Use template on course creation

Maintained by Charles Fulton, Andrew Zito
This local plugin allows site administrators to create "template" courses which will be restored into new courses on course creation.
Free
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Supports Moodle 3.1-5.2 See all versions
Latest release: 3 years ago
Installations: 337
Downloads (last 90 days): 160
Frankenstyle name: local_course_template
Local plugins

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Charles Fulton
Hi Ricardo, something like /[A-Z]+\.[0-9\-]+/ should work, assuming your idnumbers all follow that same format.
Ricardo Caiado
Hi, Charles.
I've tried several ways and I'm not getting it to work for "GRAD.2023-9".
What would be the correct regular expression to set in "local_course_template | extracttermcode"?
Ricardo
Blair F.
Thank you, Charles. I've looked at the course dates plugin, but our courses are not only created in bulk, but then continue to be added every 24 hours after initiated and in different categories. Once created, the instructor does have the ability to enter the exact dates (rather than generic term dates). So, I don't see how I could get this to work smoothly. I appreciate you tracking the issue.
Charles Fulton
Blair, that's actually by design. In our environment, the course start and end dates are set by the import from our SIS, and then the plugin restores resources from the template course but doesn't override the dates. I can see how this could be a useful feature, and I'll track it in https://github.com/LafColITS/moodle-local_course_template/issues/32. You should also take a look at the course dates plugin (https://moodle.org/plugins/tool_coursedates) if you haven't already.
Blair F.
We've been using this plugin for a while now and, for the most part, it's working as we want. The one thing it's not doing is setting the start/end dates to match those of the template. I've read in forums that it should be using those dates. Instead, all our courses are given "today's date" as the start and empty end dates. If I could figure out a way to get this to work, it would be very helpful.
Charles Fulton
A white man with a reddish beard and short hair in a white shirt with sunlight shining on his face.
If I backup the template & leave all the defaults, the images are there, I can find them in the .mbz file and also if I restore the course. It seems to be something about how this plugin creates / restores the grid format template course's backup. Any ideas of how to investigate? Where can I find the backup that the plugin uses so I can double check it to see if backup or restore is potentially the issue? We have caching enabled, if that matters.
Charles Fulton
Eric, it sounds like something changed in the grid format plugin. I would follow up with that maintainer as well if you haven't already. Are the files in the backup and to being restored, or are they not in the backup at all?
A white man with a reddish beard and short hair in a white shirt with sunlight shining on his face.
We upgraded to Moodle 4.0 and are seeing a problem: grid format course templates do not carry over their section images when they used to. Any ideas? I tried editing backup.php to set "user_files => 1" but that did not work.
Charles Fulton
I've never tested it with the course request workflow, but if the idnumber matches, and the course request workflow fires the correct event, then it should.
Hugo Ribeiro
Does this work with the course request -> approval workflow?
Charles Fulton
Bruce, try using ([A-Za-z0-9]+)\.[0-9]+, which describes the full string? That said, I would have expected that to work.
Bruce Wilbee
We need to reverse the convention and have a course id somewhat like COMP2021.12345678 Using the regex of ([A-Za-z0-9]+)\. it is not pulling the template Template-COMP2021....any suggestions?
Bruce Wilbee
We will likely have consecutive ID Numbers to identify individual courses. The short name will likely be concatenated name using: short name of template to be used (ie CSW2045), course start date and numerical courseID.
Charles Fulton
Hi Bruce, in theory any regular alphanumeric string will work, but your courses do need to have idnumbers. What do those look like>