I did several things last week, but one of them, which I worked on on-and-off over the course of four days, was to copy a moodle course. This was the longest moodle course I had ever seen; in fact, it was at least twice as long as the longest course I had ever seen prior to that point. If I started hitting page down in a large window (with my ridiculously high resolution - 1440X900), it took me eight page downs to get to the bottom of the list of resources - with editing turned off (it's even longer if editing is on). When I first saw this course, my reaction was, Oh dear Lord, please let this course copy okay the quick and easy way because I really don't want to do it item-by-item. It didn't. I tried copying only part of the course and got the same error. I tried copying an empty course, and got the same error . . . We finally gave up on the quick and easy way, and cmoore copied all of the resources over by going in the back way, through the coding. I then set about the slow and arduous and boring process of recreating each resource individually. I did this for two hours on Thursday, and still wasn't half done. I did it for another while on Friday, and then cmoore took pity on me and had me train Amelia to do it so that I could have a break and try to figure out some easy way to copy the quizzes without recreating every single question (and there were a lot of quizzes. Something in the ballpark of two a week). In this whole process, we figured out both things that were wrong with the copying, and fixed the one and avoided the other enough to add the rest of the resources the not-quite-so-quick-and-easy way. And then I had to add new Assignments because they had been corrupted (which was one of the reasons it wasn't working), and go through each list to proofread it and make sure that we hadn't missed or misplaced anything in our crazy hodge-podge of manual copying and copying other stuff in bits and pieces. Between one thing and another, I spent an awful lot of Friday working on this course. And then it was DONE, and I was so happy.

We've also had this fun interaction where this particular prof asked me to delete several old courses, some which were his and one which was the Fall 07 Premajor Advisors course (he was in it as a student). Not only do we not delete old courses, we really don't delete important administrative courses just because some random faculty member asks us to.

And did I mention that he never actually thanked me for copying his monster course of doom? He did include a thanks in the message asking me to delete stuff, but never sent a "gee, thanks for copying that for me," of the sort that I get from most of the other professors (the ones whose courses are short and therefore easy).

And then today I get an e-mail from cmoore.
Subject: Fwd: Question and apology
From: cmoore
To: me
If you didn't want to kill this guy before, you definitely will want to now. I recommend renaming the course into which you just copied everything "temp" and creating a new blank one for him to work in, just in case.
~c.

Even before opening the attached message, I had this sinking feeling.
The message read:

Subject: Question and apology
To: cmoore
From: Professorname
Hi Caroline,

Thanks for getting my course data transferred to CourseName.

As I've been working the last few weeks, I've made some extensive
changes in the course and am thinking about how best to attack what I
have in Moodle.

Question: Is there any easy way to delete all the items listed for a
given week? It is just too cumbersome to go though and delete them
one by one and to move others that I will use again up or down. I
think it will be quicker for me just to clear out all the items and
then insert new ones and link them to the files that were transferred.

If this can't be done (deleting in groups), then could you just get
rid of everything, and I'll start over?

Thanks.

Professorname

Professorname
Professortitle
Professordepartment



I went back to look, and he'd already deleted four whole sections of stuff that I'd slaved over (and which had taken me something like an hour and a half to copy, not to mention the time I spent trying to copy them).

So. Shall I kill him now, Doctor?


ETA: I do feel compelled to add that he did, at least, send me an e-mail saying thanks (eventually). I'm still not pleased with him, though.

Dear Jo,
Thanks so much for not showing up to work your shift today. Yes, I know that it's normally just that one setup in Bass 203, but today was the Work Shift From the Black Lagoon. It would have been bad with two of us. With just me, it was pretty close to a nightmare.

Cheers,
Miriam

( Read more... )

Now I suppose that I should start writing my math paper so that I have something to show when my group meets at 6:45. (Yes, 6:45. And I get out of work at 6:30. And I'm supposed to eat dinner when? Good question. This lovely arrangement is thanks to a group member who had a last-minute conflict so that we can't meet at 7:15 like civilized people. I suppose that it's probably not her fault. It doesn't change the fact that dinner is going to be a very hurried meal.)