Welcome back to our fortnightly news release for the highly anticipated Moodle 4 upgrade. As we count down to the upgrade, we strive to keep you informed and updated on our progress. 

In our previous blog post, we delved into the new assessment features of Moodle 4, including quiz and question bank enhancements, as well as timed assignments. Today, we’ll be focusing on the current state of our preparations for the upgrade, scheduled for the end of July. 

Progress Update 

During last week’s planning session (TI planning), our team identified and prioritised the tasks necessary to ensure a successful Moodle 4 release within the last two weeks of July.
Despite our initial projection of a test Moodle 4 instance release to all staff and students in April, we’ve had to adjust the timeline. We now anticipate launching this test platform at the end of May. 

We want to share the reasons for this delay. Earlier this month, we released the Moodle 4 test site for our focus group and have been diligently working on the feedback received. Our focus group indicated that the platform isn’t quite ready for a general release, highlighting some areas that require further refinement, which we are now prioritising. Additionally, we’re working to resolve infrastructure issues to guarantee optimal performance of the Moodle 4 test site for all UCL staff and students upon its release at the end of May. 

Here is the updated timeline for our summer upgrade: 

We’re committed to delivering an exceptional learning experience, and we expect to launch the Train-The-Trainer sessions to faculty and departments late May, as well as the self-paced Moodle 4 course for all staff who cannot attend trainer-led sessions, by the end of May. 

Getting in Touch 

Should you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the Digital Education team.

We’ll be back in a fortnight with more news and updates on the Moodle 4 upgrade. Until then, happy moodling! 

The Virtual Learning Environments team

Welcome back to the fortnightly news release for our upcoming Moodle 4 Upgrade. 

In our previous blog post, we discussed the latest developments in Moodle 4, focusing on the enhancements that are set to improve the learner experience. In this post, with Moodle 4 just around the corner, we will be exploring the latest updates in assessment improvements, specifically the enhancements made to the quiz and question banks, as well as the introduction of timed assignments. 

Sprint Update 

This last fortnight has been quieter due to the break, but we wanted to update you on the work we did complete in this last Sprint: 

• we are releasing a version of the Moodle Theme with UCL data to our focus groups,
• we are in the final stages of QA for the 1.2 version of the Theme (1.4 is the expected go live version). 

What’s new in Moodle 4? 

Quiz and Question Bank Enhancements 

Moodle 4 sees a lot of changes to the quiz question activity. The new features will allow for more efficient and effective quiz creation, management, and grading, making it easier for educators to create engaging and challenging assessments for their learners. 

This screen shows the improved question bank’s question status, question versions, question comments and question usage.

 

The quiz question statistics are also more visible, now, through the handy ‘responses’ drop-down menu. Question statistics like facility index or discriminative efficiency are now easier to find. 

These updates include the ability to tag questions, allowing educators to search for and categorise questions. Furthermore, tutors can now preview and edit questions directly from the question bank with a pen icon, and see when the questions were last modified and by whom (see screen capture above), to easily co-write assessment, streamlining the process of creating and managing questions. 

Timed Assignments: a New Feature 

Perhaps the most significant update around assessment in Moodle 4 is the introduction of timed assignments. This new feature allows tutors to set a time limit for completion on assignments, providing a more structured and focused approach to assessment. Timed assignments are particularly useful for assessors who want to simulate real-world conditions, such as exams or other time-limited tasks. 

 

Overall, the assessment improvements in Moodle 4 represent a major step forward for our platform, with significant updates to the quiz and question bank modules, as well as the introduction of timed assignments. These updates will undoubtedly enhance the learner experience, making it easier for tutors to create engaging and challenging assessments that promote learning. 

Getting in Touch 

If you have questions, please do get in touch with If you have questions, please do get in touch with the Digital Education team.

We’ll be back in a fortnight with further news and updates for you. In the meantime, happy moodling! 

The Virtual Learning Environments team
 

Welcome back to the fortnightly news release for our upcoming Moodle 4 Upgrade.

