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New Marking Block on UCL Moodle

By Eliot Hoving, on 30 January 2025

The UCL Moodle team are delighted to announce a new Marking block for staff on the Moodle dashboard.

Previously, the My Feedback block on the Moodle dashboard was only accessible to students, providing them with a summary of up to five recent assessments with available feedback.

The latest update introduces a staff Marking block, allowing staff to see up to five summative assessments across Moodle that require marking. This new feature aims to streamline the marking process by making it easier for staff to access and manage their pending marking.

New marking block

Marking block is now available on UCL Moodle dashboard.

The Marking block includes Turnitin assignments, Moodle assignments, and Quiz assessments that are categorised as summative on Moodle. These assessments are from courses that have started and not yet ended, with an additional three-month extension to accommodate late summer assessments.

Assessments are organized by their due dates, ensuring that the most relevant marking is prominently displayed. To keep the information current, only assessments with due dates within the past two months or the upcoming month will be shown.

This update is part of the ongoing digital assessment workstream of the UCL Moodle team. It follows on from our recent Feedback tracker feature. If you have questions or would like to feedback on early UCL Moodle prototypes please contact the UCL Moodle team via the MyServices portal.

Badge to the Future

By Samantha Ahern, on 6 January 2025

Back in early November I attended ePIC 2024: Opening and scaling up digital credential initiatives, the 22nd International Conference on Open learning and recognition practices, technologies and policies.

Unsurprisingly there was a lot of discussion about emerging AI tools and the roles they could play in this space, but what did come as a surprise was digital badges.

Back in 2010 the Mozilla Foundation and MacArthur Foundation developed open badge prototypes and in October 2012, the Mozilla Foundation launched the Public Beta of the Open Badge Infrastructure. Since then over 43 million digital badges have been issued worldwide.

The white paper Open Badges for Lifelong Learning (updated 2012) authored by The Mozilla Foundation and Peer 2 Peer University,
in collaboration with The MacArthur Foundation noted that badges were specifically able to support the Capturing and translating the learning across contexts, Encouraging and motivating participation and learning outcomes, and Formalizing and enhancing existing social aspects of informal and interest-driven learning.

Updates to the the Open Badges standard have enabled embedded evidence, endorsements, version control and internationalization (Open Badges 2.0), and the facilitation of federated backpacks via the Open Badges 2.1 (Badge Connect) API. By 2021 24 products from 19 organizations headquartered in 8 countries that have gone through the IMS conformance certification process for Open Badges v2.x.

However, understanding the “value” of a badge with regards to credentially in educational settings has proven difficult.

In December 2024, the implementation guide for the Open Badges 3.0 and Comprehensive Learner Records 2.0 standards was published.

Section 1.5 states :

The core of both Open Badges and Comprehensive Learner Record is an assertion about an achievement. As defined in Open Badges Specification v3.0 and Comprehensive Learner Record Standard v2.0, an assertion is specific to one learner. It contains a claim that the learner has made a particular achievement and metadata about the achievement, the issuer, and the learner, including possible evidence that provides support for the claim. (https://www.imsglobal.org/spec/ob/v3p0/impl)

This is something to get excited about. Updates to the metadata capability enable the inclusion of multimedia content that make it possible to embed evidence within the badge. Additionally, the standard has adopted the use of the W3C verifiable credentials data model and introduced the use of Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) gives badge earners more control over their personal data and how it is shared. It is also now easier and more transparent to revoke badges which may be outdated or have expired in some way, potentially increasing trust in the potential.

At ePIC2024 there were a few projects which looked to leverage these new capabilities to support lifelong learning initiatives. One example is Odznaka+, co-funded by the European Union that has expanded upon the open Badge standard. The application enables the issuing, collecting, storing and sharing digital badges and equivalent PDF certificates. It allows users to digitally certify different types of skills and achievements.

This new generation of digital badges may be able to address some of the concerns raised in the Landscape report undertaken by the UK Badging Commission on the trustworthiness and verification of badged credentials.

In addition to verification, data sovereignty was a key discussion point. Who owns the credential, the learner of the issuer? Who chooses what information is shared and with whom?

The UK Badging Commission recognise that digital skills wallets are an ideal platform for communicating a comprehensive picture of an individual’s skills and experiences from a range of learning opportunities. These can be facilitated through the new Open Badges 3.0 and Comprehensive Learner Records 2.0 standards in transferable and verfiable ways.

Paragraph 15 of the COUNCIL RECOMMENDATION of 16 June 2022 on a European approach to micro-credentials for lifelong learning and employability (2022/C 243/02) begins:

Education and training systems should cater for the diverse individual needs, abilities and capacities of all learners. They should also offer learning opportunities to all, including in non-formal and informal settings as underlined by the Council conclusions on equity and inclusion in education and training in order to promote educational success for all (11).

Most importantly this learning should be portable, in the recommendations portability is defined as:

‘Portability’ means the ability for a credential-holder to store their micro-credentials in a system of their choice, to share the credential with a party of their choice (whether national or transnational) and for all parties in the exchange to be able to understand the content and verify the authenticity of the credentials. This enables portability between and within education and training sectors, in the labour market and across countries.

The new generation of badges and associated learner records could become a key tool in facilitating these requirements.

What does that potentially mean for UCL?

In addition to our degree programmes, UCL provides a wide variety of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) opportunities. Could these be credentialed and verfiable digital badges to make them a transferable microcredential where appropriate?

Should we be looking to credentialise smaller pieces of CPD offered both internally and externally to better facilitate skills recognition and lifelong learning?

As stated by a speaker at ePIC2024 “we do not have a skills shortage, but a recognition of skills shortage”.

Could this new generation of badges help address this recognition issue?

References:

Moodle 4.5 update

By Eliot Hoving and Kerry, on 19 December 2024

UCL Moodle will be updated to version 4.5 on the 2nd of January 2025. 

The main change staff will notice is that the Moodle assignment submissions interface has been revamped with a new full width display, fixed headers and footers that allow for better navigation, improved filtering as well as easy access to key actions at the top and bottom of the page.

Staff can learn more by watching Moodle’s Assignment improvements in Moodle 4.5 video.  

Other improvements include: 

  • Students will now receive notifications when a Quiz is about to open, when an assignment is due (in 7 days or 48 hours) and also when an assignment is overdue. 
  • Staff will be able to set assignment resubmissions to be offered automatically if students are allowed more than one attempt.  
  • Staff will now be able to regrade specific questions in a Quiz and question categories can be organised using drag and drop or using the three dots action button (for accessibility requirements) 
  • The Tiny MCE Editor will now include the option to record the screen and computer audio as well as record video. 
  • There are several administrative enhancements, speed improvements and bug fixes. 

You can read more about the changes on Moodle’s 4.5 new features page 

Please note that UCL has NOT enabled Moodle’s AI subsystems or subsections at this stage as our current focus is on improving UCL Moodle’s performance and reliability. However, those features may be reviewed in the future if there is sufficient demand 

Feedback tracker update

By Eliot Hoving, on 12 December 2024

The Feedback Tracker has been updated today (Thursday 12th December 2024).

The update introduces improvements for staff. The display for students will not change.

The display of the Feedback tracker configuration page has been changed to align it with UCL’s design system and improve accessibility and useability.

New Feedback tracker configuration page.

The update also introduces two new features to assist staff in marking and returning feedback:

  • a progress indicator showing the % of marking completed for each assessment, and
  • a count of extensions applied on Moodle assignments and quizzes based on user and group overrides.

Configuration options have been relocated to make the editing of the Feedback tracker more intuitive.

Several bugs have also been resolved, with any outstanding issues listed under Known issues.

To learn more about the Feedback tracker, please see the Feedback tracker documentation.

Assess coding with Moodle’s CodeRunner question type

By Eliot Hoving, on 4 December 2024

UCL Moodle quizzes now support the CodeRunner question type.

CodeRunner questions allow students to submit code and for teachers to run a program in order to grade a student’s answer.

CodeRunner will be of most benefit to programming courses where students are asked to write program code to some specification and that code is then graded by running it in a series of tests. CodeRunner questions are also relevant for areas of computer science and engineering to grade questions in which a program must be used to assess correctness.

UCL Moodle has support for the following common coding languages: Python, Java, C, SQL, PHP.

CodeRunner questions are an advanced question type. You should always run a practice assessment with students prior to any summative assessments to ensure your questions are working properly and that students are familiar with answering CodeRunner questions.

If you wish to run a summative assessment using Moodle Quiz. Please follow UCL guidance and notify Digital Education in advance to ensure any necessary checks can be completed.

To learn more, please see the CodeRunner documentation.

Moodle exam guard, and 23/24 course read only date

By Pauline Harding, on 22 November 2024

Moodle Exam guard

Exam guard will prevent users from editing their course from 10 minutes before the start of a Moodle quiz until 10 minutes after the quiz has finished. Exam guard does this by looking at the “open the quiz”/ “close the quiz”  setting when a Moodle quiz is created. The course editing freeze will only apply where the Moodle quiz is open for less than 5 hours as it is designed to target Moodle quizzes being used for controlled condition exams.  To avoid any disruptions, we recommend setting the “Open the quiz” time to match the exam start time when creating the quiz, as well as leaving the quiz availability setting on “Show on course page” rather than “Hide on course page”. 

A banner will appear at the top of your course when Exam guard is in effect.

Exam guard

For further details, please refer to our wiki guide.

23/24 Moodle course read-only date

The read-only date for many Moodle courses from the 23/24 academic year will be activated on 29th November, 2024.  Once the Read-Only date is reached a course becomes uneditable.  If you will need any 23/24 courses to remain editable after 29th November, please adjust the read only date on the course as needed, and while the course is editable.

For guidance on amending the read-only date before it is globally activated, please refer to our Moodle miniguide.

If you need additional assistance, please contact us via MyServices.

Kind regards

Digital Education team