Monthly Archives: September 2024

A new year, a new look!

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Over the past couple of months, in preparation for the new academic year, I have been supporting staff across the Lancaster Medical School (LMS) and the Division of Health and Research (DHR), to redesign their Moodle pages. The aim has been to create more attractive spaces, that are easier to navigate and more engaging for learners.

Last year, while still working in ISS, I led the Moodle User Experience (UX) Project. We did a student survey as part of the project and we got 273 responses. 82% of respondents were undergraduates and 18% were postgraduate taught students. 139 students said that a good Moodle space was a well-organised one and in many of the free-text responses they mentioned the need for images and colour to make the spaces more visually appealing. Overall, students like Moodle but just find the way content is uploaded difficult to navigate. When asked if Moodle was easy or difficult to use, 83% of students found Moodle easy to use or had a neutral impression of it as “neither easy nor difficult”.  As part of the UX project, we also surveyed staff. Like the students, staff also want to see more attractive Moodle spaces with more colour and images. So enter…the ‘one section per page’ layout.

I have written about this layout before but, over the past few weeks, I have moved several LMS and DHR Moodle spaces to this new layout and want to share with you all the ‘new look’.

Some of the spaces that have undergone this transformation (or are currently undergoing it) include:

  • MBChB Hub
  • Year 4 Primary Care
  • Medicine Year 4
  • Medicine Year 5
  • 407: Mental Health: Theory, Research and Practice
  • DHR Autumn Academy
  • MBCHB101: Problem Based Learning Year 1
A snapshot of the MBChB Hub Space
The newly reorganised MBChB Hub space.
A snapshot of the Year 4 Primary Care Moodle space.
A snapshot of the newly reorganised Year 4 Primary Care Moodle space.

How do you set this up?

Before changing settings and choosing images, consider the organisation of material on your Moodle page. Try to have a clear welcome section at the top with introductory materials such as a handbook, learning objectives etc. This section should not be over-filled though and consideration needs to go into whether some of the material should be on the Moodle space, in a Moodle hub space or even in the Lancaster Student Portal instead. Then group materials into larger sections with sub-headings created using the ‘text and media area’ activity. Folders in Moodle, although a good way to group materials, can mean that students can’t quickly find what they are looking for so avoid using too many of them.

To get the ‘one section per page’ layout, you need to have the following settings under the ‘course format’ section of your Moodle page settings:

  1. Course format: topics
  2. Course layout: one section per page

Once you have chosen the above options, click ‘save and display’.

To add the summaries:

  1. Click the three dots menu next to the topic/section you wish to add a summary too.
  2. Type in your summary. For example, the summary could be some information on what students can find in the section or a ‘to-do’ list for the week.

To add images, choose high quality, landscape images for the best results. These could relate to the topic or subject material or just be high quality photos from around the Lancaster campus.

  1. Click the image icon.
  2. Choose a picture from your file explorer. You can add in information about the ‘Author’ and the licence.
  3. Click ‘upload file’.
  4. Untick ‘auto-size’ and the best size that I have found is 262wx143h (in pixels).
  5. The default option for the image alignment is ‘top’, I would recommend leaving this.
  6. Click ‘save image’.
  7. Once done, click on the image again and change to ‘left alignment’.
  8. Then click ‘save changes’.

A full-video explaining how to set up the above, can be found here:

How else can you improve a Moodle space?

Looking beyond the start of term, there are more things that we can do to improve Moodle spaces and the resources stored in Moodle.

Moodle isn’t OneDrive or Dropbox. It shouldn’t just be a list of Word documents, PowerPoints and PDFs! For a more engaging online learning experience, consider creating high quality videos for students to watch that include some interaction where possible. You can ask a Learning Technologist to support you in filming the material if it is something like a ‘Welcome video’ and the University also has Digital Media Engineers who are on hand to create very high-quality videos. Using the H5P activity (HTML5 package activity) in Moodle, it is possible to create an interactive video with quizzes, text boxes and other interactions popping up for students to engage with. H5P can also be used to create over 50 different content types. More information on H5P activities can be found in another post. These activities can support students to engage with your Moodle space more and can support effective revision/review.

