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UCL Digital Learning Environments at MoodleMoot Global 2023

By Jason R Norton, on 17 October 2023

Between the 18th and the 21st 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.

 

Moodle upgrade and course format UX project

By Eliot Hoving, on 9 October 2023

The Digital Learning Environment (DLE) Moodle UX (User Experience) team would like to wish staff and students an excellent start to the 2023/24 academic year. 

By now, many of you will have noticed that UCL Moodle has been given a much-needed update.  Student and staff feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Nonetheless, the Moodle UX team is continuing to develop UCL Moodle based on UX research, accessibility requirements and user feedback. 

UCL Staff can receive early access to developments and participate in opportunities to feedback and shape UCL Moodle by joining the Moodle Development User Feedback Teams group. Alternatively, you can email questions and feedback to digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk 

There are a few quick steps we recommend staff take to update their course to make the most of the new look of Moodle and its new features.  You can read about them in the Moodle 4 – Quick tips for updating your course guide. 

The why about Moodle text editor changes 

As part of the upgrade to UCL Moodle, the ability to change font colour and font family has been removed from Moodle’s text editor.

Font colour has been removed to encourage content in Moodle to meet accessibility requirements.  This is in response to feedback from students who have reported that text on Moodle has often been formatted with poor colour contrast (e.g. red text on a white background) or that colour has been used to indicate information which is not accessible (e.g. conveying information solely using green or red colours). For further guidance, you can read the Digital Accessibility team’s guide on the Visuals and the use of colour. 

Changing font family has also been removed to avoid text that breaks UCL’s design system. Keeping text to a consistent font family will make it easier for students to read content and will also support a consistent and improved experience across UCL’s many webpages and applications.   

 

Upcoming changes to UCL Moodle theme

We’d also like to update you on some upcoming changes which should come into effect soon.

1 – New banner and navbar 

The UCL logo banner and navbar has been redesigned to align Moodle to UCL’s new design system and to conserve vertical space. This should make Moodle more accessible and improve useability on smaller screens and mobile devices.

 

Old banner

Old UCL Moodle Navbar

New banner

New UCL Moodle navbar

2 – New course index page 

The course index page is where staff and students can search or browse for courses. This page has been redesigned based on UX interviews with staff. The new design removes unnecessary information and should be easier to use. 

Old course index page

Old UCL Moodle course index page

New course index page

New UCL Moodle course index page

 

3 – SCORM package default setting changes 

Based on user feedback and an analysis of how SCORM packages are used at UCL. The following changes are planned to the default settings of SCORM packages:  

  • Disabled Preview Mode set to “Yes” 
  • Display Course Structure in Player set to “Disabled”.

We expect these changes to save users’ time when creating new SCORM packages. The changes will not impact already existing SCORM packages, and the default settings can always be changed when creating a new SCORM activity if required. 

Course format UX project 

The Moodle UX team is currently working on wrapping up the Moodle theme development (for now), with a specific focus on improving and embedding accessibility.  

Once complete, we will start working on a UX research project on Moodle course formats. Moodle course formats control how content is structured within a course (e.g. topics, weekly topics, tabs, flexible format, grid). We will be interviewing staff and students to better understand how different course formats are used. Based on the findings, we aim to build a bespoke UCL Moodle course format that fulfils UCL student and staff needs and builds on the best elements of other Moodle course formats. 

If you are interested to find out more or participate in this research, please email e.hoving@ucl.ac.uk.  

 

 

LinkedIn Learning Content now available in Moodle

By Jason R Norton, on 11 September 2023

Linkedin Learning’s media and courses are now available to be embedded in Moodle via the add activity/Resource button as an LTI. This will allow you to share either whole Linkedin courses, single media items, with the added bonus of being able to deep link to a specific point within a video.

A new Moodle mini guide is available here detailing how to use the tool.

Linkedin Learning embedded into a Moodle Course

 

 

Changes to Lecturecast (Echo360) Interface

By Tom Walters, on 15 August 2023

We would like to inform you that Lecturecast (Echo360) is undergoing a theme transformation set to continue until September. You may have already noticed that elements of the Lecturecast (Echo360) interface have been updated with a refreshing Raspberry Pink colour palette. Please be assured that these updates are purely aesthetic and do not impact the platform’s functionality, which remains unchanged.

Our team is diligently working on aligning our user guides with this new theme. We appreciate your patience as we work through this process.

If you have any questions, concerns, or need assistance, please feel free to reach out to our dedicated support team at lecturecast@ucl.ac.uk.

Lecturecast sections for 2023/24 courses are available and Zoom integration is changing

By Silvia Giannitrapani, on 1 August 2023

Lecturecast sections for the new 2023/24 academic year are now available. All Lecturecast activity links in Moodle are copied over from the previous year’s course during a rollover, but students will not be able to open the links and view these recordings until the new Moodle course has been linked to its Lecturecast section.

Before making a Moodle course available to students, course teams need to link their course to the new 2023/24 section as follows:

  • Go to your new Moodle course and select any existing Lecturecast links.

