UCL Moodle theme update – Thursday 14th March

By Eliot Hoving, on 8 March 2024

The Digital Learning Environment team have made a number of changes to the UCL Moodle theme to improve the functionality, speed and accessibility of UCL Moodle for students and staff.

The planned update is scheduled for Thursday 14th March between midnight and 4am. There will be a small outage of 15 minutes during this time. The period is a very low usage period so should have minimal impact on students and staff.

A highlight of the key improvements are outlined below.

Course search

Each course now includes a content search in the course index menu (left hand menu on course pages). Students and staff can search by content name or activity type.

Left hand activity menus

Book, Lesson and Quiz menus no longer show on the right side of page where they can easily be hidden by students and lost. Instead they now appear on the left hand side which should improve the readability of the navigation menu.

Footer search

The search for courses and for UCL Moodle content (known in Moodle terminology as Global search) has been moved to the footer and is now available on every page.

Course breadcrumb improvements

The course breadcrumb will now appear fixed on the top of course pages and includes the course icon for easier navigation.

Additional changes:

• Course index menu (left hand menu on course pages) set to closed by default to avoid distracting students.
• Notifications redesign with links to view source of notification, images, and persistence of notifications (i.e. not disappearing once read).
• Messaging UI improvements.
• Footer user menu.
• Course section indentation on large screen to create visual hierarchy.
• Colour changes to course section toggles, expand / collapse all sections button, to create better emphasis.
• Back to top on all pages.
• Large tables (e.g. grading) fill full available screen width.
• Site admin links (those found most used in survey) moved to user menu.

Feedback or questions?

Please get in touch with the DLE team to provide feedback at digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

Develop your Digital Skills: Term 3 training courses and more

By Katy O Foster, on 7 March 2024

From training and support to helping you improve your digital capabilities, read below to find out what exciting opportunities Digital Skills Development can offer UCL staff and students in term 3.

Term 3 training courses

To book, follow the links below or find more information here: How to book a course on MyLearning.

Mastering Excel

Data analysis and visualisation

Interaction and collaboration

Multimedia content: Creating and editing

Writing, presenting and referencing

Accessibility and assistive technology

Programming

Social Media

LinkedIn Learning

In addition to the above, UCL staff and enrolled students can access over 16,000 courses for free on LinkedIn Learning.

Join us for an online webinar to discover more about the benefits and features of LinkedIn Learning:

Digital Skills Support: Office hours

To make them more widely accessible, our drop-ins have been changed to an office hours format, with slots available each day. If you have a question or would like individual support on a specific issue, book an appointment with one of our team: Digital Skills Development Office Hours

Upgrade your skills with the Discovery Tool

In partnership with Jisc, the Digital Skills Development team have put together a Discovery Tool to help UCL staff and students identify gaps in their knowledge and improve their skills. Use the self-assessment questions to start your journey towards better digital skills today: Discover your digital

Now with AI questions added for staff

The Jisc Discovery Tool now has a question set for staff on Digital skills in AI and Generative AI and a lot of new resources on AI skills have been added to the tool. Find out more in our blog post.

Contact us

For any questions on Digital Skills Development at UCL, email isd-digiskills@ucl.ac.uk

Starting up Stata with personalised options

By Jim R Tyson, on 4 March 2024

There are often things one can do to personalise and improve ones experience with software that involve some cusotmization, and that may be easy on your own machine, but less easy if your machine is managed by the organisation (in this case UCL).  My Laptop is managed by UCL (although I do have some elevated rights).

In an effort to improve my Stata workflow and output, I have several graphing options that I want to apply to all graphis I produce in Stata.  Typically, I want the Title left justified, in black, to take up the whole width of the graph (rather than the plot region) and to appear top left (at 11 o’clock).  The graph region colour should be white with no axis lines for x or y axes and with no fill-colour or border colour.

To simplify this I put these in a global macro ‘graph_opts‘ and add the macro to the start of any graphing command as $graph_opts . Anyone who knows how lazy and inconsistent I am, will already be guessing that while I may aspire to do this, I more often just hack away at my graphs until they look (more or less) as I want.  This is the worst kind of laziness because a little effort in setting this up would make for less work.

