Preliminary thoughts about conversion

Popularity of the page course format will probably be affected by its capacity of being converted easily and without much loss to Moodle standard formats, and event possibly to other popular formats.

About course formats

Linear structure formats: Topics (Std), Weekly (Std), Topcoll or tiles formats

Hierarchical formats: FlexSections

Conversion process

Il all cases, both directions of the conversion need to be addressed.

Ideally, course format conversion will be triggered when updating a course in Moodle, and detecting that the format has changed. Fortunately, the on_course_update event observer is triggered in ths situation and let us access to a key instant of the process.

Processing will need to address:

Course modules

Course Blocks

About block, our major concerns are:

In the page format,

Blocks are not located the same way on distinct pages

Some blocks can be located in the “main” block region of the page format layout (that does not exist on other formats and standard page layouts)

Course modules (activities and resources) are represented by a special block (page_module, in that we can say that the page format only deals with blocks…)

Course modules, through their page_module proxy, can appear in side regions, mixed with moodle blocks instances.

Published activites reside in their page/section pair, but may appear on other pages then their assigned section.

In other formats,

Block regions essentially depend on the page layout and are common for all the course.

Course modules are in central course layout, that has no connection to block nor block region concept.

The converting process needs to define the most consistant conversion between both paradigms.

From Page to linear structure formats

Cours modueles (activites and resources)

Destroy all page_module instances, thus moving course modules to standard section content organisation.

Section Sequences must be reordered to keep as much as possible the previous virual ordering.

Linear sections to Page

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