Moodle Tips and Reminders for the Fall 2020 Semester

Students’ Bionic enrollments are populated in Moodle. However, students will not see your course until you want them to see it. Once you have your course set up to your liking, MAKE THE COURSE VISIBLE to students.

1. Click on the course administration gear icon () dropdown
2. Select edit settings.
3. Change visible to show.
4. Scroll to the bottom and click save changes.

NOTE: If a Bryn Mawr or Swarthmore student does not see your course, make sure the student is looking on moodle.haverford.edu.

Moodle lets you email enrolled students easily. There are two ways to do this. Option 1: Use a special type of Moodle discussion forum, Announcements, to email all students. Students can also see these messages, at any time, in your Moodle course site. Click on the Announcements link at the top of your course to create an announcement with this tool. Option 2: Send mail to some or all of your students with the Quickmail tool on the side of your course. Although you can see a history of the messages that you sent from Quickmail, students only see the messages via their email.

You can let students know about your course by uploading a document to Moodle with key information. However, a video is more welcoming to students. A video may seem daunting at first, but you can do it! Learn how on our blog post, “Are you ready for shopping week” or see our video showing how you can easily record on Zoom and share the video on Moodle.

Moodle has a number of features that can help you assess students and privately share grades or other types of feedback. See our blog posts to learn about the following options on Moodle:

• Gradebook
• Collect and grade submitted work
• How students can scan and submit hand written assignments
• Final Exams
• Discussions
• Group work
• Peer review

If you want to share videos with your students, please DO NOT upload videos directly to Moodle. Instead, follow these instructions for sharing videos on Moodle.

Each course shell has a link where you and your students can record your names and listen to those recorded pronunciations. The tool also lets course participants share their preferred gender pronouns with the rest of the class. Look for the purple microphone icon next to the link named Record your name/Learn other names.

You can see a photo roster that helps you match names and faces. It’s hard to find, but worth looking! Photos for returning students are in Moodle now; new students photos will be added the first or second week of classes.

1. From the course administration gear icon () select More...
   
2. That brings up a new window. Find the Reports tab. If you do not see a separate tab, look for the Reports section under the Course administration tab. Either way, select the Roster report from the Reports section.
   

Academic courses are typically named COURSEID – CourseName.  However, if you teach a course with multiple sections, you should see all your sections, plus a course named something like COURSEID – CourseName (A01+A02 Combined).

If you teach a course with multiple sections, you have the option of using the individual sections, the combined course, or both. Students will only see the course(s) that you make visible. See our website for more information about combined courses.

Courses taught in previous semesters are still available on our archive servers—linked from the menu bar on the top of your Moodle window.

Moodle – Backup, Restore, and Import explains how to copy materials from previous semester courses into your current course shells. If you would like us to copy course materials for you, just ask.

NOTE: Contact IITS for help restoring courses overs over 250 MB or for courses taught before Fall 2015. Use VPN for off-campus access to courses taught before Fall 2017.

By default, guest access is on at the start of the semester. This lets all Bryn Mawr and Haverford students see course materials—if your course is visible—even if they are not yet enrolled through Bionic. Swarthmore students that are not yet formally enrolled may need to contact IITS to request access via a form button on our Moodle homepage.

IITS will turn guest access OFF after the registrar signals that students are properly enrolled, generally a few weeks into the semester. We will let you know when that happens. However, you can turn guest access off anytime.

See our Moodle web page for tutorials and additional information. It has a Quick Start Guide as well as a longer Moodle tutorial and a video showing you how to build courses. We also have a lot of useful information on the its.sites.haverford.edu instructional technology blog. Look in the Moodle category.

The IITS Instructional Technology Services staff, as well as the Research & Instruction Librarians, are happy to meet with you. Email hc-techlearn@haverford.edu or use the more detailed contact information on our website.