So I decided to investigate – could I automate this?  And I can.  At first, my heart sank slightly when I realised I would have to deal with the system paths on my managed machine, but it turned out to be very straight forward.  You can use sysdir on the stata console to find your stata program files folder.  When you navigate to this folder, use dir *.do to check for the presence of the file sysprofile.do -this means you are in the right directory.  Now, create a new do file called profile.do  Any code you add to this file is executed on Stata start up.  Knowing that I added these lines to my own profile.do (I used the Stata do file editor, but any plain text editor such as Windows Notepad would do as well):

// For -twoway- graphs
global graph_opts ///
  title(, justification(left) color(black) span pos(11)) ///
  graphregion(color(white)) ///
  xscale(noline) xtit(,placement(left) justification(left)) ///
  yscale(noline) ylab(,angle(0) nogrid) ///
  legend(region(lc(none) fc(none)))

// For -graph- graphs
global graph_opts_1 ///
  title(, justification(left) color(black) span pos(11)) ///
  graphregion(color(white)) ///
  yscale(noline) ylab(,angle(0) nogrid) ///
  legend(region(lc(none) fc(none)))

Of course you will want to change these to meet your own preferences – which may mean a deep dive into the Stata documentation.  It is however worth it given the time and effort you will save in hacking at graph code (or [shudder] gph files) to ensure that your graphs are all consistently presented in your reports.

Removal of obsolete Zoom recordings stored in Lecturecast (Echo360) on 11th March 2024

By Silvia Giannitrapani, on 4 March 2024

As per the UCL retention policy, any Zoom-recorded content in Lecturecast will be deleted if it meets the following criteria: 

• Zoom recordings that have never been shared with a Lecturecast course section 
• Zoom recordings that have never been viewed.

Staff members impacted by this will be contacted with further details. Should they wish to retain these recordings, they are advised to ensure a copy is stored in their Zoom account, unless they have manually deleted them. Alternatively, a copy of the recording can be downloaded before the 11th March 2024 by following the instruction below.  

• Download the recordings to your local device  

 Please note: Teaching events captured or uploaded to Lecturecast (Echo360) will not be affected. 

If you have any questions regarding this matter, please get in touch with the Lecturecast Support Team and we will respond as promptly as possible. 

Discover your Digital – AI questions added to the Discovery Tool

By Caroline Norris, on 22 February 2024

The Discovery Tool consists of reflective question sets which explore your digital practices and confidence levels.  The main question set looks at overall digital capabilities but there are also additional question sets for staff covering effective teaching and accessibility and inclusion and leadership all from a digital perspective.   The tool can also be used by students and there is a general question set for all students and one aimed at new students.

See below for full details of how to use the tool and upcoming workshops on 23 April and 13 May.

New for 2024 there is now a question set on Digital Skills in AI and Generative AI for staff and a similar question set will be available for students on 20 March 2024.

The staff AI questions are arranged under the following categories:

New Moodle training – Quiz, Question Bank and Gradebook

By i.niculescu, on 20 February 2024

The Digital Education team is launching new Moodle training packages.

Who is this training for?

These training packages are aimed at staff who are comfortable navigating the Moodle interface and understand its basic functionalities.

It is aimed at both academic and professional services staff.

What does the training cover?

Moodle Advanced Quiz and Question Bank

• an overview of Moodle question types
• building a Moodle Quiz that uses advanced features
• accessible and inclusive quiz design considerations
• advanced quiz settings such as feedback, question randomisation, and adaptive mode
• an overview of the Question Bank interface
• how teams can manage question banks
• organising question banks clearly with categories and tag
• analysing question usage and quiz results

Moodle Gradebook

• an overview of the Gradebook interface
• basic functionalities and how to access key features
• advanced features such as grade calculations, scales, outcomes and customised reporting
• considerations for regular checks and maintenance of gradebooks

How can I learn?

Self-paced online course, workshops, or a combination!

The same information is covered by both the self-paced online courses and the online synchronous workshops, the only difference is the delivery mode.

How do I access the self-paced courses or book a workshop?

Self-paced courses

The estimated completion time for each course is between 2-3 hours.

• Advanced Quiz and Question Bank: https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=40483
• Moodle Gradebook: https://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=40525

Online synchronous workshops (equivalent to self-paced courses)

You can register using MS Forms, this will automatically generate an Outlook calendar invite which includes all the necessary information for joining the workshop.

Each workshop is 90 minutes long and will take place online.

Advanced Quiz Management in Moodle

• 05.03.2024 – https://forms.office.com/e/7meqB3Pdpu
• 14.03.2024 – https://forms.office.com/e/3KjwTWsUbT

Question Bank & Question Analytics in Moodle

• 05.03.2024 – https://forms.office.com/e/LQjMxbykHq
• 14.03.2024 – https://forms.office.com/e/BLgytQaMC7

Moodle Gradebook

• 07.03.2024 https://forms.office.com/e/ZAwd0bEzPN
• 19.03.2024 https://forms.office.com/e/6CT1jCpF1p

Depending on your role, existing knowledge and availability, you can choose the combination which best suits your needs e.g. one workshop for Question Bank and self-paced course for Advanced Quiz. After completing the online courses or workshops, staff can get further support by getting in touch by email to digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

The training packages will be further developed as we receive feedback and input from the UCL community. Course participants will be notified when new materials will be added to the courses.

If you missed one of our workshops, please use the ‘Registration of interest’ form and we will contact you as soon as it becomes available again.