upload a zip file containing an entire folder structure of pictures, and auto-generate albums and sub-albums from it.
• Course Menu: Creates a Tree Structure as a block on side of page to assist navigation.
• Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file. On the main SBHS Moodle page there is also a Library block that sends search queries to our Sentral library page. This will need to be customised by schools to point to their Sentral system or the new DET My Library system (only accessible inside DET WAN). Just modify the block_library.php file to point to your Library search page. To install place the library directory in your Moodle blocks folder.