Moodle

Maths quizzes in Moodle using Maple TA

LTI have a one year site licence for Maple TA for this academic year.

Maple TA is an online testing and assessment software designed especially for quantitative disciplines that involve the use of maths and statistics. It has many features including:

integration with Moodle;
visualisation of mathematical problems;
automatically generating questions;
free response answers for questions that have more than one correct answer;
automatic marking and the provision of instant feedback;
adaptive testing with individualised question paths.

If you are interested in using MapleTA for your course or just want to find out more email LTI.Support@lse.ac.uk

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October 11th, 2016|Announcements, eAssessment News, Moodle, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|0 Comments|

Light for LTI by Helen Page www.helenlouisepage.com

Students are expected to do a substantial amount of their learning outside of the classroom and technology such as Moodle can be used to engage with resources and carry out active learning. All too often staff and students use Moodle to simply access and download material. However good use of the different activities and features can enable more interaction outside of class in order prepare students for in class activities and support students to develop peer learning.

Embedding Moodle activities into your face to face teaching can be aided by introducing them at the outset and referring to activities in lectures and classes. Student engagement can be encouraged by ensuring that activities relate to course content, referring to readings, lecture content and seminar discussions. Participation should be expected (set out as a course requirement) and contributions should be encouraged and supported through teacher engagement. Some examples of successful activities used at LSE include;

Pre-course discussion activities:

These help start to develop a learning community but also get students used to contributing and participating online.

Ice breaker
Students are asked to introduce themselves and say a bit about their background and why they are interested in studying the topic.

Resource discussion
Students are required to watch a short film clip or other relevant resource and post some thoughts about it onto a group discussion forum before the first lecture.

Preparation for lectures and seminars:

These encourage early engagement with course readings and help students to be more prepared for face to face discussions and activities. Participation can be encouraged by making contributions count towards assessment.

Blog posts
Students have to write one blog post in response to the allocated week’s readings. All students should visit the blog before coming to class and make a comment on the entry posted for that week. The blog entries are then viewed at the start of the seminar each week before moving on to a more general discussion of the week’s topic.

Presentations
Require students to post or even record presentations before class. Other students must come ready with questions.

Discussion forums
Teachers can post answers to common queries and reach the entire cohort or class rather than having to send multiple individual emails. Relevant items of interest can be posted by teachers, talks, news items, interviews and students can be encouraged to share their own questions and discussion topics.

Collaborative (students as producers) activities:

These encourage students to apply their learning to create and collaborate. Asking students to re-contextualise or critically evaluate theory and concepts develops deep learning skills.

Wiki’s
Students work in groups or individually to write wiki entries.

Glossary
Students are asked to add glossary entries. These can be definitions of key concepts or relevant images, videos or news stories.

Assessment and feedback:

the majority of activities already mentioned can be used as part of a formative or summative assessment but there are also specific activities that enable e-assessment.

Quizzes
These can be used to diagnostic purposes before courses start or to test understanding of key concepts at various stages throughout a course. Feedback can be given immediately within Moodle so students can complete at their own pace and reassess understanding as many times as they want. Common areas of misunderstanding can be reviewed in seminars and lectures.

Peer assessment and feedback
Students are required to submit an assignment online and then use marking guidelines and or rubrics to grade and give feedback to a peer. Teachers review the work and feedback. Final marks take into account the peer feedback and the peer marking activity. Students gain a greater understanding of the marking process and find marking another’s work allows them to reflect on their own assessment.

Collective feedback
Teachers provide collective feedback for the cohort/class that goes over some common mistakes and provides model answers. Feedback can be given via video, audio, or text. Model answers can be annotated to illustrate links to marking guidelines or learning outcomes.

Course evaluation and student feedback:

Allows teachers to find out what students views on what worked and what can be improved. Activities can be used in conjunction with course restrictions to ensure engagement, for example students cannot upload an assignment until they have completed the activity.

Questionnaires
These can be used to gain feedback on your own teaching. Responses from students can be anonymous.

Quick poll
These can be used to answer one specific question. Students can only see the overall responses once they have submitted their individual answer.

Hot topic
Students can post questions for lectures and rate each other’s questions.

