October 2019 – H5P, Moodlemoot, KiwiMUG
The 1st to 4th October are going to be a wealth of professional development this year, so mark your calendars!
HRDNZ is organising H5P workshops and Moodlemoot from Tuesday 1st October to Thursday 3rd October with Unitec as host venue in Auckland.
Tuesday 1st October is dedicated to H5P. If you are not aware of H5P, think of it as a highly interactive activity – many people use it instead of Flash now.
H5P integrates into Moodle via a plugin, and allows teachers to create, share, and reuse high quality, engaging, and interactive activities and resources.
It has a real “wow” factor for learners.
We have two parallel H5P workshops – one for people completely new to H5P, and one for those already using it.
Wednesday 2nd October is our Moodle community day, with keynotes and break-out sessions for teachers, administrator, managers,, etc. We have a number of great speakers and presenters already confirmed.
Thursday 3rd October has a selection of half day Moodle workshops – really focussing on practical skills and knowledge building. I will be running some workshops, so hope to see you there.
Registration for these event is open and there is a 20% EARLY-BIRD DISCOUNT in place until the END OF AUGUST. The “call for presentations” is open – and we would love you to come along and share something with the Moodle community !
You can access all the event details at: https://www.moodlemoot.co.nz
Friday 5 October is the free event known as Kiwi Mahara User Group and will be hosted at Waitakere hospital. https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/kiwi-mug-mahara-user-group-tickets-55302427048
I will probably be sharing what we have been doing at Waitematā District Health Board with Mahara.
Please help spread the word about these development and networking opportunities.
Learn Moodle MOOC
As the year comes close to it’s end it seems like a good time to think of some development goals for 2018. Learn Moodle 3.4 Basics MOOC is a free, four week course that you can sign up for here.
For those who work in education there are many reasons why you might want to consider signing up for the next Learn Moodle MOOC starting 8 January 2018.
Here is a quick list, if you tick a box or two then think about signing up:
- never seen an LMS or never seen Moodle
- not used Moodle in ages and want a refresher of latest features and current practice
- want to experience being a student to better understand their needs
- interested course design and experience an approach used for big groups
- get some inspiration for your teaching practice by seeing some activities in action
- network with some other Moodle users, hear and share stories, make some friends – you can also join the conversation on twitter using #learnmoodle and engage with other participants in the forum
- give yourself license to reflect on your own practice by comparing with what you see and experience during the MOOC
- get some help on some challenges you are facing through doing the activities and learning more about Moodle and through conversations with other participants
- get free professional development
- you want a badge! you can use this MOOC as a way to collect a badge, useful particularly if you have started talking about badges at your learning institute but not figured out what it is all about yet and are ready to explore
Note that you can start introducing yourself and familiarising yourself with the course on 1 January 2018, so don’t feel like you have to wait until the 8th to get started.
That link again – https://learn.moodle.net/
Share the love and inspire other teachers by spreading the word to educators you know.
Letting the outside world into your classroom
One of the many lessons I have learned over my years of working in education, is to remember to bring the outside into the classroom.
There are lots of ways to do that, whether it be guest speakers, excursions, work experience, getting students to bring things in, all sorts! But an easy starting point is RSS feeds into your online classroom space.
I remember reading about RSS being old technology that was going out the window, but I have to say that news feeds are still incredibly powerful at helping connect what students are learning about with the real world. They invite conversations that link theory with practice, and all too often give real examples of what can go wrong.
If you are using Moodle, it is very easy to add an RSS feed to your course (turn editing on, add a block, remote RSS feeds).
If you haven’t done it before but have a relevant news provider for the industry relevant to your teaching, you are looking for and you need to get the URL for the feed.
The URL (that is the web address) for the RSS feed will start with “http://” and usually ends with “.xml”.
Blogs often have RSS output, and there might be an RSS feed on one of your favourite industry websites, so go looking and bring the outside world into your classroom.
