Moodle

Each Moodle course site has a main page and this is the first page students see when they go to your course in Moodle.

There are a variety of ways information can be organized - weekly, by topics, grouping of weeks or days, and a combination of topic headers with weeks or dates. Whatever method you choose for your courses - and you may have different layouts for different courses - keep this phrase in mind - organize with rhythm, consistency and intuitively.

• Develop repeating patterns of presenting information

  • what do the students do before class, what is happening during class time, what are the assignments and so on.

OR • AND/OR

• on Mondays certain type or types of activities are done, Wednesdays are for something different and so on

Going one step further ... do the connections exist between what is on the Moodle course page to the syllabus and/or schedule ... are the directions/instructions in the activities themselves clear ... is their sufficient time allotted to do the activity ... and so on.

To get to the final destination of an activity or a reading or viewing content outside of Moodle, make it easy to get there with one or at most two clicks/taps.

The layout and presentation on your course main Moodle page is where it is important to view through the eyes of your students. Are the names of items explanatory, can they tell what "it" is before clicking on it, are related items for an activity or project or discussion grouped together and presented so they appear together and so on. Take advantage of the feature in Moodle to view your Moodle site as a student.

To explore different approaches to organizing content and adding your contact information click on the following link and follow along in Moodle.

Organizing Your Course's Main Moodle Page

Tips and Notes

Viewing your Moodle site as a student. Choose Switch role to from the options displayed from the down arrow to the right of your name/image at the upper right. Choose Student from the presented choices. Navigate, click on activities and links and so on. Note that you will not be able to do assignments or quizzes for a grade! When finished viewing as a student, choose Return to my normal role from the options displayed from the down arrow to the right of your name/image at the upper right.

Suggestions

Invite a colleague or a student worker not in your class to provide feedback and comments.

Course settings provide the ability to define parameters and settings for your course. For example, to adjust the name of your course to its full name.

To explore typical settings and make changes to your Moodle course settings, click on the following link and follow along in Moodle.

Course Settings

In Moodle, you have a default profile which you can change. You can include a picture, information about yourself, perhaps links to your faculty profile, to publications, websites, and so on. For a personal touch, consider sharing something you enjoy doing, a non-academic-related skill and so on.

A Moodle Profile is one way students can find some information about you and a way of introducing yourself to your students.

To setup your profile, click on the following link and follow along in Moodle.

How to Setup Your Moodle Profile

Tips and Notes

Timezone - the default timezone setting is for central Texas [America/Chicago]. If you are in a different time zone, you can specify the timezone you are in. A nice feature of setting the timezone is everything in Moodle that has time settings or options, those values will be in the timezone you specified

Suggestions

Students have Moodle profiles and they edit and manage them the same way. A nice benefit for all is when students add an image to their profile, you will see those images next to their names when you view the Participants in your courses.

Idea - perhaps have an “assignment” for students to modify their default Moodle profile or review/update the one they have created. At a minimum, add an image of themself that is recognizable and is not objectionable or not their cat or car or a sibling, etc.

Students can set their timezone and the times and dates in activities that have time parameters will automatically adjust to their specified timezone.

Tip - for students in timezones where a 9:00am quiz/exam appears to start at 7:00am or perhaps 4:00am, you can specify a different start time for them with User overrides in that activity.

Moodle provides two methods to communicate with your students outside of Forums and other activities. These are Announcements and Messages.

Announcements you create are automatically sent to all of your students in your class as emails. In addition, the announcements you post are saved in the Announcements item on your course Moodle page. At any time your students can review any past announcements.

Announcements content can include links, images, YouTube/Google Drive videos, formatted text and so on.

Messages are designed to send a short note to an individual student or to a group of students. Messages do not have the text formatting features of an Announcement and you will not receive a copy of the message in your email. You can view past sent Messages by revisiting Messages.

To create and work with Announcements and Messages click on the following link and follow along in Moodle.

Announcements and Messages

Tips and Notes

Announcements are sorted from top to bottom from newest to oldest. You can "pin" an announcement to stay at the top and can unpin pinned announcements as well.

Announcements can be scheduled for when they will be visible and the emails sent.

Suggestions

Create a Welcome to Our Class Announcement and schedule it to be sent a day or two* before the first day of class. If you have a welcome video, you can include the video's link in your welcome announcement as well.

Tip - the dates and times of created timed announcements can be modified by changing the Display period start values.

Suggestion - Your welcome announcement or another announcement would be an additional way to inform students of what is happening the first day of class especially if your class will be an A/B split where all the students cannot be in the classroom at the same time.

