Each assignment in Moodle needs to have a Red, Amber, or Green category for the use of generative AI. The University has provided some guidance for staff covering what these categories mean and how this should be communicated to students.
To make it easier for staff to share this information with students, we have now added a set of custom components to the text editor in Moodle. This will allow you to choose your category and automatically insert the official icon and text into your assignment description.
How to add an AI RAG category to your assignment description
Edit your assignment settings
In the description field, click the three dots to expand the toolbar, then select the Components for Learning (C4L) option (the Lego brick):
Under the Custom tab, select the relevant category and then click save:
The component will then appear in your assignment description:
If you require any further support, get in touch with a Faculty Learning Technologist or a Digital Learning Facilitator.
At Lancaster University we use Moodle as our learning management system (LMS) or virtual learning environment (VLE). However, what isn’t often known is that we actually have several instances of Moodle used across the University for different institutions or activities such as exams. For example, our partner campus in Weihai, Lancaster University College at Beijing Jiaotong University (LUCBJTU), has its own instance of Moodle and so does our partner campus in Ghana, LU Ghana. Aside from these, there are three different instances in use at our Bailrigg campus: Lancaster Moodle, Training and Development Moodle, Exams Moodle and we also have Moodle ‘Open Learning’.
Open Learning has most of the same features as the ‘Lancaster Moodle’ which we use daily with our students. It is used by staff, including teaching staff and researchers, to host courses to external groups of people. For example, it is used by the Centre for Child & Family Justice Research for the Giving HOPE Project. Training is provided through Open Learning to those who take an active role in the project such as those who provide care to mothers and babies. Open Learning is also used by the Library to provide support to school aged learners who are completing an EPQ (Extended Project Qualification). The students use the Open Learning space alongside in-person library sessions to learn more about how to search for relevant literature, how to reference and other key project skills.
The main advantage to Open Learning is that enrolment is not limited to people with a Lancaster University IT account. It can be accessed by anyone depending on what enrolment type the creator of the course chooses. For example, you could choose that users can self-enrol with a key (password) or you could choose that users are automatically enrolled when they click a link to the course.
Open Learning has a wealth of activities which can be used with your learners including the ability to embed Xerte packages and videos. You can also create quizzes to test the knowledge of your learners and interactive H5P (HTML5 packages) activities.
Another feature of Open Learning which is popular is the ability to create badges and certificates for those learners who have successfully completed a course. A template for a certificate is provided and you can also import your own badge design so that learners can add the badge to their profiles for example, on LinkedIn.
To find out more about Moodle, visit the ASK page. To find out more about creating an Open Learning course, get in touch with myself or a member of the central Digital Learning Team via the IT Help Centre.
Every module space in Moodle has an associated resource list (sometimes called a reading list). Lancaster University uses the Leganto system which is a platform that holds all of the University Library’s resources in its database including books, e-books, journal articles, websites databases and more! It is important that teaching staff use the Leganto resource list system rather than for example, a list of resources on a .pdf because then the library can track what students are expected to read. This informs the material the Library purchases and the subscriptions they need to maintain. Leganto also takes care of issues around copyright so you won’t be in breach of any regulations.
At the start of every module, you might notice that the resource list appears at the top but is “hidden from students” by default. This is to give teaching staff a chance to check and update the list before they make it visible to students for their upcoming studies.
To be able to edit or add to the resource list, you need to be added to the module in LUSI (the student registry system) in an appropriate role such as administrative staff or teaching staff otherwise the add button and the ability to manage sections won’t be visible to you.
Editing options at the top of a reading list in Leganto.
Resource lists can become very large especially with modules that span several weeks or in some cases, the whole academic year. As a result, it is worth knowing about how to use the embedded resource list activity in Moodle which allows you to make weekly or topic based resource lists based off the larger module one.
Why have “weekly”/“bitesize” reading lists?
We all know that students aren’t going to read all of the recommended resources and of course, we don’t expect them too. Resources may be added to the list to expand students’ horizons if they take an interest in a particular sub-topic but aren’t essential to completing the module with a positive outcome. However, when resource lists get very large they become unwieldy for both staff and students. It can be difficult for students to determine what is “essential” reading and what is most relevant to them at that point in their studies even if the material is organised into sections.
Adding a weekly reading list or an equivalent for a series of lectures or activities is helpful and encourages students to get stuck into their reading. It more easily highlights the essential resources for that week or topic. If there is a particular set text for a module, you can also select specific chapters to accompany the content delivered to students that week.
We know, from the survey I so frequently mention, the Moodle Student User Experience Survey from November 2023, that students like weekly reading lists and want to see more of them! 14 of the students who responded to the survey specifically mentioned in that they wanted to see better organised reading lists to help them navigate to the relevant material. One student said:
“It is helpful to see content in chronological order grouped by week and including slides, worksheets, recordings and resources together. Apart from that it I don’t find long lists of information helpful, especially when it seems to be unorganised. Suggested readings should also be clear and systematic.”
