This blog is used to share my interests in elearning, largely around things like OER, Social Media and Digital Literacies. I might also use this blog to discuss things related to my role, which as of March 2013, is a Lecturer (Learning Technology) at the University of Liverpool.
Although it is the season to be jolly, it is also the season where student engagement with the VLE increases - largely due to assessment periods. The training sessions in the run up to Christmas focus on three areas;
The use of level Forums in Programme Areas: this session has resulted from recent positive student feedback concerning Programme and Level forums in the 'Computing and Digital Technology Network' area. This session is primarily aimed at Programme/Network Leaders, Level Tutors and Heads of Departments (although other staff can still attend). Dates: Tuesday 13th December & Tuesday 20th December
Options for Online Submission, Marking and Feedback: although we have run different sessions on Moodle assignments and Turnitin in the past, this session will take a broad approach and discuss the various options available for academic staff to manage the assessment and feedback process online. Dates: Wednesday 14th December
Returning Feedback and Grades to Students Through Moodle: this session picks up on this blog post about returning feedback and grades to students through Moodle, even if the assessment did not take place online. Although the blog post covers the 'how to' elements, this is an opportunity for staff to come along, practice and ask questions while I'm in the room. Dates: Thursday 15th December
As always, it would be great if you could confirm your attendance using the Eventbrite booking system below, and if you have any particular requests for training, feel free to get in touch.
Many units across the Faculty are using some of the native Moodle tools such as quizzes and assignment drop-boxes to enable assessment and provide a channel for feedback and grades. But how can we return grades and feedback electronically for those assessments that were not facilitated through Moodle?
Before we delve in to this topic further, it is worth highlighting the University position, in that grades must be entered into Agresso at the earliest convenience. Further to this, additional work (expected implementation in Jan) is attempting to pull out those grades from Agresso and feed them directly into the Assessments block in Moodle units.
Having said that, there are obvious benefits of providing detailed feedback to students through Moodle's Grades tool, and there are a range of methods that allow us to do this. Here I will pick up on two of the most straightforward approaches;
1)Offline Activity
The 'Offline Activity' is available from the 'Add an Activity' menu, and is really straightforward. It easily creates an extra Grades column to enable you to provide a grade and some basic feedback.
2)Advanced Uploading of Files
Whilst you may or may not use this to manage online submission, this tool still enables staff to leave a grade and upload a detailed feedback file to students.
With both methods, a link to the assessment appears on the Moodle unit page. Students can click on the link to view their feedback and grades, as well as being able to check through the Grades link.
How to....
Both processes are reasonably straightforward to set up and use, but the following screencast runs through the steps anyway.
As always, please do leave a comment if you have any questions or to share how you are using electronic methods to aid the assessment and feedback processes.
Over the past few months, academic staff have been getting to grips with a range of features within Moodle, and it is apparent that the Groups features are of particular interest. At the same time, the group tools can be a little confusing as they work slightly different to the WebCT equivalent.
So this post hopes to introduce you to the Moodle terminology: Groups and Groupings, as well as what can be achieved and how.
What are Groups & Groupings?
Firstly, it's important to clarify the difference between Groups and Groupings:
Group release applies to the options within the 'Add an Activity' drop down menu, such as Forums, Assignments and Quizzes, etc. When releasing an activity, for example a discussion forum, you have two options in the groups section:
Separate Groups: each group has their own private forum
Visible Groups: each group has their own forum but they can still view other group's forums.
Groupings allow specific content to be hidden from particular students and released to others. Anything from within the 'Add a Resource' drop down menu can be released to a particular set of students within a grouping. For example, you might have a quiz that all students will complete, but you might want to release a separate quiz that is only visible to those students who are entitled to extra time. This is where Groupings come in handy.
The only confusing aspect related to Groupings is that you first have to create at least one group of students, and then add that group to the grouping (don't worry though, we'll run through the steps below)
Creating Groups & Groupings
Now we have clarified what the Groups and Groupings tools can do, it's time to look at how we create them - luckily it's pretty straightforward, and the short video below runs through the steps involved.
Putting Groups and Groupings into Practice
So now we have created two groups and one grouping, it's now time to put them into practice. These two videos demonstrate releasing a forum to separate groups and releasing a quiz to a particular grouping.
Creating a Forum for Separate Groups
As a tutor you can easily see the different group forums, along with the number of replies, etc.
It's also possible to toggle between Separate Groups and Visible Groups from the course page in Moodle. When you hover over the silhouette, the tool-tip confirms which group mode you are currently in, and clicking on it allows you to change.
Releasing a Quiz to a Grouping
For more information, the CeLT Moodle Training Guides page contains a guide on 'Creating and Managing Groups in Moodle', but of course if you are having difficulty implementing groups and/or groupings, feel free to get in touch.
Also, if you are doing anything interesting with the Groups/Groupings tools, why not share them in the comments....
Ahead of the Turnitin Workshop this week, this post hopes to give a quick overview of some of the key features that are offered using Turnitin and it's lesser known companion, Grademark.
As most people will know, Turnitin has been the leading UK plagiarism detection service for a number of years. It can provide a great development opportunity and really help students develop their academic writing skills by enabling originality reports for draft assignments.
For me, the biggest strength of the service lies in the paperless marking capabilities offered through Grademark. In short, managing online submissions through Turnitin allows academic staff to take advantage of the built-in marking features, including QuickMark comments; a feature allowing markers to build a database of comments they commonly leave on student papers. They can then drag and drop these quickmarks onto the paper, potentially saving bags of time from retyping the same things! Also, as you build up your personal QuickMark comments, you can export and re-import them into other units.