* The date has not been determined when the students will be added to their fall classes in Moodle. Until that time, your students cannot see the contents of their class sites and they do not see the names of their classes in the Navigation and Dashboard areas.

Content can be added to your main Moodle in several different ways. We'll explore and learn four different ways to add content to your Moodle page.

• • adding an image two different ways

  • adding a PDF document and two ways of displaying the PDF document

  • adding a page of content connected by a link on your main Moodle page

If you would like to add an image or a PDF, please have those handy to access on your laptop.

Note - anything you add to your Moodle site you can edit, move, rename, hide, and delete.

To explore and add content to your Moodle course, click on the following link and follow along in Moodle.

Adding and Managing Content - Images, PDFs, Pages

Tips

To hide an item or a section on your main Moodle page, go into Editing mode, and to the right of the item or section you wish to hide, choose Hide from the Edit menu.

Hiding items and/or sections is a convenient way to work on activities and resources without the students seeing what you are doing.

Don't forget to show any hidden items that you want the students to interact with! Return to the Edit menu to the right of the item or section you wish to show and choose Show.

Content can be added to your main Moodle in several different ways. We'll explore and learn how to link to documents and content on your Google Drive and from YouTube.

If would like to link to a document on your Google Drive, please have your Google Drive open in another browser tab. Similarly for YouTube, have the video you wish to use open in YouTube in another browser tab.

Note - anything you add to your Moodle site you can edit, move, rename, hide, and delete.

To explore and link to content from Google Drive and YouTube, click on the following link and follow along in Moodle.

Using Documents in Google Drive and YouTube in Your Moodle Course

Tips

To hide an item or a section on your main Moodle page, go into Editing mode, and to the right of the item or section you wish to hide, choose Hide from the Edit menu.

Hiding items and/or sections is a convenient way to work on activities and resources without the students seeing what you are doing.

Don't forget to show any hidden items that you want the students to interact with! Return to the Edit menu to the right of the item or section you wish to show and choose Show.

In this module we'll explore a collection of additional organizing techniques and some of the tools in the content editing Toolbar - Equation Editor, changing and customizing font and font background colors, and Wikimedia. Wikimedia is a collection of images and other document types that are free to use. We'll also discuss viewing your Moodle site as a student and how to do that.

To become acquainted with this collection of topics, click on the following link and follow along in Moodle.

Organizing Tips, Equation Editor, Font and Background Colors, Wikimedia

Tips and Notes

Viewing your Moodle site as a student. Choose Switch role to from the options displayed from the down arrow to the right of your name/image at the upper right. Choose Student from the presented choices. Navigate, click on activities and links and so on. Note that you will not be able to do assignments or quizzes for a grade! When finished viewing as a student, choose Return to my normal role from the options displayed from the down arrow to the right of your name/image at the upper right. [This is shown in the video for this module.]

The Forum activity in Moodle is a good resource for Discussions. You can have multiple Forums in your course sites and they can be of different types as well.

The most common and default Forum type is the Standard forum for general use. This style is the typical post and reply, multiple threads conversations found in other forums or posting apps and services. Each student and the instructor can start a new topic within the forum and all can reply to anyone else's posts. The exception is if the instructor locks a topic thread or the entire forum.

In the A single simple discussion each person replies to one topic the is defined by the instructor. The Each person posts one discussion forum style allows each student to post only one new topic. In both of these, you and the students can reply to any posting.

The Q and A style is not limited to only questions and answers - its more along the lines of the instructor creates a post and the students reply to that post based on your criteria. The difference in this forum as compared to the A single simple discussion style is in the Q and A style, students cannot see any of their classmates posts until they have made their initial post first.

New features in Forums with our new version of Moodle include grading and private replies. You now have the option to assign grades to Forums and the grade applies to the Forum as a whole. In your Moodle class sites you can have a mix of Forums with grades and those without grades. Private replies allow you to reply to a student's post without anyone else in the class seeing that post except for you and the student. Both you and the student will see the post marked as private and the student cannot reply to a private reply.

To become acquainted with Forums in Moodle and create a Forum, click on the following link and follow along in Moodle.

Discussions • Forums in Moodle

Tips and Notes

The area where you and your students enter the content is the standard text and content area with all the tools in the toolbar available. Posts can include images and links in addition to formatted text.

