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Helen Whitehead

Helen Whitehead

Learning Technology Consultant, Nottingham: University Park

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Posts by Helen Whitehead

Advent calendar #1: Welcome!

Welcome to our 2022 Advent Calendar! Over the next 24 days we’ll be offering tips, tricks and even a few little gifts you can paste directly into your course and use… This year we are using Xerte Toolkits for our calendar. There are lots of ways you can use Xerte for interactive features, and in …

Five minutes with… Doug Buck

What is your job role? Team leader for the Learning Systems Team What 3 words describe you? Technical, Progressive, knowledgeable. Tell us something ‘unusual’ about yourself I spent around 20 years working in industry, mostly IT, before joining the university. Or a less work thing, I’m big into world building for my tabletop roleplay gaming …

The Moodle Archive: What happens to old modules in Moodle?

You may be surprised to hear that modules that have been offered to students using Moodle are all kept. This means that we have “snapshot” copies of every module ever taught from when we first started using Moodle in 2011. This is an amazing resource of over 100,000 archived modules. In October we archived (most …

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Using video for formative assessment

We have been seeing an increasing number of video assignments being used with students. Having students submit video has a number of advantages including:  Can be used in the context of peer review.   May be a more authentic method of assessment.  Can be included in a career-facing e-portfolio.  Many students really enjoy creating videos. Video …

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Training and drop-in sessions including online marking and face-to-face drop-in

Learn something new, or come for a refresher – we’ve got lots of training courses on offer this autumn. They’re aimed to provide you with the support you need at the right time of year. As assessment season hots up (unlike the real season…) there’s new training in marking online. These have been organised with …

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Rebranding of Rogō to be called ExamSys

The university is rebranding its online e-assessment and examination system, currently called Rogō. It will become known as ExamSys. This will happen on Wednesday 9 November 2022, between 1pm and 4pm, UK time. There may be a small amount of downtime during this period.  The system will be upgraded to the latest version 7.5 – …

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Using images in teaching

We’ve been asked recently about good practice in using images in teaching. Which can you use, how do you prepare them and how do you use them? Copyright Images must all be checked for copyright. Provide your own images (take pictures) or use images that have a Creative Commons licence (include the correct attribution somewhere). The …

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How staff can prepare for ExamSys assessments for the new academic year

ExamSys is the University’s online assessment system, written within the University, for both informal formative self-assessment quizzes and formal online summative exams. It is used for assessment when a quiz-type format is appropriate. In ExamSys, there are 15 question types. Reports on student performance can be accessed and exported, enabling staff to assess the value …

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Top ten tips for staff before you make your module visible to students

There’s a lot to do at the start of session. So here are the top ten things to do with your Moodle module before the students get access: Can you see, in Moodle, the module you’re teaching? The 22-23 modules are all ready and waiting, visible to staff but possibly not yet to students. If …

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Three simple ways to engage students in lectures

A common question that we get asked is about are the best ways to poll students in face-to-face lectures, or seek short one-word or short-phrase answers. There are many third-party tools out there but to use those, you will need to evaluate them with regard to data protection, security, accessibility, sustainability, archivability and suitability. It’s …

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