STAFF – Preparing your Moodle Courses for 2017/18

Many staff have already started preparing their modules on Moodle to try to give students the best possible environment for learning and getting to grips with new material. With the start of term one fast approaching, we wanted to remind all staff of some of the key steps to follow during set-up and review of Moodle modules.  Guidance is provided below for Moodle courses where student activity was completed before the Snapshot was taken on 21^st July 2017 as well as for Moodle courses where student activity may have continued beyond this point.

Modules where student activity finished by 21st July 2017 (mainly UG)

• Student data and assessment from the past year should have been captured in the Moodle 2016/17 Snapshot: https://moodle-snapshot.ucl.ac.uk/16-17/ . You may want to check your modules to confirm that content that should be hidden has been, and any assessment data you may need is available to you.

• Reset your course in live Moodle to ensure no data or students from the last cohort remains before new students are enrolled – Find out how to reset your course.

• Make sure to update your content, in particular any assignment submission dates for this year, and that any links are not broken. Find out how to update Moodle Assignments: and Turnitin Assignments.

**If your Turnitin submission inbox does not display the column headings, you may want to clear your web browsers cache and cookies.

• Review your course to ensure that it meets the UCL E-Learning Baseline.

• If required, activate Portico enrolments in your module so that students are automatically enrolled – Find out how to activate Portico enrolments here.

• Once your course is updated, make sure it is visible by going to the Settings for the course.

Modules where Student activity continues/continued beyond 21st July 2017 (mainly PG)

• Do not reset your course! – as students have been active after the date of the snapshot and this data will not have been captured elsewhere. Check the Moodle 2016/17 Snapshot version of your course to confirm: https://moodle-snapshot.ucl.ac.uk/16-17 . If you are still unsure get in contact with us using the email below.

• Request a new course to use for this year’s teaching – include the url of the original course if you require content to be duplicated.

• Review your course to ensure that it is meets the UCL E-Learning Baseline.

At the start of the academic year and in preparation for the next cohort of students on a course, staff are required to ‘Reset’ their Moodle courses. This removes students work and grades but leaves course resources and activities in place.

An issue was identified at the end of July that was affecting Turnitin assignments when a Moodle course was ‘Reset’. This has now been resolved. Staff can now reset their Moodle courses. HOWEVER, the process of resetting courses has changed slightly so please read through the guidance provided via this link carefully, paying particular attention to step 4 of the process.

If you reset your course/s containing Turnitin assignments before 11th August, the Digital Education team suggest resetting them again, to ensure the issue described below does not occur.

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An issue has been identified that is affecting Turnitin assignments when a Moodle course is ‘Reset’.

At the start of the academic year and in preparation for the next cohort of students on a course, staff are required to ‘Reset’ their Moodle courses. This removes students work and grades but leaves course resources and activities in place.

Issue

The ‘Reset’ function in Moodle normally creates a new class ID for a Turnitin assignment and staff should then be able to edit the assignment settings accordingly.  The issue that has been identified is that resetting the course seems to ‘lock’ the anonymous marking setting to  ‘Yes’  making it un-editable.  However, even if the Post date is edited and no submission has been made, student’s names are visible.

We have reported the issue to Turnitin and they have acknowledged that there is problem and indicated that they hope to have a solution we can implement by the end of the week.

Action Required (temporary workaround)

We recommend, where feasible, that you wait until we have a fix in place and refrain from ‘resetting’  your course until we advise otherwise.

Staff who have reset their courses in preparation for the next cohort of students or any staff planning to reset their courses before the issue is resolved should take the following steps:

After resetting your Moodle course:

• Delete the Turnitin assignment(s) that currently exist
• Create new Turnitin assignment (s) with the required settings

  Guidance and instructions on creating Turnitin assignments are available from our Moodle Resource Centre: https://wiki.ucl.ac.uk/display/MoodleResourceCentre/M20+-+Turnitin+Assignment

We apologise for the inconvenience caused and will advise when the issue has been resolved.

If you have any questions of concerns, please contact the Digital Education team by emailing
digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk