Next week the Digital Learning Environments team will launch a new Feedback Tracker Report in Moodle. This report will show students the status of their assessments and feedback and is inspired by the manual feedback tracker created by the School of Pharmacy in 2023. 

Please note you can click on any image in this blog post to expand the image.

The initial release will only display the following Moodle activities: 

• Moodle Assignment 

• Turnitin Assignment 

• Moodle quiz 

• Moodle lesson (where graded) 

• Moodle forum (where graded) 

• Moodle Grade items 

Student View 

Students will access the Feedback Tracker Report via the Feedback tracker link on the Moodle dashboard or via their user profile menu – both access options are illustrated. 

Access via the Moodle dashboard 

Access via the user profile menu  

The Feedback Tracker Report gives students a personalised view of their assessments. If a student has adjusted submission times, the adjusted submission times will be shown to them. 

The report displays all courses that a student is enrolled upon, showing all assessments that are not set to be hidden from students.  

If an assessment has been categorised as summative or formative, either manually or by using the Marks Transfer feature, this information will also be displayed. 

 

For each assessment, the following information is shown: 

• Assessment Name: displayed as a link to the assessment. 

• Submission Date: The date the submission is due. If a student has an extension, their individual submission date will show.   

• Student Submission indicator: 

• • Submitted (green) = student submitted before the assessment due date. 

• • Submitted late (yellow) = student submitted after the assessment due date. 

• • Overdue (red) = student has not submitted, and the assessment due date has passed. 

• Feedback Due date: This date is based upon UCL’s academic policy on Assessment feedback requirement that feedback should be delivered within 20 UCL working days excluding all UCL holidays.  

• Feedback Status Indicator: The Feedback indicator will display:  

• • Released (green) = Feedback has been released within 20 working days from the assessment due date. 

• • Released late (yellow) = Feedback has been released but it took longer than 20 working days from the assessment due date.  

• • Overdue (red) = Feedback has not been released and more than 20 working days has passed from the assessment due date. 

•  Staff can add the following information to their course assessments via the configuration page: 

• • Feedback method – the kind of feedback being returned e.g. written, oral, video, in-class. This helps signpost the different kinds of feedback students are receiving.  

• • Contact – a staff contact point for students. 

• • Additional information – any note relevant to students, for example you could explain that cohort feedback was provided in a Moodle forum post and link to that post.  

Staff View 

Staff will be able to view a course level Feedback Tracker Report by going to the Reports tab for any Moodle course and clicking the Feedback tracker link as illustrated below. From this view, staff will be able to select to view as a course administrator or view as a specific student on that course. Staff will only see assessments for the course that they are accessing. 

 

 

Administrator feedback tracker configuration page 

Every course will have its own Feedback Tracker configuration page. From this page course administrators and tutors will have a full unfiltered view of the assessments on the course and will be able to select overrides on features such as visibility. Course administrators will also use this page to add any of the free text fields that are available into the report. 

From this page, Course Administrators can: 

• Hide assessments from the Feedback Tracker Report, these will still appear on the course but won’t appear in the student report. This allows staff to focus student attention on the most important assessments. 

• Indicate where an assessment has received cohort feedback. This will change the feedback status for the assessment to “Released”. 

Future Developments 

The Digital Learning Environment team will continue to work on the Feedback Tracker Report including: 

• Early life support and bug/issue resolution as required. 

• Developing a staff version of the reporting dashboard that will contain additional information. The team will be working on the specification within our next Agile termly increment. 

• Add additional functionality to the feedback tracker report e.g. the ability to bring other non-Moodle assessment information from SITS. 

If you have any questions or feedback, please contact the Digital Education team via MyServices.

Dear colleagues,

As many of you know, a new platform called MyServices was released on 5th August to replace Remedyforce. This system will be used for all IT queries at UCL including Digital Education queries.

This post will summarise some recent changes and how you should raise a request that is related to Digital Education.

As part of the move, any emails that are sent to digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk or lecturecast@ucl.ac.uk will get a bounceback email and not go through to our MyServices queue. You should now go to the MyServices platform directly to raise a support ticket: myservices.ucl.ac.uk/self-service

From the home page above you can search for a specific form or the service you require such as Moodle, which results in this view:

If you then click on Moodle, you get a list of our forms and knowledge articles, where you can choose the one you need. This is not an exhaustive list and is a work in progress, so please select the Staff Query Form if you are not sure which form to use. We have forms for all our services such as Lecturecast, Wiseflow etc. Please search for the service you need to find the relevant related forms. Please note that the icon for the forms is a “telephone”, while the icon for the knowledge articles in the bottom screenshot is an “owl”.

