Your SMS installation will synchronize with Moodle periodically to ensure it has the latest information about enrollments. There are two types of synchronization with Moodle.
Enrollment synchronization is the process that SMS uses to pull grade information from Moodle. This happens every 30 minutes, so on average you will see a 15 minute delay for grade data in SMS.
To perform an enrollment synchronization, SMS downloads the Moodle gradebook of each course. It then compares each gradebook against all SMS enrollments for that course, and updates each enrollment's progress percentage, report card information, and grade.
The percentage complete is calculated by dividing the number of activities the student has a grade for by the total number of non-hidden activities in the course.
<aside> 🗣 Heads up: If you use Moodle's optional completion tracking feature with a custom completion configuration, you may calculate completion differently than SMS completion tracking and SMS can show slightly different percentages than the optional completion tracking module.
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The grade and report card information is provided directly by the Moodle gradebook and is consistent with any custom grading configurations you make to a course.
Course synchronization is the process that SMS uses to pull course information from Moodle. This happens every 30 minutes, so on average you will see a 15 minute delay for course information in SMS.
To perform a course synchronization, SMS downloads the complete course list from Moodle. It then updates the list of courses visible to administrators under the "Courses" tab of the UI:
An administrator must mark a new course as Open, or Closed before it will be visible in the rest of SMS. You can read more about course states on the Course States page.
If a course is deleted from Moodle, during the course synchronization it will also be removed from SMS. Existing enrollments will continue to show that course, and any enrollment data, but it will not appear in the "Courses" tab and new enrollments can not be created.
If your SMS is completely failing to synchronize with Moodle, and more than 30 minutes have passed, there may be an issue with SMS's connection to Moodle. To resolve these issues, a technician will have to identify the issue. This most commonly happens because something has changed on your Moodle installation which revoked SMS's permissions, or changed the location of your Moodle site.
Reach out to [email protected] to have one of our staff check your installation.
If it is only some courses / enrollments, you should try our Sync Error troubleshooting guide: