Advent calendar #14: Monitoring student engagement in Moodle

Santa is rumoured to be able to keep track on what we’re all doing so he knows whether we deserve our presents. If he knew about it, he’d be delighted with the possibilities for tracking activity in Moodle. Today we are going to talk about tips and tricks to monitor student activity in Moodle. You …

Advent Calendar #8: Moving files between Microsoft Teams

Today’s Advent Calendar Tip is one you might not even know you need. But if you’ve ever had to move a file from one MS Team to another MS Team, you’ll know why this is handy! You might want to move a file from one Team to another because an incorrect file was added, a …

Advent calendar #4: Ways to poll your students

Polls and simple quizzes can be used during synchronous sessions (face to face or online) and also asynchronously to support learning by: identifying gaps in learners’ understanding, providing a simple way of actively engaging students in their learning, a minimal form of feedback, stimulate conversation, establish a baseline understanding or opinion that you can then …

Advent calendar #2: How to make a Stream video available to students

So you’ve made a recording  of yourself wishing your students a seasonal greeting. How best to share it with the students? When staff make recordings of Teams meetings and learning sessions, the recording ends up in Stream. Here’s why leaving them in Stream isn’t usually the best way to make these available to students. Normally, …

Advent Calendar #1: A festive use for H5P

In our most recent Moodle upgrade we installed H5P. This is an alternative to Xerte Toolkits for creating small interactive items within the Moodle page. You can create, edit and re-use interactive content (e.g. multiple choice quizzes or virtual tours). These can be added as graded activities on your Moodle module or non-graded embedded elements …

A Summer of Moodle #13: Training sessions to help you use Moodle and other technologies

A number of training sessions are being run by the Learning Technology Section and colleagues to help staff plan and create online learning for the new academic year.  More sessions are added all the time, but currently the following are available, all of which help you use Moodle more effectively, often by linking to other systems.  They …

A Summer of Moodle #12: Engaging students with Moodle Quizzes

The Quiz activity in Moodle allows you to design and set quizzes consisting of a large variety of question types, including multiple-choice, true / false, and short answer questions. Moodle questions that you create are kept in the course question bank and can be re-used within courses and between courses. Quizzes can allow multiple attempts. Each attempt …

A Summer of Moodle #11: Communicating with students on your module

Moodle gives you the ability to send an email message to all the students who are enrolled on your module. The email message will be sent to the email address in the student’s profile which has been fixed to the student’s University of Nottingham student email address. Use the Announcements function in your module to send …

A Summer of Moodle #10: Encouraging students to collaborate using Wikis and Databases

You may want your students to work together as a whole class or in groups of whatever size is appropriate. If so, Moodle has several activities to make this happen.  By using collaboration tools such as the Wiki and Database you can set up group work exercises in the same way as you might in a …

A Summer of Moodle #9: Adding a Reading List to your module

A classic way to guide students to relevant material to support their studies is to use a reading list. If the reading list is online it can help students go straight to the relevant item. The University of Nottingham uses the Talis Aspire software to manage reading lists.  Talis Aspire is a separate system, but …