 

We are all adapting to MyServices together and hope that everyone continues to have a smooth transition. For further information on MyServices please see this Sharepoint: https://liveuclac.sharepoint.com/sites/ESM

As always, we are here to help and please do not hesitate to raise a request or issue with us when needed.

Kind regards,
Digital Education Support

Dear colleagues,

Hope you have had a relaxing summer so far and are enjoying the weather while it’s in our favour.

As the new academic year approaches, you can get your Moodle resources ready for the incoming cohort with the help of our Moodle guide to prepare for 2024/25. Please also ensure not to delete content on last year’s courses and only make edits on a separate 2024/25 version of a course.

Portico mappings and Lecturecast sections are now available for the new 2024/25 academic year. For further advice and guidance on these please check the Portico enrolments miniguide and Lecturecast sections KBA. Please note that the Lecturecast Scheduler only shows 4 months from the current date. This means that if you wish to schedule the whole of term 1, you can do so from 20th August in order to include 20th December 2024.

We hope things run smoothly, but if you have any difficulties please refer to the Moodle Resource Centre. If you cannot find an answer, then please send us details via the Moodle Query form.

We wish you all the best with your preparations for our new students, and hope that you enjoy the rest of your summer.

Kind regards,
Tom
Digital Education team

Course administrators and tutors can now rollover Moodle courses for the 2024/25 academic year.

Please note that Lecturecast sections for the upcoming academic year 2024/25 will not to be available until the 1st of August 2024, after which the new academic year’s sections can be linked to the rolled over Moodle course. 

If you need to rollover a course for the current 2023/24 academic year, then please contact IT services.

Relevant guides: 

• Rollover staff guide
• Updating your course checklist

UCL Moodle has been updated with a new feature called Exam guard.

What is it?

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.

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

Why is this required?

In the past, when users have attempted to edit and save changes to a Moodle course while a quiz is underway, it has caused serious performance issues while Moodle tries to refresh caches and implement the changes. This issue is particularly bad where a large cohort (300+) are taking the quiz, and has caused exams to be disrupted.

What do I need to do?

Exam guard will work automatically and should have no impact on the majority of workflows. Staff can still post to forums, and mark submissions in other assignments. They can also add user overrides for late minute ECs and SORA students to a quiz.

Staff will not be able to edit course settings or create or edit activities in their course while the exam is running.

Staff will no longer be able to manually release a Moodle quiz by making the quiz visible at the exam start time. This workflow is not recommended or required. A better approach is for staff to set the Moodle “open the quiz” setting to the exam start date and time when creating the quiz. Students will see the quiz item on Moodle but aren’t able to access the questions or begin the quiz before the open date and time so there is no risk your exam is released early.

You can now set up and mark MyPortfolio assignments using Moodle! MyPortfolio is UCL’s e-portfolio system, which is now integrated with Moodle assignments. This allows tutors to create assessments where students submit portfolios or pages from their MyPortfolio accounts directly via Moodle Assignments.

Staff can:

• Set up MyPortfolio as a submission type in Moodle Assignments
• Mark MyPortfolio entries and leave feedback through Moodle

Students can:

• Submit a link to their MyPortfolio work via Moodle Assignments
• Get their marks and feedback through Moodle

Important information:

1. Re-submitting MyPortfolio pages or collections after making changes

• Tutors only get access to a copy of the portfolio via Moodle Assignments. This process ensures that changes made after the deadline are not reflected in the Moodle Assignment submission.
• Students must re-submit their portfolios after editing them, as they currently need to do with all other Moodle Assignments e.g. MS Word files.

2. Using MyPortfolio across a whole academic year and/or only for formative work

• Please encourage your students to share their MyPortfolio work through Mahara. In this way you will always be able to access the latest version of their work. Because the Moodle MyPortfolio integration creates a copy of a page or collection, you will not be able to see any updates unless students re-submit their work via Moodle every time they add something or make any changes.
• If you need to mark the portfolio at the end of the year, please set up an assignment using the MyPortfolio Mahara LTI only at the end of the course, once students have completed their work.

3. Step-by-step guides

• Staff guide: how to set up and mark a MyPortfolio assignment using Moodle Assignments
• Student guide: how to submit a MyPortfolio assignment using Moodle
• Staff and students: guidance for using MyPortfolio
• Please note that ‘MyPortfolio’ will appear as ‘Mahara’ in Moodle.

If you have any questions, please email digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.