Moodle Exploratorium

Quick links to course elements for your convenience

What are you curious about as you explore this course? Is there anything you'd like to know more about? Let me know!

[I always subscribe to this kind of forum so that I'll be sure to know when someone has asked a question. I recommend subscribing to Q&A forums to all of the instructors I work with. The only tricky thing is remembering to reply in the forum, rather than replying to the email notice I receive.]

My colleague created this presentation in Powtoon, then saved it to Youtube. Enjoy!

I've embedded a Google calendar for my Project Management course in a page (see Oct.-Dec. dates for events). I had to make the calendar public in order for students to view it without having to be logged into their Google accounts. I also added an infographic providing a visual representation of my syllabus.

Shifting from Blackboard to Moodle can be confusing—course layouts are very different.

Here are 10 of my favorite tips for fostering student engagement in Moodle. How many examples can you find in this site?

Come check out our Moodle training site for faculty (Mastering Moodle) and our orientation site for students (Test Drive)! Make a note of these details:

• Use the Non-SOU Account Login link.
• ID: learn.guest
• PW: Moodle77

Enjoy!

Articles for faculty at Southern Oregon University (Moodle 2.5-3.5)

Articles for students at Southern Oregon University (Moodle 2.5-3.5)

We created this page to help faculty new to Moodle find their way.

The Lightbox Gallery plug-in is not activated in this installation, but it's very useful for sharing images files — photos of rocks or plants, cartoons, group projects, etc. Open this page to see what a gallery looks like.

This is an example of a glossary. Instead of defining terms, each entry is a link to a photo.

The "Random glossary entry" block on the right is reaching into the glossary and selecting an image to display randomly each time you open the course page.

Glossaries are designed to be an interactive activity (like the Our Team glossary below), so when you import a copy of your course into a new course shell, any glossaries that you have created will appear without any entries. To restore the entries created in a prior offering of the course, you can export the entries from the prior course and then import them into your new course.

In Learn Moodle Basics 3.7, Michael Milette pointed out that many of the practice courses he reviewed contained large photos that were slow to load. See his tips and download SOU's guide to resizing images.

This is an example of linking a dynamic Google doc to a web site to engage course participants. When I am using a shared doc synchronously in a training session, I add a table with rows like this to make it easier for people to know where to write. Otherwise, it's really chaotic!

Ideas for different kinds of forums to engage your students and how to balance involvement in forums.

Many instructors would like to set open and close dates for discussions, but there isn't a good way to do that yet (as far as I know!). We had hopes for discussion "locking," but it doesn't work the way we thought it would. See this page if you'd like to learn more.

We often get requests from instructors for help with enabling their students to share work with their classmates. Depending on your needs, creating a forum or adjusting the permissions for a folder might do the trick.

Sometimes, a learner needs a little extra time to complete an assignment. See these instructions for granting an extension to a due date. (Opens in new window.)

Check out what it looks like when you go to grade submissions!

Here's an easy way to make sure that due dates are correct for all your assignments (and other activities).

Tired of circulating group sign-up sheets — how would you like to have Moodle enroll students in a group based on their choosing the topic? With the "Group Choice" plug-in, you can!

Lessons are definitely advanced activities! A lesson is similar to a book with information provided in pages, but you can add quiz questions between pages to allow learners to check their understanding. If you really want to get fancy, you can create a lesson that has "branches"—the next page that is displayed depends on the response made by the learner.

Two things to know about navigating this lesson: 1) You can avoid the quiz questions by using the page titles in the table of contents on the right to move through the pages, and 2) If you do take the quiz and enter an incorrect answer, be aware that the questions will be displayed in a different order the next time they appear.

We haven't created any documentation for the Lesson activity, but it looks like what's available at moodle.org is pretty good!

If you'd like, you can download and save this file, then use the "Restore" option in your course to install this lesson in your own course. That will allow you to see how it was made.

Step-by-step instructions for creating quizzes

Some learners may need extra time to complete a timed quiz or may need to take a quiz later than the closing date. Setting up an override just takes a moment. (Opens in a new window.)

The Questionnaire plug-in allows you to survey your learners inside Moodle.

Labels are great for organizing materials in your course!

Completion tracking not only helps students keep track of what they've done and what they need to do, it also helps you track what they are doing.

No one wants to create the dread Moodle Death Scroll! Here's a simple and elegant solution to try.

Also, check out the description of Collapsed Topics in the More Plugins! book below.

One of the new features as of Moodle 3.3, here's an explanation of how you might take advantage of an activity that is hidden, but available.

This explanation starts with a fix for how to undo this setting if you got there by mistake.....

Standard Moodle is great, Moodle with these plug-ins is even better!

Including a course banner at the top of your main course page adds interest and helps participants know what course they're in. Open this page for another way to help course participants keep track of where they are and learn how to add an image to your course name in the dashboard.

Sometimes, the image you insert for your course banner is wider than the viewing space, resulting in the insertion of a horizontal scroll bar. Find out here how you can avoid that (and take advantage of this technique in other text fields, as well!).

This explanation arose in Learn Moodle 3.7 (this one's for you, Twahir!).

Customize the image shown in the "card" view of courses listed in the dashboard

Sometimes it's useful to see how your learners are interacting with course materials. Activity logs can reveal all!

Moodle's gradebook is a bit daunting at first, but once you "get" it, it's really useful both as a course management tool and as a means of communication with students.

Wondering how to create a badge? Here's a quick description for you, based on what I've learned along the way. One of the big things I just learned was to check the settings of the items you're going to use as the basis for awarding a badge — be sure that you'll be rewarding the behavior that you want to reward!

Add a personal touch to your course with the record feature in the Atto editor.

Recommendations for managing your practice course including instructions for customizing your course welcome message and changing role names.

One of the most convenient aspects of Moodle is being able to copy an entire course or parts of a course from a prior edition into a new course shell.

This is easy to do!

Posted in the Course Management area

We've been doing a lot of work in redesigning courses with our faculty. I hope you find this interesting.

If you are considering participating in a future edition of Learn Moodle, you may want to start your practice course where you're leaving off in the current edition. See how easy it is here.

This course is a workshop created for our faculty, elaborated from a similar course I took a few years ago. Some links may be broken, but what is here might be of interest to you.