As a result, we should, where possible, try to utilise smaller resource lists to support students in their learning.
How do I set up weekly reading lists?
Firstly, you must have a resource list associated with the module, usually found at the top of the module space in Moodle. If resources are added to this list, you can then pull them through into a weekly/bitesize reading list. Therefore, it is important to make sure you have set up a complete module resource list in Leganto first.
Once this has been done, turn on edit mode in Moodle.
Click “add an activity or resource” to add the weekly reading list where you need it to be. You can always move them after creating them if required.
The activity to choose is the “Resource List (Embedded item)”.
The resource list (embedded item) activity option in Moodle.
Once selected, many of the activity settings are the same as other activities in Moodle. However, this activity has a section called “Select citations from [name of module resource list]”. This list reflects your Resource list and you can tick the boxes for the resources you wish to add to the smaller list for your topic or week.
You also get the option to change how this type of resource list will be shown in Moodle to students under the “appearance” section of the settings menu. You get three options:
On a separate page
Inline on the course page (initially collapsed)
Inline on the course page (automatically expanded)
My recommended setting for the appearance of the resource list is “on a separate page”. That way, it does not clog up the main page and you can more easily track engagement with the list in Moodle through the activity logs if this setting is selected.
Once finished, click “save and return to course” or “save and display”.
For more information on resource lists you can visit the LibGuide for staff. You can also contact your Faculty librarians for support in managing resources for your module.
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
The newly reorganised MBChB Hub 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:
Course format: topics
Course layout: one section per page
Once you have chosen the above options, click ‘save and display’.
To add the summaries:
Click the three dots menu next to the topic/section you wish to add a summary too.
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.
Click the image icon.
Choose a picture from your file explorer. You can add in information about the ‘Author’ and the licence.
Click ‘upload file’.
Untick ‘auto-size’ and the best size that I have found is 262wx143h (in pixels).
The default option for the image alignment is ‘top’, I would recommend leaving this.
Click ‘save image’.
Once done, click on the image again and change to ‘left alignment’.
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…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 ‘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.
Written by Ellen Wildman, Digital Learning Facilitator (ISS)
The text editor we use to create and add content (not just text!) into Moodle has undergone a change. The new editor is called TinyMCE and is now the default editor in Moodle. Additionally, we’ve added in some useful new plugins (or additional tools) to the editor to enhance your experience when using it.
This is what the new editor, or TinyMCE, looks like:
Why the change?
TinyMCE has been designed with accessibility in mind, to help ensure we keep our online material available to the largest number of learners as we can.
The old editor, Atto, is shortly due to be retired by Moodle so we’re getting a head start on the future change.
How will it affect me?
The layout and menu options now more closely match the editing options that you’re probably familiar with – such as in applications like Microsoft Word – with options such as Edit, View and Insert running across the top of the editor.
There are some additional features added to this new editor:
Components for Learning (C4L)
This option allows you to quickly drop in useful blocks into the content, such as reminder banners for assessment or quotations. This can be a great way to add visual interest to our pages and highlight key information for the learners.
This is an example of what an inserted ‘component’ can look like on a page:
You can also make the ‘component’ wider on the page using the double headed arrow icon when you are choosing which style to add.
Sketch
As the name might tell you, this is a tool that can allow either yourself, or your students in a quiz environment for example, to draw annotations in an online sketchbook. This can be useful for content that might be hard to produce via a keyboard.
This is an example of what an inserted ‘sketch’ can look like on a page:
Through the View option in the editor, there are some useful new features, including:
Show block: this will add a grey block around the text and display what style you are using. This is not displayed when you save, but rather acts as a useful guide when ‘clumping’ the content you’re creating.
This is an example of the dotted grey line you will see when you have the view option enabled:
Who can I ask for help?
If you need help with using the new editor, or anything else Moodle-related, contact the IT Help Centre or post a message in the Digital Education Network (DEN) on Microsoft Teams.
Written by Ellen Wildman, Digital Learning Facilitator (ISS)
As many of you will already know, we updated Moodle to version 4.3 on Tuesday 23rd July 2024. We used to be on version 4.1. so there has been a variety of changes that have occurred with this new update.
Now we have all had a bit of time to get used to it, I thought I would run through just five of the changes that will make our lives as staff easier!
You can now add activities anywhere in a section.
Before, we needed to go to the bottom of a section or topic and click the “add an activity or resource” button. Once the activity had been created, we then moved it where we wanted it to go. No more! Hover between two cards and the plus icon as shown below will appear. You can use this to add an activity or resources anywhere you want to.