Communicating in Moodle
Today I’m highlighting some ways of communicating in Moodle. Read more…
Monitoring in Moodle
Today I want to share a few ideas around monitoring in Moodle: Setting up your Moodle courses to reduce the teacher management workload, effectively monitor student progress, and empower students with the autonomy to self manage as they progress through their studies.
So often teachers talk of the high workload in managing online components of the their courses; checking which students have completed what tasks, looking for forum contributions and checking what needs marking.
This post will show tracking options and reports available to teachers and students. I will focus on core tools that are available in a modern Moodle standard install. There are excellent modules and plugins available, however they’re not much use if you don’t have admin rights, so here’s what tools you will have.
Reports
There are different types of reports available in Moodle through the administration block or through the user profile page.
Logs and live logs
You can generate logs of course activity by selecting any combination: participants, days, activities, actions or events. Then click on “Get these logs”.
Use the ? icon to get more information. The logs give you active links enabling you to access the student’s profile page or the particular page they were viewing. IP address gives an estimate of the student’s location.
Teachers and students both have access to logs but they get different information. See the user reports below for student views.
Course reports > Activity reports
Teachers can assess the usage of each activity and resource within their course using the activity report. It shows the count of clicks and the number of unique users who clicked. This can assist in having conversations with learners about why some activities and resources have more clicks than others, but the data in isolation should not be used to make assumptions.
A question that helps teachers understand this:
You read the Course > Activity report and find one resource has 200 clicks, another has 20 clicks. Discuss which resource is the most useful to your students and why? What is the data telling you?
Ask teachers to discuss the possible causes of clicks:
- “It was really useful so I referred to it often.”
- “It was confusing and I read it over and over but still don’t understand.”
- “I didn’t click on it because the name of it made me think I didn’t need to open that.”
- “I didn’t open it because I already knew about it.”
Course reports > Course participation
Teachers can generate a participation report on a particular activity. For example: forum view or forum posts. A useful feature of the participation report is the option to send a message to all students who have or have not completed an action.
Course reports > Activity completion
If the Moodle site has activity completion enabled this can drastically improve course management and a huge time saver for both the teacher and the student. Setting up activity completion is discussed later in this blog post, so keep reading!
The reports above are largely teacher focused. Next, let’s look at the reports and tools primarily for students.
User reports > Profile page
User reports > Today’s logs and all logs
Students can use the logs to show their submissions were sent on time. They can also see what days of the week they are more active.
User reports > Outline report
This is a brief outline of the learner’s course participation. For more detailed information they can look at the complete report. This report is useful for a brief overview and to check if they have missed anything.
User reports > Complete report
The learner can use the complete report to get a detailed record of their course contributions. Depending on the course design, the learner can print their complete report and use it as a study guide. Teachers who would like to encourage this approach should get their students to write question and answers in forum posts, and ensure the layout of activities like database show the questions in the students responses so the questions appear in the complete report.
I have used this approach in a course that has an elearning pre-requisite to a face-to-face workshop. The learner prints their complete report and brings it to the workshop, instead of printing a large workbook.
Using the reports
When I teach people how to use the reports and logs I give them scenarios to consider in groups.
- A student says that they have submitted an assignment before the due date, but it is showing as late. Which reports can you look into to see exactly when the student accessed and submitted the assignment? Discuss in a group and submit your chosen answer in this choice activity.
- The teacher wants to check the students are all keeping up with the course work. They should have done the first three topics. Which reports can you look into to see exactly where the students are at? Discuss in a group and submit your chosen answer in this choice activity.
- One of the students has asked to meet with you about their course work. They are struggling with the course work but they say they have been trying to do all the course required activities. What report would you look at to prepare to meet with them? Discuss in a group and submit your chosen answer in this choice activity.
Completion settings
Earlier we showed you the Activity completion report. To use the report above, you need to set up activity completion at site level course level, and in each activity and resource.
It is helpful to refer to Moodle Docs > Activity completion settings to learn about this feature, but the brief is that you can use activity completion settings in Moodle to track and display activities and resources as “complete” for students based on criteria set by the teacher for each resource or activity, dependent on viewing, submitting, receiving a grade, or posting or replying conditions being met.
