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!  

The following is a guest post by Lucy Porte who is studying for an MSc in Health Informatics at UCL. In January, Lucy travelled all the way from Manchester to join us at #LearnHack in London. Here is her report:

Up Up and Away! 

I had the best weekend recently at #LearnHack 7.0, sponsored by the UCL Centre for Engineering Education and hosted by the School of Management. A distance-learning student, I could not resist the temptation to do a research based hackathon from the centre of Canary Wharf and so headed down to London for the weekend. When we got to the 50th floor of One Canada Square, I knew my decision had payed off. 

One Canada Square. Credit: Janina Dewitz

 The themes this year were Generative AI and assessment and feedback, to tie into #LearnHack’s overall focus on innovation in a research and education setting. There were so many different parts of the event, from board game sessions to brainstorming workshops, pizza breaks to Brewdog pints, an evening seeing the winter lights display and even a competition to see who could make the best AI-generated artwork. This was all alongside the main activity, the creation of our #LearnHack artefacts, which we would get to present at the end of the three days. 

Everyone having fun. Credit: Janina Dewitz

Having only attended one hackathon before and being fairly out of my depth, I was quite apprehensive about this element. Luckily there was a range of amazing project topics to choose from, including game design, UX design, qualitative research pipelines, a tool to perform automated marking and a tool to summarise biomedical research papers. I really struggled with choosing one of these, and spent a lot of the first two days discussing projects with people and gathering ideas for implementation. In the end I chose the last project because it tied into my studies in Health Informatics. 

Protocol Optimiser. Credit: Amy Li

Amy, Jenny and myself soon got to work creating a prototype for our idea. Thanks to Amy’s extensive background work, we were quickly able to focus on our objectives and train a ChatGPT to extract method steps from biomedical papers according to a framework we had found online. Because of ChatGPT’s learning capacity we could iteratively improve the tool to create better results and even evaluate its own performance. We were all very surprised to be granted first prize, which included $1000 of AWS tokens and UCL Changemakers funding to continue the project! 

The team! Credit: Janina Dewitz

We are going to be presenting a poster about our idea at the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium in April, and can’t wait to see what comes out of the Changemakers funding, but will be sure to feed back! I honestly didn’t realise I could get so much out of one weekend with the Digital Education team, and would encourage everyone to subscribe to the #LearnHack mailing list, so you can be first in line for next year! 

Lucy Porte 

On the weekend 26 – 28 January I helped to facilitate and took part in the seventh iteration of #LearnHack.

#LearnHack is a community hackathon organised by an interdisciplinary UCL team. The original event was held in November 2015 in collaboration with UCL Innovation and Enterprise at IDEALondon. The 2024 version was the first time it has been run as a hybrid event. It was held over the weekend of 26-28 January in the School of Management department at Canary Wharf in collaboration with the Faculty of Engineering, Digital Education and UCL Changemakers. Participants came from 12 different UCL departments, alumni, and external guests from Jisc. Everyone was invited to submit project proposals for how to improve UCL based on pre-agreed themes. The themes this year were AI and Assessment with overlap between the two.

Being fairly new to UCL I had not come across this event before, but when I was told about the ethos behind it which is to empower a community of staff, students, researchers and alumni to tackle challenges collaboratively and creatively, it sounded right up my street. I am a big advocate of playful learning and creating a safe space for experimentation and failure. I also liked the interdisciplinary approach which encourages people from all backgrounds to work together and learn from each other.  Anyone with a valid UCL email address can submit a project proposal to be worked on over the weekend and anyone can run a learning session to share their skills or ideas with participants. Everyone is encouraged to attend welcome talks on the Friday evening to hear about the different projects and get to know each other and form teams. Participants have the weekend to work on their chosen project and also take part in learning sessions.

I’m always up for a challenge, so I not only put forward a project proposal and ran a learning session, but I also helped to facilitate the online attendees on the Friday evening and Saturday morning. This meant it was a packed weekend and I got to experience all the different elements of #LearnHack, including joining online on the second day. 

View from UCL School of Management at Canary Wharf.

The venue was amazing, with great views of London, and the School of Management spaces were perfect for collaboration and hybrid events. The learning sessions were great, I particularly enjoyed learning how to use Lumi and GitHub to create and host H5P activities outside of Moodle so that they can be shared externally. I also found out about the game that ARC had devised for engineers and developers to learn about the issues associated with generative AI where players can help prevent or create an AI Fiasco.

My own session on making a playful AI chatbot was run online but many people joined from the room. The session encouraged people to experiment with different types of chat bots and have a go at creating their own. We managed to create some interesting applications in the short time we had including a bot that accurately answered questions on using Moodle, Zoom and Turnitin. We also explored how a bot’s personality can impact a user’s interactions and perceptions on the accuracy of its responses and had some interesting discussions on some of the ethical issues involved with users uploading material to datasets.

In-between games, food and learning sessions, teams worked on five different projects. I was impressed with all the project teams and the work they managed to produce in such a short space of time. The winning team stood out in particular, as they created a working prototype using ChatGPT. Their project aims to reduce the time that medical science students spend manually searching through articles looking for replicable research. This team now have Student ChangeMaker funding to create an optimiser to filter through biomedical research papers and extract quality quantitative methods. It is hoped that the ‘protocol optimiser’ will streamline workflows for researchers and students to find suitable lab work. I am looking forward to following the development of their project and hopefully they will report back at a changemaker event later in the year.

