As some of you may be aware, a new Moodle integration is due to be released in the spring which has been designed and developed by the DLE Team to improve the process for transferring marks from Moodle to Portico. It is called the Moodle-SITS Marks Transfer Integration and we are currently trialing this with around 40 course administrators across the institution.

The pilot kicked off on 8 January and will run until 29 February 2024. The purpose of the pilot is to test the Moodle-SITS Marks Transfer Integration using the newly designed Marks Transfer Wizard and its marks transfer functionality that was developed following the Phase 1 Pilot, which took place with a very small group of course administrators at the end of last year. This wizard provides a more streamlined experience for end users by putting the core assessment component information at the centre of the tool which can then be mapped to a selection of Moodle assessments.

Pilot Phase 2 is the last pilot phase before an initial MVP (Minimal Viable Product) release into UCL Moodle Production in late March 2024. Currently, users can take advantage of the integration if the following criteria are met:

1. They have used the Portico enrolment block to create a mapping with a Module Delivery on their Moodle course.
2. Either of the following assessment scenarios is true:-
   1. Only one Moodle assessment activity is being linked to one assessment component in SITS.
   2. Only one Moodle assessment activity is being linked to multiple assessment components in SITS.
3. An assessment component exists in SITS to map against.
4. The Moodle assessment marks are numerical 0-100.
5. The assessment component in SITS is compatible with SITS Marking Schemes and SITS Assessment Types.
6. For exam assessments, the SITS assessment component is the exam room code EXAMMDLE.

The Marks Transfer Wizard currently supports the transfer of marks from one of the following summative assessment activities in Moodle:

• Moodle Assignment
• Moodle Quiz
• Turnitin Assignment (NOT multipart)

We intend to collect feedback on the new Marks Transfer Wizard from pilot participants to improve the interface and workflow for a general UCL-wide release in late March 2024 and also to prioritise next step improvements and developments following the launch.

So far informal feedback has been very positive: users say the assessment wizard works well and will save them a lot of time. The pilot has also been useful for exploring where issues might arise with Portico records or Moodle course administration as well as for gathering frequently asked questions and advice on best practice which will feed into our guidance for wider rollout.

Just a quick update for Moodle Board users or former or future users! The issues with staff and students not being able to move posts between Board columns have been resolved in the latest version which is available on Moodle 4.3. A few other improvements have also been made.

If you are not aware, the Board module for Moodle is a plugin that enables a post-it or sticky note type of activity for students (think Padlet but with restricted access on Moodle). This is a collaborative activity where tutors set out a number of columns with optional headings and then students add contributions to the columns. Students do not see who has posted what.

Screenshot of an example Moodle Board

There are several useful pedagogic applications of Moodle Boards including:

• Icebreakers, introductions
• Exit tickets – e.g. posting something that is still not clear (“muddy”) or providing general feedback
• Collaboratively sharing content, resources or links
• Students’ reflections during group breakouts
• SWOC analysis for group projects

To see a guide for Moodle Boards, please view our updated mini guide.

Add/Configure LTI External Tool

In Moodle 4.3 the add/configure “LTI External Tool” function is no longer accessed by opening the add Activity/Resource button.

The add/configure option is now located by going to Course navigation > More > LTI External tools.

Moodle 4.3 LTI category Level Restrictions

Moodle 4.3 brings the ability to restrict the visibility of LTI tools to any category within Moodle. This enables LTI tools that are faculty or departmentally licensed to be made visible to those specific categories in Moodle. Previously, LTI’s were restricted to either site wide or to specific courses. This could cause frustration in multiple configuration setups across many individual departmental courses. To make use of this function, please contact the Digital Education Support Team via digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk as restrictions are only available to site administrators.

Full Details of Moodle 4.3 changes to LTI External Tools can be found on Moodle Docs at the following URL https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/LTI_External_tools  a video covering these changes can also be viewed below.

UCL Moodle is being updated from Moodle 4.2 to Moodle 4.3 on Thursday January 4th 2024. The Digital Learning Environment team expects minimal disruption. 

Moodle is expected to be unavailable between midnight and 04:00am on Thursday January 4th 2024. 

The upgrade to Moodle 4.3 will bring several benefits including: 

• streamlined display of course activities including smaller icons, less white space, and a drop down menu for activity completion which should save screen space and improve the user experience on course pages, 
• the ability to add titles to text and media areas or “labels”, 
• quicker to access editing menus for visibility and completion criteria to make editing content easier for staff, 
• and a number of bug fixes and security updates. 

For a quick summary of the changes see Moodle’s new features page. Please note that UCL Moodle doesn’t use Matrix communication or MoodleNet. 

If you have any feedback or questions about the upgrade, please get in touch with the Digital Learning Environment team. 

We are pleased to introduce the ‘Advanced Moodle Quiz and Question Bank’ self-paced course which is now available at https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=40483 

This course is aimed at academics and professional services staff who want to deepen their use of Moodle to create and manage quizzes.

The estimated completion time is 2 to 3 hours. We’ve designed it with flexibility in mind, allowing you to progress through the material in smaller, digestible chunks that fit into your busy schedule.