When I teach this I show how to setup activity completion settings on existing activities such as forum, glossary, page, quiz, and assignment. I discuss with teachers self marked quizzes that show as complete immediately on submission, versus teacher marked assignments which can show as complete on submission or complete when a grade has been received. When the “completion” happens on grade received there is a delay.
Another consideration is that this tracking does not assess quality of contributions. For example, forum conditions can’t assess quality of posts, only quantity. Viewing a resource does not equal reading/understanding/processing etc.
Restrict Access settings
This feature allows you to restrict students from accessing a resource or activity based on criteria set by the teacher (roles are blurry, so I am simplifying here).
There is useful documentation at Moodle Docs > Restrict access settings for you to find out more.
Examples we use in our practice include:
- Restrict access until another resource or activity is marked as complete – e.g. certificate not available until assignments are marked complete.
- Restrict access until after a grade over 90% achieved in another graded activity.
- Restrict access to a group or grouping – we use this to manage monthly new intakes and classes.
- Restrict access until after a date – this could restrict the learner from viewing a resource or activity until after a presentation or a field trip.
- Restrict access so only visible to people who have match a profile field – e.g. city equal to Auckland, this would allow you to show a label with a face to face event for learners in that city.
You can use restrictions to stop learners from viewing the certificate module until after feedback activity is marked complete, and they have a grade of 100% on the assessment activity. This ensures instructional designers are always getting feedback on their development, and the learner has met the assessment standards agreed with the SME.
Note that when you have two restrictions there is the option to require the student to have met “all” or “any” of the requirements. With “all” you see “and” but with “any” you see “or” between the conditions.
Course completion criteria
- Turn on and off course completion tracking in course settings in practice course.
- Add course completion block.
- Set course completion criteria via the administration block
- Discuss the risks of unlocking the criteria after a course has started (note the option to unlock without affecting current completions – how does this impact future participants?).
- Discuss what happens if you want to add an activity, track it in course completion, after students have started? We promote pre-planning, but there is an option to retain some of the data if you do need to make adjustments after the course start date. We recommend reading https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Course_completion_FAQ
Grader report
Moodle includes a grader report that is automatically populated by graded activities in your course. The documentation Moodle Docs > Grader report will give you the steps to using grader report.
During workshops with teachers:
- Look at what is automatically put into the grader report, and what you can manually add, show how to set up categories and grade items, how to use groups for filtering and set grade visibility, type (real/percentage/letter), and weighting.
- Get the workshop participants into groups and give them an existing course that is not currently used by students. Ask the groups to organise the grader report in a way that makes sense to their group, add categories and grade items as necessary, and decide on the weighting of activities.
What I want teachers to think about are the benefits to the students for having the grade structure organised, as well as themselves and moderators and auditors of courses.
I ask workshop participants to share examples and discuss ways they can use these features in their courses.
Feedback on these workshops is overwhelmingly positive. Participants are keen to spend more time on familiarising themselves with these features.
Some feedback received from participants:
- “I have learnt more in the last 2 hours than in the last day… you have my creative juices flowing now.”
- “This session is how I envisioned the whole day to be. It was great!”
- “Impressed by the combination of solid development and “on the fly” flexibility.”
- “I am very keen to add more activities to my courses. Our current pages are flat, unorganized and definitely have the scroll of death!”
- “I’ve got a lot of information now to try and get more out of Moodle which is currently being hugely underutilized.”
- “Really useful to discuss the ways the reports can be used and interpreted, using the as a start point for discussion!”
And despite each workshop being three hours long, when asked “Tell us one thing you would change or improve” received responses are like these:
- “Too short! Could spend a whole day using this type of thing.”
- “Restricted time limit.”
- “It would be great to have a bit more time to go over how to create these things.”
- “More time!”
I hope this blog post helps you monitor your students or provided you ideas for your courses.
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