Recent feedback around moodle

The icons which allow you to update, delete, move items etc, are too small.

When a user is about to enrol on a course, it usually tells them that they should have received an enrolment key from [name of tutor]. If there are multiple people enrolled on the course as teachers though, how do we ensure that the correct name is shown? I.E Mark and Blayn are teachers on a moodle course, Blayn is running and managing the course and wants students to know that he is the main contact. But when a user comes to enrol, the message says 'You should have received an enrolment key from Mark', since Mark is also a teacher on the course.

Can we share resources between courses? i.e link to the same files from two different courses in moodle.

Moodle enrolments

From now on, I am going to label any stuff we learn about how moodle can work better for us at YSJ with 'learning', that will help us track what we've learnt throughout the initial process. If there is an action associated, I will also use the tag 'action'.

Thinking about enrolments today, we discovered that at the moment, all courses(except those with enrolment keys) are open to anyone with an account in moodle.

This means that Joe Blogs could go to the create an account button, register with moodle then self enrol on any of the courses we have, which aren't protected with an enrolment key.

I can see a lot of benefits to this, but can also see that it might be a massive worry too, for example if someone external registers and then starts to post inappropriate stuff into forums.

I have found a setting in the courses which stops courses being 'enrollable', but it also prevents students who have an enrolment key from enroling as well.

ACTION
As an action from this, we will see if in his integration script, Jim can set all courses to be non-enrollable by default. We can then deal with any exceptions, where tutors request for enrolment to be enabled, on an ad-hoc basis.

New Year Moodle update

We've been busy over the last few months sorting out a lot of things in the background of moodle. One thing you might notice is that moodle has been 'branded' now. The autumnal swish which goes across the page reflects the new DLD range of branding and the YSJ logo has been added.

We've also been looking at the assignment submission options and have installed a plugin which allows users to mark assignments online. For the standard e-submission tool, we noticed that there wasn't an option to download all assignments at once, like there is in Blackboard. So we have solved this problem as well, thanks to the moodle community and the sterling work of Jim in the EIS team.

So what next? Well, we've been working with academic staff across all faculties towards pilots in Semester 2, training has taken place in small groups and one to one sessions. The next big thing we're working on is automatic enrolments. That means getting staff and students automatically enrolled on the relevant courses in moodle, in the same way Blackboard works.

I'm also arranging further dissemination of moodle information via the plasma screens located around campus and have posted another notice to Blackboard, to tell people that QSEC and Academic Board have approved the move to moodle.

WE WILL BE MOVING TO MOODLE FROM SEPTEMBER 2010.