  • Once you click on the link, you will be prompted to choose the new Lecturecast section. Use the drop-down list(s) to select the term, course, and section you want to link to.

  • Then select ‘Link to the Section Home’ to link your new Moodle course directly to the section class list.

  • Click ‘LINK CONTENT’ to complete the configuration.
    • Once you link through, you are automatically enrolled as an instructor in the relevant Lecturecast section for next year.
    • All the Lecturecast links in the rolled-over Moodle course will now be linked to next year’s session in Lecturecast.

Please note that to reuse one or more recordings from the previous year, you still need to make a copy of the recording and then share the copy with next year’s section. Please follow the instructions available at Reuse recordings from previous years.

The Zoom/Lecturecast integration is changing…

As of Friday, August 4th 2023 the integration between Zoom and Lecturecast will be changing to an opt-in model. This means that by default your Zoom recordings will not be ingested automatically into your Lecturecast/Echo360 library unless you change your configuration settings.

What does this mean for you?
If you choose to opt-in, all your Zoom recordings will automatically be stored in Lecturecast for future reference and to be shared with your students (this is advisable only if the majority of your Zoom recordings are teaching related such as lectures or tutorials)
If you take no action, your recorded Zoom sessions will no longer be automatically stored in Lecturecast but you can still manually upload teaching related recordings by following the instructions in the ‘Zoom recordings in Lecturecast’ miniguide.

To opt-in, please visit the settings section of your Lecturecast account and enable the “Automatically copy Zoom recordings to Echo360” option. Please see the miniguide for detailed instructions.

Setting to Automatically copy Zoom recordings to Echo360
We understand that everyone has different preferences regarding the recording of lectures, and this change aims to provide you with more control over your Zoom recordings.

If you have any questions, concerns or need further assistance, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team at lecturecast@ucl.ac.uk

UCL Moodle has been Upgraded to Moodle version 4.2

By Jason R Norton, on 27 July 2023

We are very happy to announce that UCL Moodle has been upgraded to version 4.2 (from version 3.11) and our new UCL “Theme” has been enabled.

UCL Moodle Login Screen

UCL Moodles new login page

 

To keep this post brief, we are signposting existing and new resources that are now available.

Resource List

Updated Moodle Resource Centre – Moodle mini-guides have been updated to reflect Moodle 4 changes and a new top level landing page introduced to ensure new Moodle 4 items can be highlighted. (N.B. some updated resources are being released over the next 48 hours)

Moodle 4 self paced Training Course – An online Moodle course that will walk you through all the key changes within the Moodle 4.2 environment, and as a bonus will award a nice badge on completion.

Moodle 4.2 Demo Instance – We know that trying things out in a new environment may be a little nerve wracking, so we will be ensuring that the Moodle 4.2 demo environment is up to date and available for all staff to test various functionality. You will not be able to do everything because integrations with other systems (eg SITS) will not be enabled, but most Moodle based activities and course editing testing will be available.

Student Resource – The team have updated the basic introduction to Moodle for students.

Previous Moodle Upgrade Blogs – A link to the archive for all the previous Moodle 4 upgrade blogs that have deep dives into specific new or changed features.

Moodle 4 – Quick tips for updating your course – A mini guide on updating course elements post the Moodle 4 upgrade.

For those of you who may like to look at Moodle HQ’s own detailed release notes, below are links to all versions that are included in this upgrade.

Moodle 4.0

Moodle 4.1

Moodle 4.2

 

Note: Academic Year 23/24 Portico Mappings and Lecturecast Sections

Portico Mappings and Lecturecast Sections for the academic year 2023/2024, will NOT be available until after the 1st of August 2023, when data for the next academic year is made available within SITS.

 

What next for UCL Moodle ?

Post Moodle 4 Code refinements and bug squashing

Releasing a new version of any software always requires a period of review and bug fixing. While our team has spent hundreds of hours with various forms of manual and automated testing, its only when you, our users, use the platform that some bugs and minor feature issues will be detected. The support team will be actively prioritising tickets regarding Moodle to our development team who will continue to work to resolve any identified issues as quickly as possible.

Any issues discovered will be listed on our known issues page. If you encounter any issues please contact digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

Post Release Theme Development

Working with our partner Titus Learning, our small theme feature team will continue to make minor changes and improvements based on your feedback up until the start of the new undergraduate session. Once that work has been completed the team will begin to look at our Moodle course formats, another key UI/UX feature of our Moodle platform. They will be looking to bring our course formats into alignment with the new UCL Theme, helping to support consistency across course formats and working to improve accessibility.

Moodle Roadmap

The product team will be working over the summer to refine our medium to long term roadmap. This we aim to have published by the end of September to all our users.  The team have a lot of feature requests, required developments and general operational requirements in our backlog that need to be prioritised and aligned with the work of the Digital Education Portfolio and various strategic goals.

We thank you all for your patience over the last 18 months of active development and I also wish to thank all of those who have engaged with the product team in providing feedback and ideas that have helped us develop a better Moodle.

many thanks

Jason Norton

Product Manager for Digital Learning Environments