Many of our administrators, programme leaders and lecturers long for the day when many of the systems we have in-house such as Moodle and SITS will communicate effortlessly to the point where manual work is minimised. Well the future is bright or at least it will be with Moodle 2.4.
About SITS
As part of the SLE investments project, we are promised a much improved and enhanced integration of Strategic Information Technology Services(SITS) system with Moodle. SITS is a student records management system used by the university to store, administer and manage all aspects of student information from enquiries through to graduation and alumni. The system acts as the central point of information on students and their qualifications, and integrates with supporting applications such as finance systems, campus access systems, library systems, estates management, human resource systems and our virtual learning environment that is Moodle.
There are a number of improvements that can be made to ensure that these systems do provide a much more seamless experience both for staff and student. The SITS Integration working group ran a workshop earlier last year which was attended by course officers, registrars and Information Services (IS) and the Learning Development Centre(LDC). The workshop reviewed current processes and developed connections. Along with that, the workshop helped provide a better understanding of the workflow between Moodle and SITS. The SITS Integration project has now been incorporated into the Student and Staff Lifecycle Management programme(SLMP) within IS as advertised in City News this week. This is significant since it includes a number of linked projects such as Single Sign On, Identity Management, Student Gateway, Staff Gateway and integration of Moodle 2.X
In the pipeline
The aim is to streamline and automate things as much as possible so that our tutors can assign who they want on their courses from the SITS system rather than having to request from admin support. Along with that, the synchronization between SITS and modules will be further refined. More specifically, we are aiming to reduce the amount of manual enrolment that is currently required in the general upkeep of a module.Single Sign on is also on the horizon. Single Sign On is where the days of logging into various different systems used by the staff and student will become old news.
We will continue to keep you updated once we have more specific information so do watch this space.