The new ‘add an activity or resource’ button
Bulk actions are now available
In edit mode, there is now a “Bulk actions” button at the top on the right as shown below. This enables you to select as many activities as required and move, edit, duplicate or delete at once.
The ‘bulk actions’ option at the top of a Moodle page
The text editor in Moodle has changed to TinyMCE
A future post will go into the details of the changes around this text editor but for now, click the three dots to get more options as shown below. Some of the key changes include being able to open the editor in full screen mode and add components for learning (C4L), which are text boxes of a variety of colours and styles.
The TinyMCE text editor in Moodle.
You can duplicate more easily
It is now possible to duplicate a whole course section and not just the individual activities within it. You can also bulk duplicate activities as mentioned above. This makes it much easier to keep to a similar look and feel for each topic/section.
Duplicating a section from the three dots menu
Quizzes & the Question Bank
There have been quite a few changes to the quiz activity and to the question bank. Staff are now given more flexibility to customise the columns shown to them in the question bank and filtering/searching for questions is easier. The quiz editing page is wider to improve usability and students can now hide the timer in a timed quiz.
Our developers in ISS, have also reintroduced the ‘back to top’ button which I know many of us are very grateful for! They have also created the brand new ‘My Feedback Plugin’ which you can find more information on in another post.
A full list of the changes and developments in Moodle version 4.2. and 4.3 are available from the links below:
Written by Phil Tubman – eLearning Development Officer, Digital Learning Team (ISS)
Each year in the Digital Learning Team, we try to improve the Moodle experience for students and staff. During this academic year we have held focus groups with students and listened to their concerns, which overwhelmingly speak of their difficulties finding thingson the Moodle course page:
“Chaotic sometimes, not always grouped together similar documents. Hard to find.”
“Every Moodle page has a different structure, making it difficult to learn how to navigate.”
Feedback given through Moodle is arguably the most important aspect of teaching and learning, so we have developed a new feature which collects all the students’ feedback (single course or all courses) onto one page, accessible from the Moodle course page – we are unsurprisingly calling this feature, “My Feedback”.
Figure 1: My Feedback link as viewed by a student on Moodle
When a student clicks this link, they are taken to their My Feedback page which displays all their feedback from that course on one page, which has the following features:
All feedback, grades in Moodle, submission dates and due dates on one page
An area to make self-reflective notes (these are only visible to the student themselves)
A button to download all their combined feedback files for the course (the annotated file, feedback comments, feedback criteria, rubric)
note this does not include files that have been uploaded for feedback
Figure 2 My Feedback page with download all, and self-reflective notes feature
To view all the feedback from all the courses, the student just clicks on their profile link at the top right of Moodle, and choose ‘Feedback’ from there:
Figure 3 Use the profile button to access all feedback across Moodle
Now all their feedback across Moodle is listed on one page:
Figure 4 My Feedback page for all Moodle courses
We feel that this feature will be greatly beneficial to students during their academic tutor meetings, 1-1’s, or meetings with Learning Developers.
If you have teaching staff, course convenor, or administrative staff role on a Moodle course, you can also view as student’s My Feedback page (minus their self-reflective notes, of course), by choosing ‘My Feedback’ (under the ‘more’ option on the course front page), and selecting the student you wish to view:
Figure 5 Select a student to view their ‘My Feedback’ page as staff
For a preview of My Feedback, you can watch the video below:
Please comment below if you have any suggestions or thought about this new feature or pass your comments on to Phil via email.
DLT have created a series of short videos on how to use Moodle. These are in answer to many of the frequently asked questions (FAQs) that we get. You can find out how to manage materials, how to enrol participants and how to access reports and logs.
The Moodle Walkthroughs playlist , available on eStream also has some videos on the One Section Per Page layout and how to add summaries and pictures to this. The One Section Per Page layout is popular with staff whose courses have lots of resources and/or run for a longer period of time as it helps keep the page tidy and there is ‘no death by scrolling’.
If you would like to speak to a member of DLT on how to improve your course layout, you can put in a Help Centre Request Ticket via the Staff Portal. Remember, we are also offering training events in October and November, remember to book your place!
User experience is a bit of a theme in this blog and DLT would like to invite Lancaster University staff who use Moodle to complete a short survey on their experience (link to survey below!). It will not take more than 5-10 minutes of your time. We are advertising in lots of spaces to get as many responses as possible! A student survey is on the horizon but this one is just for staff at the moment.
All respondents will remain anonymous. Opinions expressed in this survey will be used to inform future decision making around Moodle developments and training at Lancaster University. The survey is open until3rd November 2023. Some questions are optional and do not require a response. If you wish to withdraw from the survey after you have completed it, please get in touch with me, Liz Walkden. There is an invitation at the end to be involved in future focus groups if you are interested.
