Moodle: Bulk download of uploaded assignments

This semester I've been more diligent about getting the students to upload their assignments onto Moodle rather than handing me hardcopies or emailing them to  me. What's nice is that - compared to an email - the student can see that their file was posted, and it gets a timestamp too. Today I had a bunch of files to download and here's where the magic came in - clicked on "download files" and it downloaded the whole batch of assignment as a single folder, labeled with the student names too. The part about adding the student names is pure genious. I always request that the students label their files in a specific way to make it easy for me to figure out who's is who's but they always forget - not a problem now!

-AI

TLT Moodle Blog

TLT has a blog that is devoted to Moodle - "Moodle Musings". Be sure to keep an eye out on that blog as well!

Cheri has some neat ideas for collaborative environments and activities in a recent posting. In particular I thought the idea of setting up a forum for anonymous questions was something that would be really useful. I haven't checked out that feature yet but I would assume you'd want to set it up so that you approved the anonymous postings before they actually got posted.

http://blogs.elon.edu/technology/category/teaching-and-learning/moodle-musings/

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.

Importing your old course into new one in Moodle

All that time you spent setting up your Moodle course last semester did not go to waste. I just successfully imported all my old links/formats/etc from this semester into the next section for Spring. It had just a few minor things that didn't transfer but otherwise was pretty painless. Here's the basic idea:

• from within the new course, under "administration" click on import. 
• Choose the course you want to import from. 
• deselect anything you don't want to transfer in
• follow the "continue" buttons for about 1-2 min at most. 

thank goodness - I was worried it was going to be a little more complicated than that....

developing thoughts on Moodle

Well it's been 2 weeks of working with Moodle, although just one week where students are trying to access the stuff that I think I'm posting. Here's what I think so far:

Good stuff

• really easy to work in external information
• very easy to rearrange material within the course plan to help plan/design a course
• the ability to switch to "student" mode and see what they see is fantastic
• activity reports are very intuitive

Confusing stuff or stuff that I'm still trying to figure out....

• gradebook is very complicated. Also, can't seem to have anything be worth more than 100 points
• use of user roles is confusing, may be why I've had some access issues
• for some reason my announcements get put either into a "news" or a "forum" which seems to have some different implications for how they get displayed
• spent a lot of time this week ensuring that the students are getting my posts and that they can access the files I upload. There is definately a learning curve to deal with and it's worth nailing that down quickly in the semester before more critical info gets online.

Things I'll be playing with in coming weeks

• online submission and grading of assignments
• getting a quick survey up and running
• ironing out the gradebook so it makes sense

more to come.....

Google forms

need a quick survey? Google Forms seems like a good answer. On Tonya's recommendation I checked it out just now. Took about a minute to make a quick survey and send it off, and was able to see instantaneous results after I took the survey.

In Google documents, create a new form. The interface is extremely easy. Then access the document later to see the results pulled together in an excel sheet - very nice. Google keeps winning.....