This is an exciting opportunity to learn how to:

• Confidently manage the Moodle question bank interface.
• Organise question banks clearly with categories and tags.
• Use Moodle’s advanced quiz settings to make your tests more engaging.
• Analyse quiz results to improve your questions and teaching methods.
• Build a Moodle quiz that uses advanced features effectively.

The course includes step-by-step guides, links to further resources and knowledge-check quizzes. You also have the option to receive a certificate at the end of the course.

After completing the course, staff can get further support by getting in touch by email via digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

This version of the course will be further developed during term 2 as we receive feedback and input from the UCL community. We will make sure that everyone will be notified when new materials will be added to the course.

P.S: A workshop version of this course will also become available from January 2024. More info to follow!

Between the 18^th and the 21^st of September, the Moodle (DLE product) team attended the Global MoodleMoot, a coming together of over 700 worldwide Moodle users from education, government, NGOs, Moodle Partners and beyond.

On the pre-conference day, team members attended Developer, UI/UX and Learning Designer “jams”, where they worked with other delegates on issues around lifelong learning challenges within Moodle.

The main conference included presentations on all aspects of Moodle covering developments, product roadmaps, and new functionality from Moodle HQ, Moodle partners and independent vendors. Of course, there were numerous talks about the use of generative AI both in online education and Moodle, including a very interesting keynote by Martin Dougiamas, the founder of Moodle on the future of AI and robots and its impact upon humanity as a whole.

The UCL team gave two presentations: one by the product owner on implementing Agile methodology into the DLE team at UCL, and one by our DLE UI/UX team on improving Moodle through research into the user experience and data analysis.

Our teams presentations are available to watch at the following URLs:

Introducing Agile Practice into the VLE at University College London

Improving Moodle through UX research and data analysis

Our presentations were warmly received with all presenters being approached numerous times over the next few days to discuss aspects of their presentation or to offer insight and support for other Moodle users.

One of the team’s principles is that any developments that we make that can be fed back to the Moodle community should be. Following our UI/UX talk, and discussions in which we announced the release of several plugins, our Senior Team Lead Alistair Spark was semi “mobbed” by other Moodle users seeking to get the repository URLs so they might make use of our developments.

Catalyst IT, our Moodle partner, also won Moodle Contributor partner of the year based significantly on the work that they have developed with us and released back to the community.

Outside of the conference, I also met with the Moodle Quiz Consortium of which UCL is part. Over the last 2 years together, this group of five leading European universities have provided funding for a complete rewrite of the Moodle core question bank.

This has led to a significant enhancement of Moodle’s assessment capabilities, guided by input from the Consortium. The outputs of these developments have and continue to be released into Moodle versions 4.0+. The Consortium leads at Bern University and the Open University presented on the next stage of development and upon the success of the group’s developments so far.

The Consortium is now seeking funding for the next item of quiz bank development, which is the ability to share question banks. This is a high value function that our users would significantly benefit from, as demonstrated by the quote below from one of our senior academics. I hope that we will be able to devote some resource towards this work within this financial year.

“Being able to share questions is essential. At present my main issue is that I have questions in separate courses. If I share them with colleagues, by making a copy, their changes and feedback don’t apply to my questions and we end up having to maintain separate versions of the same questions. As we have 1908 questions in a single course, you can imagine that being able to share these centrally at our category level between tutors and use tag/search on the question is absolutely essential.”

Final comments

As product owner, I personally have come away with three specific contacts that I will be following up. The first was a reach-out from the Moodle (HQ) product owner to arrange a talk with UCL about Moodle. This has now been followed up and the UCL team are having a joint meeting and agenda in December with the Moodle product leadership team.

The second was from members of the European Commission Moodle team who were interested in talking to us on both what we have done with Moodle and the impact of moving to Agile/Scrum.

Thirdly, I had an engaging talks with the product owners of the Moodle Academy which is a Moodle HQ training resource that provides official, free, up-to-date Moodle training packages. I held a discussion with them on how UCL may be able to use the Academy to provide tailored learning pathways for our administrators and tutors. This could lead to a UCL specific badge or a UCL specific variant of the MEC qualification. 

And my final takeaway item, and one that I will be talking to my colleagues in the Media Environments product team about, is an LTI for the enhancement of media in Moodle from any source via a product called Annoto. This product enables course participants to add time-based annotations as an overlay to any video content, turning passive video watching into an active and collaborative learning experience while providing actionable insights on the students and the video content delivered by course tutors. One for a shared product review in the future!

Our technical team who were in attendance have likewise made many contacts and expanded their networks with specific institutional contacts as well as the larger Moodle community. They have each come away from various presentations and demonstrations with ideas and suggestions that the team will be discussing over the next few weeks and months that will go into making our UCL Moodle that much better.

The UCL Moodle team continues to have significant and growing standing in the Moodle community, Our presence and engagement at events such as MoodleMoot and release of our developments into the open source community enhance UCL’s reputation.

MoodleMoot has once again provided an exceptionally rich environment for the team to learn, think, develop and connect.