This week we’ll update you on what our team has been working on for the last fortnight and highlight a new Moodle 4 feature, more in detail.

What are we working on?

This week we want to share with you our progress with these two aspects:

• UX (user experience) and UI (user interface)

The team has conducted seven face-to-face interviews with students on user journeys through Moodle, defining possible improvements for our UCL Moodle platform. The team also conducted a survey about UI/UX with over a hundred responses which are being reviewed.

• Codebase and plugins

Our team is continuing codebase review for Moodle 4, and reviewing UCL plugins to ensure everything works well when the upgrade takes place in July.

What’s new in Moodle 4?

Database activity improvements

The Moodle Database activity had UX improvements. These improvements have been supported by the Moodle Users Association. It now features a useful start page, an improved Image gallery preset, as well as three new presets: Journal, Proposals and Resources.

These four ready-made presets mean that you don’t have to build a database (adding fileds, creating layout templates) from scracth, but you can now use and adapt the most suitable preset to fit your student’s learning needs.

The presets can also be previewed before use so that you can be certain it is the layout you are looking for, and it can then be adjusted to what you need.

Have Questions?

If you have questions, please do get in touch with the Digital Education team.

We’ll be back in a fortnight with further news and updates for you. In the meantime, happy moodling!
The Virtual Learning Environments team

Previewing our new UCL Moodle, ahead of the summer upgrade. 

Hello and welcome to the new fortnightly news release for our upcoming Moodle 4 Upgrade. 

As announced by Jason Norton, Head of Virtual Learning Environments, in the Moodle 4 Upgrade Summer 2023 blog post on 6th March 2023, the UCL main instance of Moodle will be upgraded this July from Moodle 3.11 to Moodle 4.2. 

In this series of blogs, we aim to keep you up to date with what our team is working on each Sprint (fortnight) and to highlight a new Moodle 4 feature, in more detail. 

What are we working on? 

This week we wanted to share with you our progress with the dashboard redesign for Moodle 4. 

The new dashboard aims to improve the students’ experience with course updates including a timeline of activities, featured current and future course activities, and a ‘Recently accessed by Peers’ section to keep up-to-date and provide quick access to popular activities and resources. The clear buttons and fresh page layout aim to make managing deadlines, learning and signposting of support easier for our learners. 

As well as the dashboard, the new “My courses” area introduces a central point where students can access all their available modules and courses, and allows searching and filtering of these courses in the overview section. 

What’s new in Moodle 4? 

Gradebook user experience improvements 

A better user experience (UX) has been a key focus for numerous Moodle 4 developments.  

One such change is that UX improvements have made the Gradebook easier to navigate, which allows graders to analyse the success of formative and summative assessments, and inform improvements to course design.  

In this new version of Moodle, a ‘Grades summary’ page has been added to provide a summary report of the grade averages for each course activity. This Grades summary report can be filtered by activity. 

There is now also an improved ‘User report’ with a more modern design and collapsible categories. 

The grader report has an improved search function with dropdown menus. There is also an option to open external assessment tools from the gradebook and add grade letters if needed. 

A ‘Single view report’ with improved design and a new search make it easier to review class and specific user grades. Graders can now search by user, group, or grade item. 

 

It’s now also easier to import/export gradebook elements. 

Have Questions? 

If you have questions, please do get in touch with the Digital Education team.

 

We’ll be back in a fortnight with further news and updates for you. In the meantime, happy moodling!
The Virtual Learning Environments team 

 

The UCL main instance of Moodle (moodle.ucl.ac.uk) will be upgraded this summer from Moodle 3.11 to Moodle 4.2. The upgrade will take place in mid to late July of this year (2023).

The Road to the Moodle 4 Upgrade

The image below provides a high-level overview of the activities that will be taking place over the next few months leading up to the upgrade in July.

