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Three Moodle features to help students stay on top of assessments

By Eliot Hoving, on 2 October 2024

Moodle is UCL’s centrally supported digital learning environment. 

A Moodle course page is a digital representation of a module which allows tutors to communicate and share activities, assessments and resources with students. 

As you explore your course pages, you may find that assessments are in different weeks and areas depending on how each course is designed.  

Luckily, Moodle provides students with three handy features to help them find their next assessment deadline and stay up to date with feedback.  Read on to find out about each feature and how to use it.  

Students will find these three features on the home page of Moodle when they log in. 

1. Check the Timeline to see upcoming deadlines 

The Timeline shows you a list of upcoming deadlines on Moodle. You can change the display to show all due dates, or those in the next 7 days or 6 months. 

2. Check the Feedback block to see recent feedback  

The Feedback block shows you the latest feedback that has been released to you.  

You can click on the assessment name to view your feedback.  

 

3. Check the Feedback tracker to see an overview of all your assessments and feedback 

In the Feedback block, click the link to the Feedback tracker to see an overview of your assessments and feedback. 

 The Feedback tracker is also available from your profile menu in the top right of Moodle. 

 The Feedback tracker shows you a list of your Moodle assessments organised by academic year and course. 

For each assessment you will see whether you submitted on time, submitted late, or have missed the deadline and so your submission is overdue. 

You will also see the status of your feedback and whether feedback has been released, released late, or is overdue.  

Lastly, the Feedback tracker shows any mark you have received, and whether the assessment is summative or formative (summative assessments contribute to your overall course mark whereas formative assessments do not). 

The Feedback tracker can help you to find and review feedback. Sometimes you may have assessments that are outside of Moodle, so it is important to always double check with your course tutor what the assessment requirements are for your courses.  

You can learn more about the Feedback tracker by reading the Feedback tracker student guide. 

In summary, the Moodle home page provides you with three features to manage your assessments. Use the Timeline to see upcoming assessment deadlines, the Feedback block to see recent feedback and the Feedback tracker to see an overview of your assessments and feedback. 

Best of luck in your assessments!  

New Moodle assessment features

By Eliot Hoving, on 19 September 2024

The Digital Learning Environments (DLE) team is excited to announce the launch of several new features to support assessment on Moodle: 

  • Assessment categorisation  
  • Feedback tracker report 
  • Mark transfer update 

Assessment categorisation 

Staff can now indicate whether an assessment is summative or formative on Moodle. This will make assessment requirements clearer to students.  This feature will also enable more useful assessment reporting for Departments and Faculties.

Assessment categorisation is available for the following activities, with more to follow: 

  • Moodle assignment 
  • Moodle quiz 
  • Turnitin assignment 
  • Moodle workshop 

Staff will be prompted to add an assessment category when creating or editing an assessment.

Categories can also be added in bulk for all assessments on a course using the date management report tool.

Assessments will be automatically listed as summative where staff have mapped their assessments to Portico using the Mark Transfer tool. So staff preparing courses should map their assessments early and then use assessment categorisation to indicate any formative assessments.

You can learn more by reading the Assessment categorisation documentation. 

Feedback tracker report 

The Feedback tracker is a new report on Moodle that shows students the status of their Moodle assessment submissions and feedback on one single page. 

The report will make it easier for students to access feedback. 

It will also give students and staff a clearer view of feedback turnaround. A status is shown for when a student submits on time or late, and whether feedback is returned within UCL’s policy of 20 working days. 

The report will also show whether an assessment is summative or formative based on Assessment categorisation.

Staff can customise the report with the option to add additional information or exclude items.

The following video provides an example of how the Feedback tracker can be accessed, and configured (6 mins 48 seconds).

The DLE team will focus next on early life support for the Feedback tracker. Followed by developing a Department report to allow Departments and Faculties to better monitor feedback turnaround and to improve marking workload planning.  

You can learn more by reading our pre-release blog, and the Feedback tracker documentation. 

Mark transfer update 

Finally, if you wish to transfer marks for Late Summer Assessments from Moodle, it is now possible to do so with the Moodle-Portico Marks Transfer tool. 

This works in a similar way to marks transfer for standard assessments. However, when accessing the dashboard for completing the set up, you choose the Re-assessments page. When transferring marks, they will be sent to the relevant reassessment record in Portico. 

For more information, see the Reassessments How to Guide on the Marks Transfer wiki. 

Should you experience any issues using the tool, please check the FAQs wiki page. 

If you are unable to resolve the issue, you can request support as follows: 

  • For general questions, feedback or suggestions, contact your Faculty Champion 

Questions and support

For any issues with using these new features, please contact Digital Education via MyServices

Removal of obsolete Zoom recordings stored in Lecturecast (Echo360) on 11th March 2024

By Silvia Giannitrapani, on 4 March 2024

As per the UCL retention policy, any Zoom-recorded content in Lecturecast will be deleted if it meets the following criteria: 

  • Zoom recordings that have never been shared with a Lecturecast course section 
  • Zoom recordings that have never been viewed.

Staff members impacted by this will be contacted with further details. Should they wish to retain these recordings, they are advised to ensure a copy is stored in their Zoom account, unless they have manually deleted them. Alternatively, a copy of the recording can be downloaded before the 11th March 2024 by following the instruction below.  

 Please note: Teaching events captured or uploaded to Lecturecast (Echo360) will not be affected. 

If you have any questions regarding this matter, please get in touch with the Lecturecast Support Team and we will respond as promptly as possible. 

Online Learning: Community of Practice

By Oliver Vas and Jo Stroud, on 13 February 2024

black smartphone and laptop near person

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Online Learning is a rapidly expanding area in higher education around the world. While it became a necessity during the pandemic, an increasing number of students and short course learners are choosing to study their degrees fully online. Currently UCL offers around 40 postgraduate programmes with a significant distance learning component, just over half of which are delivered fully remotely.

As such, we’re setting up an Online Learning Community of Practice (OLCoP; catchy, we know) to bring together staff who teach and support online programmes, modules, and short courses at UCL.

At this stage, OLCoP is an informal group, and we hope to use regular meetings and the Teams space to:

  • Share best practices in online teaching and learning
  • Build a communication hub between academic departments, central, and local services
  • Identify and recommend professional development opportunities
  • Disseminate new and changing information relating to policy, quality assurance, pedagogies, technology, and more
  • Ensure that issues relating to equity, diversity, and inclusion in online learning are properly represented
  • Gather actionable feedback from staff and students regarding online learning experiences.

If you are interested in joining, please complete this short form. This will also send you an invite to our Teams space.

We will be holding our first meeting of OLCoP on 13th March 2024 at 2:30pm.

This first meeting will take place as a hybrid event and act as an opportunity to get to know other staff teaching and developing online courses.

Those who wish to attend in person can join us at the training suite at the Anna Freud Centre, not too far from King’s Cross station, while those who prefer to join online can do so via Teams. We will have facilitators in both spaces.

You can register to attend using the form linked above.

We hope you can join us!

Moodle Boards Update

By Kerry, on 17 January 2024

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

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.

Upgrade to Moodle 4.3

By Eliot Hoving, on 20 December 2023

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.