Using Moodle

Note: This page may be interesting/useful to other instructors; it is not intended to be particularly helpful or interesting to students.

I have been teaching here for a few years now, and I have collected a list of things that I have to do occasionally, but not often enough that I remember how to do them from one time to the next.

Rather than doing a new web search each time, I'm going to list some of these things here. I'm sure some of my colleagues could find them useful too.

• • Granting extensions on Moodle. It is not something I like to do much, but occasionally there is a good reason to give a student an extension - either to hand an assignment in after the official due date or to write an online quiz at a later time.

    • This video describes the process for assignments:

• • Setting up class forum. I have found that a class forum can be useful, especially in large classes, for fostering more communication and interaction. Mileage varies between courses and between groups of students, but I like to have the option there. A couple of tips that I sometimes forget and have to re-learn (at my students' expense):

    • Forum posts are not necessarily archived. If you want the posts to be persistently visible on the eClass forum, check the settings first.

    • The default forum is an announcement-only forum. If you want students to be able to post at all (questions, replies, etc), then you need to create a new forum that is not announcement-only. I generally then make the default forum invisible - I have no use for it. (Students already get emails with my posts to the more interactive forum, so I use that for announcements as well as discussions.)

  • Quiz feedback settings. With quizzes, the default feedback settings aren't great. One option is shown in this screenshot.

• • This interface is under the "Edit settings" page for the quiz (scroll down to find the "Review options" foldout).

  • With these settings:

    • While a student is writing the quiz they can only see their answers - no feedback.

    • While the quiz open but after a particular student has finished, that student can see their marks.

    • Once the quiz is closed to everyone, I let them see it all: their own answers, the right answers, what mark they got, and any feedback that I have incorporated into the questions.

    • This is available to them until the course ends, so they can use it to study up for future quizzes, exams, etc.

  • Capture part of screen on iMac: Command-Shift-4 (whole screeen: cmd-shift-3)

• Building quizzes and question banks

  • • Basic preferences:

      • If I have a multiple choice question, I strongly prefer to set it to allow multiple responses. This eliminates the need for ridiculous "a or b" or "all of the above" items. (It does not obviate the need for "none of the above" options, however.)

      • I also like to set multiple choice questions up with randomly-ordered options. This means that I must put the content in each option, rather than numbering them. I also need to be careful that different answers don't refer to each other in a sequential way. On the other hand, it means that order of presentation isn't something students can use to guess the answers.

    • There are a lot of options and parameters with quiz questions, and it would be pretty easy to accidentally generate questions with confusingly different behaviours. When I get time, I will articulate the standards I try to follow, both for my own reference and as a suggestion to others.

    • I'll also put up some stuff on the formatting of cloze ("Embedded Answer") questions - links or my own descriptions. This is a very powerful question type, but it requires more manual work on the question-writer's part than the other question types.

    • Generally, for large classes (like LING101), I have questions which allow no ambiguity: the automatic marker will never fail (so long as I have programmed it right).

    • For smaller classes and for online final exams, I also incorporate short-answer, fill-in-the-blank, and occasionally long-answer ("essay") questions. These require more manual work.

      • On a short answer question looking for the answer "arytenoid", you won't automatically catch every acceptable variant, such as "arytenoid." (with a "." at the end) or " arytenoid" (with a space at the beginning). Moodle has a wildcard operator, but it is both too permissive and too limited for rigorous marking.

      • On long-answer questions, there is no way to automate the marking. (However, the "Manual Grading" interface does streamline the process as much as possible.)