To see more examples of embedding Moodle activities into face to face teaching see our Moodle portal. If you have any queries or questions about how you can use Moodle in your teaching see our Moodle guides, book a training session or contact LTI.Support@lse.ac.uk;

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October 4th, 2016|Assessment, Moodle, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|0 Comments|

Musings on Moodle part 2 – layout and design

As the previous blog post in this series indicated students often experience dissatisfaction with inconsistencies among layouts and types of information provided on Moodle courses. With over 1,307 standard Moodle courses and an additional 172 Summer School courses on Moodle there is a huge variety in approaches to using Moodle. The most common complaint that students have is not being able to find material. Setting up a well structured course design can avoid this problem.

Clear signposting

Your course should have an intuitive logical structure, this can be linked to the course structure (course topics) or face to face teaching (week 1,week 2) but it should be consistent and easy to navigate. Keep assessment information in one place and use clear titles and labels (see more on labels below). You may want to include a simple statement on how students are expected to use the course or particular resources and activities.

Avoid the ‘scroll of death’

Moodle courses can all too often develop into extremely long page of resources and activities with users finding they have to scroll down and endlessly search to find anything. Several of the new themes such as ‘collapsed topics’ or ‘grid’ format help to signpost and divide up your Moodle course in easy to navigate sections. (A guide to different Moodle formats can be found on our Moodle portal).

Use labels
It is always worth using labels to identify different aspects of your course. Labels can be images as well as text, remember to use creative commons images and attribute appropriately. When providing titles for resources and activities make sure they are clear, consistent and work out of context, generic titles like ‘summative assessment’ can cause confusion.

Make it accessible

Any images should contain a description for screen readers. Different colours and fonts can be useful to make distinctions between information but make sure they can be read clearly and will work on all devices. Check out the Government Digital Service guide on the ‘Dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility’. When adding files or links make sure that you select ‘automatic’ for the display option under appearance settings to allow for pop up blockers or devices that will not download files.

Remove clutter

A cluttered course can be difficult to navigate. You may want to use the book or lesson activities to group resources together. Make sure that you update your course each year, are the resources from 3 years ago still relevant? Do the links to external resources still work?

Apply restrictions

Access restrictions can hide and then reveal activities so students cannot progress until they have met certain requirements.

Groups and groupings can ensure that students only see material that is relevant to them. Class groups are created automatically from timetable information so using the groups option in activities allows teachers to view student participation by each of their class group.

Activity completion
One way signpost the suggested or compulsory activities on your course is to use the activity completion feature. If you can combine this with course completion it provides students with a clear indication of how they are progressing on the course and can give you a quick snapshot of how students are engaging on the course.

Mix it up

Using a variety of resources; images, video, tv, web, audio, can keep students interested and engaged in course content. Alternative formats can allow for different approaches to study (listening to a podcast on the commute) and help students to apply concepts and theories from classes and lectures to real world case studies and develop critical thinking skills.

Similarly a mixture of activities can develop students understanding and indicate that they are expected to be active learners. See post 3 for more details on how to embed moodle activities into your face to face teaching.

To see some examples of good Moodle design see our Moodle portal.

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September 27th, 2016|Moodle, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|0 Comments|

Musings on Moodle Part 1 – the standardisation or baseline debate

Over the Summer LTI had a lively email discussion on the pros and cons of Moodle baselines and the issues raised prompted this series of blog posts on making more of Moodle.

Ways to standardise the VLE

Some institutions use a baseline or template to ensure that all courses have a bare minimum of features and some degree of consistency on the layout and content. For example, UCL introduced a baseline in 2011 after consultation with students indicated that they found inconsistencies with layout, navigation and types of information available on Moodle. York St John University introduced University wide minimum expectations in 2015. Research into sector wide opinions and approaches to baselines carried out by Peter Reed at Liverpool University indicated that there are three common approaches to creating standardised VLE’s (simple checklists, detailed checklists, and detailed rubrics).

What to include?

Peter Reed’s (2015) research indicates a growing number of UK HE institutions have opted for some kind of standardisation of the VLE (of the 24 institutions that responded 75% already had some form of minimum standard and 25% were looking to introduce some minimum standards 21 March 2014, http://thereeddiaries.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/sector-wide-subscription-to-vle-minimum.html). But then the obvious question is what a best practice VLE should look like? Internal surveys at Liverpool indicated that while staff and students often favoured the introduction of minimum standards there was some inconsistency regarding what should be included in a course. Students appeared to be most interested in accessing quite practical course information and resources (Lecture Notes (95%); Past Exam Papers (93%); Further Reading (88%); Timetables (86%); Module Leader Contact Details (83%)) rather than learning activities. However analysis of what students do on the VLE has indicated that when such material are available they are not always accessed. Which brings us neatly to the main issue that LTI have with introducing a baseline or checklist at LSE;

Simply including certain tools or resources on a Moodle course does not guarantee that they will be used, either by students or staff.

