Happy New Year. Hopefully you had an enjoyable and refreshing break.
As you get ready for spring, you may find the Moodle news, tips, and reminders below helpful. Moodle is a great tool for sharing syllabi, readings, websites, and videos. You can also use Moodle to collect and grade assignments, as well as provide online quizzes and tests.
Getting Started Info
If you are new to Moodle, Moodle at Haverford, or the Moodle version for this academic year, take a look at this getting started help.
- What is Moodle? (Online tutorial and video)
- Moodle Quick Start Instructions for Faculty
- What’s New in Moodle 4.1 (video)
- Workshop: Moodle and its friends (1/16/24 2-3:30pm)
- Workshop: Introduction to Gradescope (1/17/24 10-11am)
⚠️ MUST DO: Make sure students can see your course!
When students enroll in courses via Bionic you should see them as participants in your Moodle course. However, students will not see your Moodle course until you want them to see it. Once you have your course set up to your liking, MAKE THE COURSE VISIBLE to students.
- Select the Settings menu under your course name
- Set Course visibility to show.
- Scroll to the bottom and save changes.
Email your students
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, on 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.
Learn to say names correctly
Each course shell has a link where you and your students can record your names and listen to those recorded pronunciations. Look for the purple microphone icon next to the link named Record your name/Learn other names.
Match names and faces
You can see a photo roster that helps you match names and faces. It’s hard to find, but it’s worth looking for!
- Select the Reports menu located under your course name
- Choose Roster.
Use assessment and gradebook options
Moodle has a number of features that can help you assess students and privately share grades or other types of feedback. Many of these are discussed in the blog post, Post-pandemic Teaching and Evaluation Tips. A few features you may find especially useful are as follows (links below open in new tabs):
Share videos
If you want to share your own videos with your students, please upload those to a streaming platform such as Panopto or YouTube. You can then link that video to your course. This will provide a better viewing experience for your students than uploading directly to Moodle. IITS is happy to help you with this, should you have questions.
Please DO NOT upload videos directly to Moodle.
Teaching a course with multiple sections? Select the right shell
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.
Find/copy your old 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 over 250 MB or for courses taught before Fall 2018. Use VPN for off-campus access to courses taught before Fall 2022.
Note: Self-enrollment is ON
By default, self-enrollment is on at the start of the semester. This allows Bryn Mawr and Haverford students to participate in Moodle activities, even if they are not yet enrolled through Bionic. These self-enrollments will expire after 14 days. At that time, students that are not formally enrolled will lose access to your course. We will notify you when we turn off the self-enrollment option. However, you can always set your course enrollment options differently from our defaults.
Want more help?
Email hc-techlearn@haverford.edu or contact your subject librarian.