Moodle's Assignment activity provides several options for accepting submissions - content that is directly entered into Moodle with the capabilities to format the text, including images and links - e.g. links to content on Google Drive. Assignments can be set to accept document submissions - PDFs, images, and other types - and an Assignment can be configured to accept both online text and documents. Assignments can be configured for no submissions but with a grade. For example, an out-of-class activity done on campus near the Thinking Tree. Assignments can have due dates or not, a time limit and configured to be only available during a set time period.

Assignments, as with other activities in Moodle that have date and time parameters set, overrides can be configured to provide accommodations for students that need different time parameters. For combined sections using one Moodle site, groups can be setup for each section. With groups, overrides can be set so that each group has different time parameters for the same assignment. Groups can also be setup in any Moodle site - single section site or combined sites.

To become acquainted with creating an Assignment, providing feedback or annotations on submitted work and assigning grades, click on the following link and follow along in Moodle.

Assignments in Moodle

Tips and Notes

The area where you and your students enter content is the standard text and content area with all the tools in the toolbar available. The Assignment description [prompt] as well as your students entering content directly into the Assignment for submission can include images and links in addition to formatted text.

Grade with Rubrics or Grading Guides in Moodle - follow the steps in this resource on how to set up Rubrics and Grading Guides. [from the University of Massachusetts Amherst]

Moodle Quizzes have two components - questions that are created and stored in the Question Bank and the Quiz activity that contains questions you choose from the Question Bank. The Quiz activity has parameters for setting the date and time for when a Quiz is available, when the Quiz closes, and the amount of time the student has to complete the quiz. Quizzes can have none of these time parameters set which is useful for self-assessments.

The available question types are: Calculated and Calculated Simple - Calculated Multichoice - Drag and Drop onto Image - Drag and Drop Markers - Drag and Drop into Text - Embedded Answers (Cloze) - Essay - Matching - Multiple Choice - Numerical - Select Missing - Words - Short Answer - True/False

A handy reference for the different questions types with examples may be found at:

Quiz Question Types in Moodle

Once you have questions in your Question Bank, you can add the ones you want to use in a Quiz activity. You can have several quizzes in your Moodle site that use different or the same or a combination of questions from your Question Bank. If in the midst of creating a quiz you forgot to add a question in your Question Bank and/or you have a new question, you can create a new question while setting up the Quiz activity.

To become acquainted with adding questions to your Question Bank and creating a Quiz, click on the following link and follow along in Moodle.

Quizzes and the Question Bank

Tips and Notes

Moodle provides the ability to import questions from a variety of standard and other formats. Some publishers provide questions for importing into Moodle or in another compatible standard format.

You can also create your own import files of your questions. Details about the different import formats may be found at:

Import Questions

Moodle Assignments and Quizzes that have time related parameters set, you can providing accommodations - for example, a student needs 2 times the amount of time on a quiz - with overrides - User Overrides and/or Group Overrides

A reference for setting up user and group overrides for Quizzes • the same process applies to Assignments

Quizzes • Accommodations

Tips and Notes

If you have more than one student with the same accommodation, you can create a Group in Moodle for those students and apply a Group Overrides to the Quiz or Assignment. All members of the Moodle Group will have the Group Override settings you configured in that Quiz or Assignment.

Groups in Moodle allow you separate students into groups to use in Forums, Quizzes, Assignments and so on. For example, you have a students working on projects in groups. You want to use a Forum so the groups members can communicate among each other but not with anyone outside their group. To accomplish this, you create the project groups and in the Forum's setting in the Common module settings area set Group mode to Separate groups. This similar type setting you can do for other activities.

Information about setting up and working with groups:

• Create & Modify Groups in Moodle

• Create Groupings in Moodle [A Grouping is a collection of groups. Groupings can be used to organize groups, assign activities, distribute materials, and/or maintain forums]

• Assign an Activity to a Group or Grouping in Moodle

Google Drive is a collaborative service available to all Southwestern students, faculty and staff. It is a great resource for storing and accessing from anywhere all types of content, working with others "in real time" on documents, and you have unlimited storage space.

You can share the content you choose on your Google Drive with your students and place links to that content on Moodle. For accessing videos created by you or your students, placing those on Google Drive makes them "stream-able". Moodle is not a streaming service and it is recommended to use Google Drive for videos and add the links to Moodle for you and your students to access the videos.

Google Drive is another option for students to submit assignments or other types of content. The collection of document types in Google Drive provide different ways and tools for you and your students to work with content. For an overview of Google Drive, go to:

Drive Cheat Sheet

To become acquainted with Google Drive, setting up and sharing content, student submission folders, and linking with Moodle, click on the following link and follow along in Google and Moodle.

