As part of the new Lancaster Moodle template, you will have seen the new “Teaching Team” activity, which usually sits within the “Module Information” section. This activity provides students with the names, faces, roles and contact details of the staff they will come into contact with on their modules and within their department.

University can feel like an impersonal and intimidating place at first, especially when students are on large programmes. Therefore, the teaching team activity is just one of the small ways that we can combat students feeling overwhelmed and isolated as we put names to faces and make ourselves easier to reach out to. Hopefully, this supports students by encouraging them to seek help early from named contacts and, in turn, this will help strengthen their sense of belonging and confidence in engaging with our community.

On a practical note, it can also help to improve communication efficiency as the teaching team makes it clear to students who the key contacts are, what their roles are and encourages them to send enquiries to the most relevant person.

Adding Contacts

Within the settings of the activity, you can add/edit contacts by selecting the tick box to add a contact to your teaching team activity.

When adding/removing contacts, there are three types:

• Team Members
• Additional Team Members
• General Contacts

The list of “Team Members” and “Additional Team Members” are pulled through from the enrolled participants list on a module and often the roles of these individuals are pulled through as well from LUSI (e.g. course convenor). You can add as many “team members” and “additional team members” to the teaching team activity cards as you need.

The “General Contacts” list, is where you can add contacts such as Professional Services Teams that have shared mailboxes. At the moment, you can add two general contacts per Moodle space, this might increase in the future.

Note: the Teaching Team activity paginates and only allows four contacts to show at once. Use the “key contacts” option to show those contacts on the first four cards whom students are most likely to contact.

Customising Contact Cards

Within the settings of the Teaching Team activity itself, you can customise the following details for each staff member:

• Office Hours
• Email Address
• Job Title

You can also select whether a staff member is a “key contact” which is useful if there is a large teaching team for a module/programme.

More customisations are also available though. These can be accessed via your Moodle profile. Click on the dropdown menu option next to your profile image at the top of the Moodle page and click on “Profile”.

Then click the “Edit Profile” option.

From here you can add the profile picture that pulls through for you to the teaching team activity. You can also add the following in the “Teaching Fields” section which will pull through to all the teaching team activities you are added to within Moodle:

• Office Hours
• Office Location
• Office Location Mazemap URL
• Appointment Booking URL (for Booking with Me or Libcal links)
• Pronouns
• Academic Title
• Job Title

Once you have added as many or as few of these details as you like, remember to click “save profile”.

If you wish to access further support with features of the new Moodle template, visit the Moodle template ASK page. You can also reach out to one of your Faculty Learning Technologists.