Furthermore, this completely online process of submission, marking and feedback impacts upon two huge areas of current interest;
Student Feedback, which suggests students want the freedom to submit work online to avoid the time and financial costs of printing and travelling to campus to submit work, as well as receiving more timely feedback that is in a legible format (compared with handwritten feedback).
The University's Green Impact Campaign, an innovative program that inspires staff and students to collectively 'green' MMU. SUSTEIT suggests the major environmental impacts are related to paper, and that reducing paper consumption is “perhaps the most important feature of a sustainable printing strategy” (James & Hopkinson, 2009). Previous work that I have been involved in with Turnitin & Grademark has saved significant amounts of paper - online submission across just six first-year units saved around 7500 sheets, totalling 15 reams of paper. Imagine if this was scaled larger!
So, come along on Thursday (12-1pm. C1:01) to learn more and get some practical experience in using some of the tools offered by Turnitin & Grademark. If you can't make it, there are some materials available within the Staff Resource Area's 'Moodle Training Guides' page.
November is as good a month as any to turn our attention towards tools to assist in the formative and summative assessment, available through Moodle.
To this end, the following workshops focus on three of the most common assessment tools:
Moodle Assignment tool: to enable electronic submission of coursework files. Tuesday 8th November, 12-2pm: JD C1.03
Quizzes: can automatically mark answers to multiple choice and drag and drop questions (amongst others). Wednesday 9th November, 1-3pm: JD C1.01
Turnitin & Grademark: which can be used to manage the entire assessment process from assignment submission, online marking and feedback. Wednesday 16th November, 1-2.30pm: JD C1.01
You can use the eventbrite booking system below to register your place on any of the workshops, and if you have any particular interests or questions ahead of the sessions, please do let me know.
Most staff will probably be aware that we have access to a Staff Resource Area within Moodle, but did you know there is an equivalent Student Resource Area where all students are automatically enrolled?
The Student Resource Area is split into a five sections. The following descriptions are taken directly;
Skills Online
Skills Online is a resource that will support you in developing the necessary skills you need to study and progress successfully at this level. It is designed to be used to complement your programme-based teaching and learning activities.
Employability Online
Employability Online is a resource which gives you the opportunity to develop key skills that employers are looking for. It will help you to reflect on your areas of relative strength and on development.
InfoSkills
The InfoSkills Online tutorial helps develop Information Literacy skills. Self-sufficiency and effectiveness in locating, evaluating and employing good quality research information is an important life and career skill. Information Literacy has been identified as a key Graduate Competency in MMU's "Employability Curriculum Framework".
Moodle Guides & Support
Guides include how to access and navigate Moodle, editing Profiles, submitting Assignments and using Discussion Forums.
Equal Opportunities & Diversity
This programme must be completed by all students as well as staff. The module does not carry credits for your University course but completion of the programme will contribute to your continuing personal development in this key transferable skill area.
So if your students are in need of a little further online self-directed support, you know where to send them....
I've been using twitter for over 3 years now, and have found it a great way to find/share information and engage with others with similar interests (whether that's eLearning topics or my beloved Everton FC). I had already posted my thoughts on Twitter some 2 years ago - many of which haven't changed. The one thing I wanted to explore was using Twitter within teaching, and luckily that now I'm in the position to implement this myself, the twitter 'movement' is at it's largest yet, with over 100 million users worldwide.
I've seen and read about others using twitter within their teaching and really think it can help bring students together to communicate. Bill Wolfe's post on 'Using Twitter in the Graduate Classroom' does a good job at highlighting some US-based work. He talks about the use of twitter as a back-channel and alludes to the development of a 'community' of learners - exactly what I hope to achieve.
I'm also interested to see how many of my students are part of this growing 100 million figure; if they welcome the use of twitter for their studies; and if they continue to use it with their colleagues beyond learning.
To start with, I've introduced a hashtag - what twitter uses to record posts about a specific topic/idea, and I've used the Twitter Widgits to quickly show any 'tweets' with the course hashtag (#MM5362) directly in my Moodle area. I'm also building a twitter 'List' to display student aliases so they can each follow each other and build that community.
If you are aware of any research in this area or are interested in using Twitter in your teaching, feel free to get in touch - you can even follow me on Twitter
For those not too familiar with Twitter, I leave you with this introduction:
If, like me, you have access to a number of units and programme areas in Moodle, you will probably be receiving regular email alerts based on each discussion forum post.
I appreciate these email alerts can start to clog up your inbox, so this quick screencast demonstrates a simple way to reduce the amount of emails through the options available under 'Update Profile'...
With the big changes around the University, and the increasing impetus to engage with blended and online learning, I thought it would be a good idea to develop a Checklist that would guide Unit Leaders in the development of their Moodle areas. What's great, is that it's licensed with Creative Commons!
It was important to keep the checklist as short and simple as possible, but still highlight key points to ensure a smooth and consistent student experience with the VLE. Hopefully this will help ensure a minimum standard within and across Unit areas.
I teamed up colleagues from CeLT: Rod Cullen who is well known to the Faculty, played a huge part in bringing this together and brought excellent understanding of the legal requirements around accessibility, as did Neil Ringan and Christopher Meadows.
So, the bathing suits are back in storage and September is here, and no doubt staff will have all hands to the pump preparing for the start of term. WebCT has now been switched off and Moodle is here!
To help staff ready Moodle areas, there are some mop-up sessions to introduce and run through some of the basic workings of Moodle. There are three sessions booked in over the next couple of weeks:
There will be various other awareness raising and training opportunities throughout the year, but if you have any specific requests, feel free to contact me: P.Reed@mmu.ac.uk.