It is a legal requirement that the resources posted on Moodle are digitally accessible. This is something that should always be on our minds when we create resources. For more information on how to improve the digital accessibility of your Moodle course, you can read this article on my ‘10 top tips’. One of these tips includes using Blackboard ALLY, the accessibility tool that is integrated into our Lancaster Moodle spaces, to check how accessible your resources are and use the guidance it gives to improve this if necessary. The score gauge provided by ALLY should always be green in colour.

For support with learning design and Moodle, feel free to get in touch with me. More training sessions on how to create H5P activities, digital accessibility and more will be forthcoming in the next couple of months – keep an eye on your emails!

Group Work: Tips, Tricks & Technology

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Group work…often dreaded by teachers and sometimes by students too! When I first started teaching in 2017, I was reluctant to use group work activities. They were tricky and time-consuming to set up and I quite often didn’t get the outcomes I was looking for. I had very little experience with educational technology as it didn’t form part of my PGCE at a time when Microsoft Teams had only just been launched and the Covid-19 pandemic hadn’t happened yet.

Since that time though, I’ve picked up some tips and tricks that have helped me to facilitate successful group projects both inside and outside the classroom. Now working in higher education, post-pandemic and in a world where technology enhanced learning is much more centre stage, I’m more comfortable with facilitating successful collaborations. Group work isn’t something I dread anymore! As a result, I thought I would share some tips and tricks as well as suggestions of activities/tools that are available at Lancaster University that could be utilised when asking students to work together.

Create Connections

Connecting with strangers is hard! Students are forced into a learning environment together and often expected to collaborate and discuss things with each other when they have only just met. This situation is a daunting one for many, even for staff! We have all been asked to “turn to the person next to you” to complete some activity…I don’t know about you, but sometimes this makes me wish I hadn’t attended the session and it can get awkward fast. Creating a comfortable and connected learning community is important to help facilitate successful group work. The community building often needs to happen in advance of the activity or project too so that students have time to form connections and get comfortable in the moment.

One tip is to encourage a digital “water cooler”; a place where students can chat freely. Many staff already encourage students to create their own groups, for example via WhatsApp. However, as staff we can also create spaces, for example a forum in Moodle that you don’t access and leave for students to communicate with each other or a Microsoft Teams space for students. There are many tools and ways to create a communication space for students, I’ve only mentioned a few but it will certainly help create those connections that will support students when they are asked to work together. OneHE has a page full of ideas for “warm up activities” to help students engage in low-stakes conversations which will help facilitate the start of those connections that will eventually support collaborative work.

Roles and Responsibilities

Getting everyone to participate in group work is a difficult task for every educator or facilitator. One recommended, tried and tested method is to establish roles and responsibilities within the group. The roles themselves can be varied and may be specific to the project or task that you set your students. For example, you might have a team leader, a note-taker, an external stakeholder manager, a proof-reader, a meeting chair…the possibilities are endless! AdvanceHE has some excellent guidance with top tips and resources on how to set up groupwork. They too suggest giving students roles and asking them to reflect on the diversity of skills in the group to ensure effective collaboration.

As an institution who uses Moodle, we have the ‘Board’ activity available to use. This activity can be set up in group mode so that each group can collaborate. One use case for group activity is to set it up as project management board with columns such as “to-do”, “in progress”, “done” and “blocked”. That way students can manage their workload together and keep track of their progress. Below is an example of a Moodle ‘Board’ activity set up in this way:

An example of a Moodle "board" activity.
An example of a ‘Board’ activity in Moodle

A similar thing can be created using Microsoft Planner within a Microsoft Teams space. For training and support in creating either of these resources, get in touch.

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