Google Drive • Sharing Content, Student Submission Folders and Moodle

Tips and Notes

Every folder and document on Google Drive has its own unique web address [URL]. You can move and rename content on your Google Drive without the worry of breaking links. There are two ways you can create broken links - un-share the content with the person accessing the link or deleting the document/folder on your Google Drive.

• How to share articles, videos, audio, etc. from SU’s licensed resources and databases

Google Drive provides the ability to setup collaborative spaces for your students to work in groups and with the entire class as well. Similar to how you would set up a folder on your Google Drive for students to view shared content, setting up a collaborative space is easily done by setting a different permission.

There are several documents types in Google Drive that work well for collaborative work:

• • Documents - primarily working with text content and includes the same formatting, creating links, and inserting features of images as with Word and Pages

  • Sheets - spreadsheet document supporting a large selection of formulas and charting capabilities similar to Excel and Numbers

  • Slides - presentations, posters, publication type documents similar to PowerPoint and Keynote

  • Forms - provides the ability to create questionnaires, polls, and for collecting information

  • Drawings - single page - can set to any size and orientation needed - contains tools for freehand drawing, shapes, formatting of objects, word art, insertion of images, and more

  • Jamboard - single and multi "page" whiteboard/chalkboard with basic pens, colors, insertion of images, and "sticky notes" text

To become acquainted with using Google Drive for collaborative spaces, setting up these spaces, exploring a few document types for collaboration, and linking with Moodle, click on the following link and follow along in Google and Moodle.

Google Drive • Collaborative Spaces and Moodle

Tips and Notes

Slides and Drawings can also be used as whiteboards/chalkboards in addition to Jamboard

Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents can be converted into the corresponding Google Drive documents.

Jamboard is available as an app for tablets and phones. One can use their fingers or supported pens/styli to work with Jamboard content.

Other Google Drive documents are also available as apps for tablets and phones. The documents types with a freehand tool can be used with your fingers or supported pens/styli.

Moodle's Gradebook allows you to design and configure a grade book to "line-up" with your syllabus. There are many different ways instructors calculate grades ... averages ... weighting factors ... sum of the grades ... mixtures where some groups of items are averaged and other groups are averaged but two items in a group have different weights ... and so on.

If you can, you'll probably find it easier to setup your grade book first before creating activities that will have grades. However, you can set up your grade book up at any time. In addition, you can modify your grade book at any time and the Gradebook will automatically recalculate grades if needed by any changes you make.

If you have a syllabus handy - doesn't have to be current or "real" - you can use that as your "model" to setup a grade book. Anything you add or modify in the Gradebook can be removed and reverted back.

In the first video, we'll be setting up a grade book with categories where the categories have different contributing values, change some grades to weighted, view what the students will see, and modify the arrangement of what the students see. Click on the following link and follow along in Moodle.

Moodle Gradebook and Grades

If your grade calculation is done by adding up the grade numbers as the students progress through your class, check out:

Configuring Your Gradebook to Sum Grades

Tips and Notes

Drop the Lowest Grade or Grades - the Gradebook allows you to specify the lowest grade or grades to drop for the entire course or by categories.

Import - grades can be imported into the Moodle Gradebook and details about that may be found at: Grade Import

For courses with activities and graded items that do not use Moodle's activities - e.g. FRA's, Cello, and etc. - you can enter the current grade of your students directly into Moodle's gradebook. When their grades change as the course progresses, you return to the gradebook and update the grades.

• • Entering students current grade directly into Moodle - no gradebook to setup

    • This guide is designed to be used while you are signed into Moodle

    • Current Grade Direct Entry Guide (click on the speaker icons to hear the narration) - NOTE: The screen images are from our previous version of Moodle prior to June 30th but the steps are the same in our current Moodle.

Moodle's gradebook will display the students' current grades but often students like to "predict" their grade to determine how a future grade would impact their overall grade. Also, weighting factors, dropping the lowest grade in more than one category, and so on can be confusing to students. Using Google Sheet to setup a Grade Calculator for your students and by sharing with View permissions, the students can make a copy to their Google Drive.

• Grade Calculator Examples:

  • Julie Sievers examples - (includes total points and weighted versions - see the 3 tabs at the bottom of the page)

  • Melanie Hoag example

• • “Learn Moodle Basics 3.8” - collection of short videos covering a range of Moodle topics and features.

Note: The appearance of Moodle in these videos is different than SU's and you will see some differences in layout and navigation.