Moodle: Glossary importing

I've been playing around with the glossary function in Moodle. It seems like each semester there are terms that have students confused that might be resolved by supplying them with a more detailed and context-driven definition than what their textbook offers. The Glossary feature of Moodle would allow me to do that potentially, and this would be a useful resource for them to refer to throughout the semester, not to mention they potentially could export these into a study tool for their mobile devices.

Entering the glossary terms is pretty straightforward, however, it is a little clunky to do it one by one. An alternative is to type out the term and definition into an excel sheet in adjacent columns. These can be imported into Moodle in a slightly tricky way as follows

• visit http://moodleflair.com/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?id=119 and download the linked html file
• open up the html file into your browser - it should look like a webpage. 
• copy and paste your two columns into the webpage's left column
• click on "convert" and you'll see the info get converted into "xml" (extensible markup language) format. The new material shows up in the right column. 
• cut and paste the converted material into a word document. Here's the tricky part - save as a text file, but give it an ".xml" suffix
• now you can import all the terms directly into the Moodle glossary

An alternative to all of this is that you can have the students help you generate it and grade them on the quality of their entries. 

I'm going to try this with the second section of Bio111 - the material that traditionally is the toughest - and see if it improves student comprehension. 

Moodle: using weighted grade categories

Last semester I was dying to figure out how to get the gradebook to calculate weighted means for Sr Sem. I think I've made some headway on this and I thought it would be nice to have some examples of how the settings should look to make it work

Here's the screenshot of how a basic weighted means should look. For this example I have two categories of grades - quizzes and practicals. Each quiz is worth the same, each practical is worth the same, and they are weighted by their total points. Basically, these are just weighted by their actual point values.

Now a more useful weighting. By making the "weight" numbers equal for both quizzes and practicals, quizzes now become worth as much as practicals. I find it useful to use numbers that represent the percentage. With this settings used below quizzes now get weighted equally to practicals. With mock data where I scored 4/5 on each quiz and 70/100 on each practical, my final grade was reported to be a 75% confirming that this was set up appropriately.

But what about if I want to make things more complicated - what if one of the practicals is weighted four times as heavy as the other, but the weight of the practicals is still equal to that of the quizzes? This is also one of the issues I ran into last semester. To accomplish this I changed the aggregation settings in the lab practical category to "weighted mean of grades" and split up the weight of each practical so that one is weighted at 10 and the other is weighted at 40. With lab quiz grades of 4/5, lab practical 1 score of 100, and lab practical 2 score of 70, my final calculated grade was 87% which is correct by manual calculations.

One key trick to making this all work was to carefully set up the categories and grade items beforehand.