#LearnHack 7 Feedback on participants ‘best bits’ of the event.

Despite smaller numbers of attendees than hoped, feedback from participants was positive with calls to raise awareness amongst the student population with promotion in freshers’ week and from careers to encourage students to join. Personally, I had a great time, although next time I wouldn’t try to do quite so much and would either stick to being involved in a project or helping to facilitate and run sessions. The Faculty of Engineering has already given the go ahead for #LearnHack8 and we are currently exploring possibilities with running some mini #LearnHack events before then, so watch this space for more details and if you have an idea for a project then get in touch.

What does it take to succeed in a student research project, or any research project for that matter?

Well, there’s a whole lot of stuff that Digital Skills Development can’t help with, and anyway, you’re all really good at that stuff: the scholarship, the domain knowledge, the research skills.  But, there’s an awful lot that we can offer.

Getting on top of the choices that face you now and planning what tools you will use will allow you to work out what skills you need to acquire and how you are going to acquire them.  And beefing up your digital capability will not only improve your chances of research success, but will add to your capital in an area that employers rate among top desirable job skills.

When people plan research projects, they often forget to work out what software tools and techniques they will use, what skills those tools require, and where they are going to get those skills.  Often, we think it will all just be obvious and somehow it will come together.  Well, in a way it usually does, but with a little planning and foreknowledge, we can transform these decisions from afterthought to opportunity.

Digital Skills Development has six demonstration sessions to put you on the road to software success.  Each session introduces tools to tackle specific tasks for your research project.  We look at:

1. writing: is there life beyond Word?  Is there any reason to go there?  How do I cope with fussy formatting requirements?
   Upcoming session: DSD: Software for success: Writing tools Fri 17-Feb-2023 12-1pm
2. using survey tools: which is the best one for your research project?
   Upcoming session: DSD: Software for success: Survey tools Tues 21-Feb-2023 11-12noon
3. winning with charts: which is the best chart type for your data?
   Upcoming session: DSD: Software for Success: Winning with charts Wed 15-Feb-2023 12-1pm
4. data visualisation: what tools are available for visually presenting your data?
   Upcoming session: DSD: Software for success: Data visualisation Thu 16-Feb-2023 10-12 pm
5. data analysis: is it worth learning to code, or can I cope by wrestling with my data in Excel?  I don’t do numbers, how can software help me?
   No upcoming sessions: DSD: Software for success: Data analysis & statistical tools join the interest list to be told about future dates.
6. managing literature: imagine a world where your library and database searches link seamlessly  with your citation system and a database of annotated PDFs.  That world can be yours.
   No upcoming sessions: DSD: Software for success: Working with Bibliography and Citation Apps join the interest list to be told about future dates.

If you haven’t thought about what tools you will use for each of these tasks, or if you have thought about it but you’re just not sure what to do, these sessions are for you.  There will be demonstrations of different tools and approaches with guidance and discussion of what tool is best for the job.  If you think you know what software you are going to use, then we invite you to come along and  be challenged: there may be tools on offer that could smooth the way to a successful research project.

Now is the time to move beyond those good old coping strategies and tame the software beast.  These sessions will help you do it.

The IT Services team are here to help you get started with essential IT services like checking your email, connecting to wifi, using a computer on campus or downloading software.   You can contact them by live chat, phone or email at any time. They are also running drop in sessions from 12 January until 4 February, mainly aimed at new students but all are welcome.  Each drop in will provide guidance on a different topic but there will also be time for you to ask any questions you have about IT services for students.

The following topics are covered:

• Office 365 and software – 21 January, 4 February;
• Live@UCL (your UCL email) – 19 January, 2 February;
• User ID and password – 12 January, 26 January;
• Desktop@UCL and Desktop@UCL Anywhere (the UCL desktop) – 14 January, 28 January.

Find out more and book a session.

The BeeLine Reader alternative format is now available on UCL Moodle for students and staff.

You and your students have almost certainly felt eye-strain from too many hours reading online, or confusion at staring at a wall of internet text and not knowing where to begin.

The BeeLine Reader provides an innovative solution. It works by adding a colour-gradient to text which allows the eye to focus and move along one line to the next. It designed to make reading online quicker and easier on the eyes. Here’s an example.

With the BeeLine Format:

Without: 

_{Example Text: Aerogel by Dr Zoe Laughlin licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0}

I personally found that it took a while to get used to the BeeLine colours, but thereafter I was able to identify key headings and sentences much more effectively.

You can try out the BeeLine Reader on your UCL Moodle course now. Simply locate a Word or PDF document, click the Ally download icon net to the file name and select BeeLine Reader. Ally will convert the document to an HTML file for you to read in your browser with the BeeLine colour gradient.

Due to COVID-19, students are likely to be reading more content online now that they don’t have access to UCL printing services. BeeLine Reader and Ally’s other alternative formats can greatly assist all students, especially those with specific needs, to effectively engage with digital content whilst supporting their health and wellbeing, so please recommend Ally’s alternative formats to your students. You can learn more about Blackboard Ally by reading the staff guide or promote it to students using the student guide.