Every Moodle course could be automatically set up with a discussion forum (just as the course announcements feature is a default in all courses) but simply having a discussion forum available does not mean that it will be used well or at all. Measuring how well tools are used is fairly difficult to ascertain but analysis of how much tools are used indicates that currently discussion forums are often set up and then remain empty.

Improving the learning experience

Over the years LTI have debated the pros and cons of developing a template or best practice for Moodle courses and have researched the differencing opinions across the sector. As learning technologists the LTI team are most interested in using technology to enhance teaching and learning. Devising a long list of requirements for every course can easily turn into a bureaucratic tick box exercise that adds more to teachers workloads than improving students experience of Moodle. A good learning experience needs to consider the design of the course i.e. navigation, usability, consistency etc. (see post 2) and how activities can be used to contribute to the learning objectives (see post 3).

Although a baseline can be useful, especially for online only courses, LSE Moodle editors currently have the freedom to choose the structure and content of their Moodle courses and LTI encourage best practice and offer training, advice and guides on using Moodle. The best way to ensure that a Moodle course is well used is for the teacher to be engaged with the editing to ensure that it is relevant and useful for students.

See our guides on how to use Moodle for teaching and book a one to one training session via the training and development system.

References

Peter Reed Staff & student perspectives on introducing minimum standards VLE, November 12 2013

http://thereeddiaries.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/staff-student-perspectives-on.html
‘Hygiene factors: Using VLE minimum standards to avoid student dissatisfaction’ Peter Reed and Simon Watmough E-Learning and Digital Media, January 2015 vol. 12 no. 1 68-89. Published online January 29, 2015, doi: 10.1177/2042753014558379

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September 20th, 2016|Moodle, Reports & Papers, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|0 Comments|

Making more of Moodle

Here within LTI and in the wider learning technology community there has been a longstanding debate on how to make more of Moodle and ensure that it is used to it’s full potential as a learning tool. In an ideal world the VLE(1), in our case Moodle, plays an essential part in the learning process, allowing students to go at their own pace through material, test their understanding of key concepts or theories, work with others to develop and produce content, gain feedback on their progress and build a learning community. Online course features should interweave with face to face teaching, link to the course learning outcomes and follow a clear sequence of activities which build on each other and are referred to in lectures and classes. That is how it could be used, but how is it currently used at LSE and what can we do to improve things?

In these three blog posts I have explored the issue of how we can make more of Moodle. These short Musings on Moodle are grouped under the three themes of standardisation, layout and design and embedding Moodle activities into face to face teaching.

Part 1 – the standardisation or baseline debate

Part 2 – layout and design

Part 3 – embedding Moodle activities into face to face teaching

(1) Virtual learning environments (VLE’s) are online interactive platforms that are designed to support educational courses, by providing a consistent way for staff and students to store and access resources and tools. These online learning spaces allow teachers and students flexible access to material and provide ways of communicating and assessing collaboratively and individually. Here at LSE we use Moodle as our VLE with the aim that it will support ‘blended learning’, (a combination of online and face to face learning).

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September 20th, 2016|Moodle, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies, Uncategorized|0 Comments|

Turnitin in Moodle rolls out

Learning Technology and Innovation are pleased to announce the roll out of Turnitin originality check from within Moodle across the School from Tuesday 16th August.

Turnitin provides originality checks against webpages, library catalogues, journals and publications but also other student submitted work (within LSE and other institutions). By integrating Turnitin into Moodle, originality checking becomes more efficient, reliable and a robust solution in identifying matched text through the production of originality reports and scores (%); viewed directly within Moodle.

Learning Technology and Innovation (LTI) have trialled the integration at eleven departments across the School; liaising with ARD, GLPD, IMT, SU and TLC throughout.

We will roll out the integration across departments and are developing supporting material for teachers and students ranging from documentation, videos, FAQs etc.

If you would like LTI to demo how Turnitin in Moodle works; Book a place to our briefing or get in touch with LTI for 1-2-1 or departmental sessions.

