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 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 any issues with Portico data, contact examboards@ucl.ac.uk 

• For issues with incorrect assessment set up, contact lifecycle@ucl.ac.uk 

• 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

UCL Moodle is due for its summer upgrade tomorrow (25 July 2024). We will be upgrading to Moodle 4.4. Downtime should be minimal and the upgrade will take place between 00:00 and 04:00 GMT on Thursday 25 July 2024.

There will be improvements and new features for site administrators, teachers and students.

What does this mean for you? Well if you are involved in teaching or editing course pages on Moodle, you can expect to see the following changes:

• Course page improvements
• Forum enhancement for groups
• Quiz improvements
• Badge filtering

On course pages, activities and icons are now more clearly defined, icons have more accessible colours and file types can be more easily identified. Also, you are now able to choose to focus on one section at a time when viewing a page and choose to see one section at a time while in edit mode. This will help to reduce clutter when you need to focus on one part of your course page. Topics format has become “Custom sections”.

Additionally, Flexible format will be removed as part of the update. Courses in this format will automatically shift to the “Custom sections” format. The previously issued Flexible format guidance explains why this is happening.

The forum has been enhanced to allow you to post to all groups if the forum is in group mode and you have set up more than one group, which will be a welcome time-saving feature.

In terms of quiz improvements, students can now see when their response to a question was last saved, and teachers can assign a grade to a quiz section to provide more detailed feedback to students. In addition, there is now a new ordering question type that can be used for text or images.

Finally, teachers and students can now filter badges.

Moodle HQ have created a YouTube Playlist which highlights the main changes in Moodle 4.4. We shall also be updating our own mini guides in due course but we are hoping that you find these simple improvements intuitive and seamless.

Please note the TinyMCE editor and Matrix rooms are not part of the upgrade. We are currently reviewing TinyMCE and will update you if we decide to install it in the future.

Happy Moodling (version 4.4) in the meantime!

The Digital Learning Environments team.

Since the release of the Moodle-SITS Marks Transfer Wizard in March 2024, we have an important update for you. When selecting a source Moodle activity to transfer marks from, Moodle activities can now include a Grade Item or Grade Category from the Moodle Grade Book.

Previously, it was only possible to transfer marks from a single Moodle assignment, Quiz or Turnitin assignment to one or more than one assessment component in Portico.

From 6th June 2024, you will also be able to select a Grade Item that you have manually created in the Moodle Grade Book. In addition, you will be able to transfer marks from a Grade Category. This means that if you have set up a Category in the Grade Book which has its own aggregated grade calculated from its Grade Items, you can also transfer this grade to one or more than one assessment component in Portico.

Please ensure that the Grade Item or Category meet the following criteria before completing a marks transfer:

• The mark is numeric (letter grades are not eligible) so the Grade type should be set to “value”.
• The maximum value is 100.
• The Grade display type is set to “Real” (other display types will not be recognised by Portico so the item or Category would not show up as a Source activity in the Marks Transfer Wizard). 

These developments were prioritised following user feedback during the pilot earlier this year. Our next priority will be to analyse requirements for SORAs, ECs, LSAs and other special cases.

You can access guidance on how to use Marks Transfer in our Wiki, which includes short screen recordings. There is now also a short Tour on Moodle for users getting started with the tool.

If you are experiencing issues with using the Marks Transfer Wizard, please check our FAQs (which are frequently updated) and if you are still unable to resolve your issue, you should contact the Digital Education Support team at digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

For any issues with Portico data, contact examboards@ucl.ac.uk or for issues with incorrect assessment set up, contact lifecycle@ucl.ac.uk.

For general feedback or suggestions on future developments, please contact your Faculty Champion.

Turnitin can be used as an assignment activity on Moodle (option a), or in a Moodle assignment where it checks the submission for text-matching but the marking remains in Moodle assignment (option b).

These two options have mostly the same settings, but currently there is inconsistency in some of default settings between the two.

To ensure the default settings are the same for both, the DLE team will change the default settings for the following options from No to Yes for Turnitin in Moodle assignment (option b).

• Display Similarity Reports to Students
• Allow submissions of any file type?
• Exclude Bibliography
• Exclude Quoted Material

These new defaults will only apply if Turnitin is enabled in a Moodle assignment. Staff can choose to override the default values if they require.

These changes will take effect from the 1st July 2024.

Any questions or issues please contact the DLE team.

The Digital Learning Environment Team are pleased to announce a new MATLAB activity available on Moodle.

The MATLAB and Simulink Online Courses LTI 1.3 allows students to automatically track progress in self-paced training courses on MATLAB and Simulink. Students can move from Moodle into their MATLAB online course/s seamlessly. Courses include MATLAB for Data Processing and Visualisation, Deep Learning with MATLAB and plenty more.

You can add the activity onto any Moodle course from the activity chooser page, in the same way as you would add other activities.

 

 

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