To manually enrol a user onto your course, from within your Moodle course go to the Participants list and click on Enrol users. In the Enrol users pop-up window, use the Assign roles dropdown menu and choose the relevant role from the following list:

Staff who require access to all Moodle courses within a faculty or a department do not need to be manually added to every course individually. They can be added once to the department’s category and then have access to every Moodle course within that category. Please note: only the Digital Education team is permitted to assign this category level access. Approval from the Head of Department should be sought for any new enrolments at category level as this grants access to a large number of courses.

 To obtain Moodle access to all courses within a faculty or a department, please see the instructions below: 

• To request Read-only / Non-editing access: A written email confirmation from the Head of Department will need to be sent to Digital Education (digi-ed@ac.uk) to request access for particular staff.
• To request any editing roles: In order for any UCL member of staff to gain editing category level admin rights in Moodle, they will need to provide written email confirmation to Digital Education (digi-ed@ac.uk) from the Head of Department specifying the member of staff, the type of role and the Moodle category to which they require access and then, they will need to complete the ‘Administering your Moodle’ course, which is available at https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=9682. 

Types of Moodle category roles available:

Further guidance on manual enrolments is available at UCL Wiki – M06f – Category enrolment

If you have any specific queries, please talk to your Faculty Learning Technology Lead or email the Digital Education Team at: digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

With campus being closed, departments are looking for alternative options to run both formative and summative assessments.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

The Moodle quiz activity is a great option, which allows you to set a specified Start / End time or have a window-in-a-window, e.g.: 2hr time limit between 00:00 – 23:59 on 1 March 2021.
You can find guidance and recommended settings in our Moodle Quiz Guide.

For both formative and summative quizzes, make sure you let us know in advance by completing the Exam Notification Form, under the Staff Help  menu of any Moodle page. This means we can check your exam does not clash with any planned maintenance, and know who to contact if there are any student queries or technical issues on the day.

If you have any specific queries, please talk to your Faculty Learning Technology Lead or email the Digital Education team at: digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

Photo by J. Kelly Brito on Unsplash

Most of your students have now submitted their assignments to Moodle. You may be thinking: ‘Am I ready to mark my submissions?’ or you may wonder where to start.

The Digital education team, having received plenty of questions on how to mark and release marks for Moodle submissions, decided to write this post for you!

Wiki

Did you know Digital Education have plenty of resources already available on our Wiki and recommend visiting these on our Wiki pages? Areas we cover are around anonymous marking, Rubrics, Release feedback and so much more to assist with managing your submissions.

We suggest visiting our UCL Moodle Staff Guides on:

• Moodle Assignment;
• Turnitin Assignment.

Training courses

Digital Education also run online assessment training courses, we suggest to enrol onto the courses listed below:

• Hands on with Moodle Assignment (online training) is a self-paced online course that introduces Moodle assignment tool for collecting submissions, marking and returning feedback.
• Hands on with Turnitin Assignment (online training) is a self-paced online course that introduces the Turnitin assignment tool for collecting submissions, marking and returning feedback.

Learning Technology Lead

Alternatively we suggest contacting your Faculty Learning Technology Lead or email the Digital Education team digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

Happy marking!

One of the strengths of Moodle Quizzes is the ability to randomise questions. This feature can help deter student collusion.

There are several ways to randomise questions in a Moodle Quiz, which can be combined or used separately. Simple examples are provided here but more complex questions and variables can be created. 

Randomising the Question response options

It’s possible to shuffle the response options within many question types, including Multiple Choice Questions and Matching Question. When setting up a Quiz, simply look under Question behaviour, and change Shuffle within questions to Yes.  

Randomising the order of Questions

You can also randomise the order of questions in a Quiz. Click Edit Quiz Questions in your Quiz, click the Shuffle tick box at the top of the page. Questions will now appear in a random order for each student. 

Randomising the Questions

It’s possible to add random questions from pre-defined question Categories. Think of Categories as containers of Quiz questions. They can be based on topic area, e.g. ‘Dosage’, ‘Pharmokinetics‘, ‘Pharmacology’, ‘Patient Consultation’ or they can be based on questions for a specific assessment e.g. ‘Exam questions container 1’, ‘Exam questions container 2’, ‘Exam questions container 3’. 

The first step is to create your Categories.

Then when adding questions to your Quiz, select add a random question and choose the Category. You can also choose how many random questions to add from the Category. 

For example, if you had a quiz of 10 questions, and you want to give students a random question out of 3 options for each question, you would need 10 Categories, each holding 3 questions e.g. ‘Exam Q1 container’, ‘Exam Q2 container’ … ‘Exam Q10 container’. 

Alternatively, if you want a quiz with 10 questions from ‘Pharmokinetics‘, and 10 from ‘Pharmacology’ you could create the two Categories with their questions, then go to your Quiz and add a random question, select the ‘Pharmokinetics‘ Category, and choose 10 questions. Repeat for ‘Pharmacology’. You now have a 20 question quiz made up of 50%  Pharmokinetics and Pharmacology questions.  

After saving a random question/s you can add further random questions or add regular questions that will appear for all students. Simply add a question from the question bank as normal.  

