Sharing Cart
Contents
Purpose
The Sharing Cart is a block for duplicating course items into a personal library and an easy way to move those Moodle resources and activities between multiple courses on your site. With just three clicks, the Sharing Cart copies and moves a single course item from one course to another. It copies without user data—similar to the “Import” function in Course Administration. From version 2.3, user content in Forums, Wikis, Glossaries and Databases can optionally be included. In addition, items can be collected and saved on the Sharing Cart indefinitely, serving as a library of frequently used course items available for duplication. The Sharing Cart is viewable only by teachers, course creators and administrators.
Operation
- Turning On and Off: With editing on, add the Sharing Cart block from the block menu. After adding the Sharing Cart block, you will notice the block stays "on" the next time you enter that course. When you go to another course, add the Sharing Cart block to that new course. Then you can see your Sharing Cart as you roam courses across a site. Click the "X" icon to turn "off" the Sharing Cart, although the contents of the Sharing Cart will remain there when you turn it on again.
- Copying to the Sharing Cart: You will notice a small "Copy to Sharing Cart" icon which appears after each resource or activity in the center column of a Moodle course. Click on that icon to send a copy of that resource/activity into the Sharing Cart. User data will be removed, only the activity itself will be cloned.
- Copying from the Sharing Cart: Click the "Copy to course" icon in Sharing Cart, then you will see many dotted boxes appear in the center column. Choose the location you wish to place your item, and it will be copied there directly.
- Making folders inside the Sharing Cart: Click the "move" icon on a course content item and an input box will appear. Input the name of the target folder there. To move an item into a folder, click the "Move to folder" icon in the Sharing Cart, then a drop-down list appears, and select the target folder. If you click the “Edit” button, you will replace the drop-down list with an input box.
Roles
Generally, the Sharing Cart will duplicate any activity in any course that a teacher has access to. However, quiz questions have another set of permissions independent of site roles. Therefore, if you experience difficulty sharing questions in Moodle 1.9 (i.e. students cannot view embedded audio or images), we recommend making a new role within your site:
- Add a new role--Question Creator: Make this role in Site Admin >> Users >> Permissions >> Define roles, and assign all teachers to this role (in addition to other roles they already have). This role should be given at least the following rights (set permissions to "Allow") under "Course": Manage Activities, Manage Files,Add new questions, Edit all questions, Edit question categories, Move all questions, Use all questions, View all questions.
- Set questions to System Question Category: If you set questions to course or activity level categories, you may not be able to share them.
TIP 1: ...Possibly add another role--Question User: If students are unable to view questions, make this role and assign all students to this role. Set to "Allow" the following permissions: Use all questions, View all questions.
These additional roles are likely not needed in Moodle 2.x, because of more robust ways to save media files.
Known Issues & Roadmap
- It seems that two capabilities are required by a user in order to use the plugin in the most basic scenario (copying an item): 1) Restore activities (moodle/restore:restoreactivity); 2) Restore courses (moodle/restore:restorecourse). Therefore, programmers and administrators must be aware of this when granting permission to using the Sharing Cart. Currently there is an open issue of an exception thrown when a user does not have these two capabilities.
- Sharing Cart 2.2-2.7 is stable, with two minor bugs--only one folder can be created and the Essential theme hides the Sharing Cart icons. Please send feedback directly to Don Hinkelman: hinkel at sgu.ac.jp.
- Sharing Cart 1.9 works well with Moodle standard modules (activities and resources) including Hotpot. Sorry, this version is no longer updated.
- Some third party modules with incomplete backup/restore will not work with the Sharing Cart and may produce fatal errors. Here is what to do.Sharing Cart/Project Format Errors
- If you make an administrator setting to enable "split restore" (Admin block>>Miscellaneous>>experimental>>split restore), the Sharing Cart will not work properly. To make it work, turn off split restore.
- In SC 1.9, media files are copied (not moved) to each instance of a new duplicate file. This solves many troublesome issues of permissions to access the files. However, for sites with restricted hard disk space, it may fill up space quickly.
- *Block: Sharing Cart 2.9 release 1 - 2015.06.25 (fixed function change to test_core)
- For future versions, depending on funding, we wonder if there is interest to build a locking mechanism to prevent the Sharing Cart from copying commercial works or items that the author does not want copied.
Issues to Consider
- The Sharing Cart uses core code that has significant issues. See MDL-12403: Minimize questions in Question Bank-original “Backup/Import of single quiz includes all questions in database” Bug—critical; MDL-41924: Minimize questions in Question Bank-new; MDL-19721: Put Sharing Cart into core. Voting for these issues may help the Sharing Cart provide better performance and user satisfaction.
- Moodle 1.9 has a sophisticated system of permissions for the Question Bank. Question categories can be limited to certain teachers. The Sharing Cart operates on the assumption that sharing of questions is desirable and little control is needed. We do not know all possible results that may happen if questions are copied and duplicated. For example, if the question was originally limited to a "Course" category, will it share perfectly to other courses and students? Please report to us any problems you find concerning this question. Before, we were recommending sharing questions with the "System" level question category because the philosophy of Moodle of collaboration and sharing. However due to a long-standing bug in Moodle core, if you keep thousands of questions at the System level, it will slow down all sharing of quizzes, even to the point of crashing backup/restore.
- Finally, if your administration wishes to have a high degree of control of questions and activities, the Sharing Cart may be too easy-to-use. In terms of site user policies, we believe sharing permissions should be broadly applied not just to administrators, but to all teachers. Your policy on sharing depends on your institutional culture and values.
Maintainers
The designers of this block were Don Hinkelman and Andy Johnson of the Moodle Association of Japan. This block was originally programmed by Akio Ohnishi and Tomonori Maruyama at Version2 Educational Web Development and released under GPL. Tue Korsgaard of Praxis became a maintainer from November 2019, assisting Don Hinkelman. Funding has been provided by Sapporo Gakuin University, the University of Ulm, the Japan Association of Language Teaching--CALL SIG, and the Moodle Association of Japan. We welcome other contributors and thank Praxis for donating their time. For issues and suggestions, please contact Don and Tue on the Sharing Cart github here (https://github.com/donhinkelman/moodle-block_sharing_cart) or directly (hinkel at sgu.ac.jp).