For full details on the rollout and the resources available, please visit the Turnitin page.

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June 28th, 2016|Announcements, Assessment, eAssessment News, Ed-Tech news and issues, Moodle, Teaching & Learning|0 Comments|

Celebrating LTI’s Moodle men!

Award This week two members of the LTI team were recognised for their work at the 2016 IMT awards.

Chris Fryer the LTI Systems Manager was awarded ‘unsung hero’ for his behind the scenes efforts to ensure that Moodle is always up and running and working well with other LSE systems.

He is a very deserving recipient of this award as LSE Moodle has the highest rates of ‘up time’ across the whole of the UK compared to other HE institutions. Over the last academic year it has been online 99.99% of the time, this means that the system was ‘live’ for all bar 42 minutes in 2015/16!

LSE Moodle has supported the running of 1651 active Moodle courses across all departments, the IPA, language centre, TLC, HR and LSE Enterprise (a 50% increase from the previous year and that doesn’t include those courses in the Summer School and TRIUM). Moodle courses were accessed by over 22000 unique users and facilitated over 15.5 million ‘participating actions’ (actions where students and staff click to do something on Moodle).

His work has not gone unnoticed by those in IMT with staff recognising his dedication to the job:

“Chris Fryer doesn’t seem to ever truly take a holiday. Regardless if he is hiking through Italy or looking after his kids, if there is an emergency he will take time to fix it”.

In addition, our very own ‘Moodle Man’, Milan Popovcic was awarded “Excellence in Customer Service” for his work on responding to LTI.Support@lse.ac.uk emails. Recent analysis of the LTI emails has illustrated that LTI responded to queries from every academic department, centre and institute across the school from staff and students alike. Moodle is the most common query but topics also included questions on online assessment, the use of forums and social media, how to record audio feedback and requests for training. The number of emails received has gone up year on year, with 4667 emails received for September 2015 to June 2016.

Milan is often the member of staff that responds to these calls for help and was one of the most nominated colleagues across several categories with positive comments from customers and colleagues.

“Delightful manner, patience of a saint, really cares about helping academics with their problems, not just answering their queries but also developing them to help themselves. Milan is a joy to work with”.

We are currently working on developing more resources and support to go on our new website which should be up and running before the start of Michaelmas term 2016. In the meantime if you have any queries, Moodle or otherwise please contact lti.support@lse.ac.uk

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June 23rd, 2016|Announcements, Moodle, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|0 Comments|

New features for Moodle

Moodle was upgraded to version 2.7 as part of the reset process. The changes to Moodle are minimal and can be seen below along with some features of Moodle that you may not be aware of.

Changes to Moodle

New text editor
Atto is the new default text editor in Moodle from version 2.7 onwards. Clicking the top left icon (highlighted in red below) will expand it to three rows.

The previous text editor (‘TinyMCE’ shown below) contains additional font style settings and the paste from word button. If you prefer the old editor you can select the TinyMCE as your default text editor from your profile settings.

Go to Administration > My Profile settings > Edit profile.

Then select ‘TinyMCE html editor’ from the drop down list for Text editor, then click ‘update profile’.

Improvements to Quizzes
2.7 sees the introduction of new features to quiz question banks, including question duplication, moving questions and save changes and continue editing buttons. The essay question now allows students to add an attachment with no accompanying text.

Improvements to assignments
Teachers can now comment directly on students work when they submit via online text.

Some features you may not be aware of:

Turnitin plugin

This plugin allows work to be submitted automatically to Turnitin, ( the plagiarism checking software ) directly from the assessment activity. Teachers can then mark and give feedback using the Turnin GradeMark features. If enabled students can also see their originality reports and use this information for plagiarism prevention training.

This feature is being enabled to individual courses on request. For more information about using this tool or to take part in a pilot please contact LTI.Support@lse.ac.uk or see the Moodle-Turnitin Integration Moodle page.

Activity completion

This can be set up to record the completion of various activities in your course. A check (tick) appears against the activity when the student meets the criteria you have set (e.g. viewing an activity, submitting an assignment, or passing an assignment).

Once you have set up your assessments with activity completion details you can then set up the completion details for the whole course. Go to ‘course completion’ in the administration block and, select ‘Course is complete when all conditions are met’ and then select all activities to be completed.

You can then access a quick view to see if students have completed the activities in your course by going into ‘Administration’, > ‘Reports’, > ‘Course completion’.