Be aware, that randomising questions will reduce the reliability of your Moodle Quiz statistics. For example the discrimination index will be calculated on the Quiz question overall, e.g. Q2, not on each variation of the question that may have been randomly selected from, i.e. all the questions from the Exam Q2 container. Each question variation will have fewer attempts compared to if the question was given to all students, so any analytics based on these fewer attempts will be less accurate.  

Randomising variables within Questions:

In addition to randomising questions, certain question types can have randomised variables within them. 

The STACK question type supports complex mathematical questions, which can include random variables. For example you could set some variables, a and b, as follows:

a = rand(6)  (where rand(6) takes a random value from the list [0,1,2,3,4,5,6]).

b = rand(2)  (where rand(2) takes some random value from the list [0,1,2]).

Variables can then be used within questions, so students could be asked to integrate a×x^b which thanks to my random variables will generate 21 different questions for my students e.g. integrate 0×x⁰, 0×x, 0×x², x⁰, x, x², 2x⁰, 2x, 2x² …  5x⁰, 5x, 5x², 6x⁰, 6x, 6x².

Random variants can be generated, tested, and excluded if they are inappropriate, in the above case I might exclude a = 0 as the question equation would evaluate to 0, whereas I want students to integrate a non-zero algebraic expression.  

The Calculated question type also supports randomising variables as well as  basic calculation questions for maths and scientific assessment. Calculated questions can be free entry or multiple choice. For example you could ask students to calculate the area of a rectangle. The width and height would be set to wild card values, let’s call them

{w} for width, and

{h} for height.

The answer is always width × height or {w} × {h} regardless of the values of {w} and {h}. Moodle calls this the answer formula.

The tutor then sets the possible values of {w} and {h} for the student by creating a dataset of possible values for Moodle to randomly select from. To create your dataset, you first define your wild card values e.g. {w} will take some value between 1 and 10, and {h} to take some value from 10 to 20.  You can then ask Moodle to generate sets of your variables, e.g. 10, 50, or 100 possible combinations of {w} and {h} based on the conditions you define. For example, given the conditions above, I could generate the following 3 sets: 

Set 1: {w} = 1, {h} = 14 

Set 2: {w} = 6.2, {h} = 19.3 

Set 3: {w} = 9.1, {h} = 11 

Creating a dataset can be somewhat confusing, so make sure you leave enough time to read the Calculated question type documentation and test it out. Once complete, Moodle can now provide students with potentially 100s of random values of {w} and {h} based on your dataset. Using the answer formula, you provide, Moodle can evaluate the student’s response and automatically grade the student’s answer regardless of what random variables they are given. 

Try a Randomised Quiz

To learn more, take an example randomised quiz on the Marvellous Moodle Examples course.

Speak to a Learning Technologist for further support

Contact Digital Education at digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk for advice and further support.

Digi-Ed is excited to announce that Moodle will be upgraded to Moodle 3.9 on Tuesday 10th November 2020. This upgrade will take place in the early morning (1am-2am) to minimise any disruption to staff or students. The upgrade delivers the following new features and improvements as well as performance enhancements and required bug and security fixes. 

Activity chooser 

A new activity chooser is available that makes it easier to locate, star and view recommended activities and resources for use within Moodle. 

Participants filter 

A new participants filter is available which provides more options for searching the list of enrolled users on your Moodle courses. This new filter allows you to search participants by the role they’re assigned on your course or filtering by group. 

Whole forum grading 

Forums can now be awarded an overall discussion forum grade. This makes it easier for tutors to use Forums for assessment. Tutors and course administrators can set setup a forum to be graded while students can submit posts and view the grade they have received for their contributions. 

Forum reporting 

A Forum summary report can now be generated by Tutors to show student forum engagement. 

Activity completion 

A new activity completion criterion is available which allows access to an activity or resource to be restricted based on completion of the previous activity within the course. This allows for content to be moved around or added to your Moodle course without having to reconfigure access restrictions and completion tracking. 

Emojis for Moodle messaging and Forums 

Emojis are now available in Moodle messaging. They can also be added to Forums and other Moodle content using the new emoji picker in the Atto text editor. 

Additional Changes 

Alongside the features listed above, the following improvements are also available on Moodle: 

• You can now filter the Moodle calendar by day and month instead of just listing upcoming events 
• The question bank now shows question ID numbers within the list of questions for each category 
• Book resources now have clearer and easier navigation options to improve the user experience for moving between pages 

Full details of all changes between Moodle version 3.7 and 3.9 can be found on the Moodle 3.9 upgrade wiki page.

If you have any queries, please contact digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk 

There are two types of analytics available from within Lecturecast (Echo360), these are:

• Course analytics
• Individual media analytics

The course analytics will provide information about student use of the ALP tools, in addition to interactions with the inidividual media resources. The individual media analytics only provides analytics about the specific media item.

Which set of analytics you use, will depend on how you have added Lecturecast materials to your Moodle course.

If you have embedded recordings in your Moodle course using the Atto editor:

Then to obtain accurate viewing data for the recording you should use the Individual media analytics.

Please note that students will not have access to the addiitonal tools such as confusion flags and note taking if recordings are added in this way.

Whereas, if you have linked to recordings ore presentations via the Lecturecast activity in Moodle, you would use the Course and student analytics.