 

• March: Continued user group engagement and a demo site with all courses will be made available to the Moodle Development User group
• April: A Moodle 4 demo site including an “in development” UCL Theme will be made available to all staff
• May: Moodle 4 Train the trainer sessions will begin, Online self pace material will begin to be made available
• June: General staff face to face training will commence, Student resource will be published
• July: Staff training continues, Moodle 4 upgrade occurs
• Post upgrade: Staff training will continue, development of the UCL Theme will continue

 

Why are we upgrading Moodle?

Moodle version 3 was released in 2018 and has now reached its end of life for support, bug fixes and security patches. To ensure our platform remains up to date and our user data is secure we need to move to the Moodle 4.

 

A More Modern User Experience and a New UCL Moodle Theme

One of the biggest changes introduced by Moodle 4 is a revamped user interface and user experience. This was Moodle HQ’s primary focus with the release of Moodle version 4.0, and they have updated the underlying technology, the layout and the navigation. This re-design means that Moodle looks more modern and significantly cleaner in its user interface.

To take advantage of these changes, UCL Moodle is moving to a new Moodle Theme. We are currently working with an external partner Titus Learning and internal and external design teams to bring a customised Moodle Theme that best supports UCL needs. This is an ongoing piece of work and one that will extend into the summer, post the release of UCL Moodle 4.2 in July.

The new theme (code name “Norse”) is currently being developed with input and comments from over a hundred and fifty staff, both tutors and course administrators as well as student focus groups. As you can see from our timeline, we aim to release an “in development” Moodle test platform to all staff that will enable you to look at a Moodle 4 environment with the new Moodle Theme applied in April.

This will enable you to see how the new theme and its interactions with course formats has impacted your course. From the review work and feedback already taken place, it is important to note that impact has been minimal.

The screenshots below of the new Moodle Theme should be taken as “in development”. Overall, the layout of the user interface will not change, however colour, icons, fonts, blocks, accessibility features are all still subject to change. However I hope these images give you a good idea of the new general look and feel.

 

 

 

What will courses look like after the upgrade?

The best way to see the changes coming will be to engage with the Moodle demo site that we will be making available in mid-April. This site will have the latest available version of Moodle 4 and the latest version of the new UCL Moodle Theme. From the development and testing work we have undertaken so far we are expecting impact on existing courses to be minor.

The Theme version on this platform is still in a beta state and will be updated as we work towards the upgrade in July. We expect between 2 and 4 additional updates will occur prior to the July upgrade as we refine the theme based on your feedback and complete accessibility checking and design reviews.

Moving from Moodle 3.11 to Moodle 4.2 will bring both changes and new functionality to Moodle. These changes will be detailed in a series of upcoming blogs and will also be the key focus of the training we are in the process of creating.

 

Staff Training

Staff training will be available via two distinct strands. The first will be an online self paced course that will be available on a Moodle 4.2 instance in late May. This course will walk you through the changes and additions to Moodle functionality including an initial topic on how the new Moodle navigation works. This self paced course will use Moodle activities, videos and course completion activities so that a badge or certificate will be received upon completion.

The second strand of training will be provided face to face or online in a more localised faculty/department context. We are currently working on a train the trainer programme, that will be delivered in May to the following individuals: Faculty Learning Technology Leads, Departmental Learning Technologists and Connected Learning Leads. If you would like to be part of the train the trainer programme, please discuss this with your Faculty Learning Technology Lead.

The online and face to face Moodle 4.2 training will commence from June and continue throughout the summer.

 

Student Support

A student Moodle user tour and updated student wiki guides will be made available in June.

 

Have Questions?

If you have questions please do get in touch with the Digital Education team.

 

Q: What is the cost of developing e-learning?

A: It depends

Argh – this answer is not good enough. 

E-Learning is a big industry, so why does the cost of making ‘some’ feel so mysterious? Increasingly the question of ‘how much will this cost?’ is cropping up. This is a perfectly valid question and one that really demands a better answer than the one above. For too long the response of ‘it depends’ comes up, or something about a piece of string. This isn’t cutting it so after some research (there isn’t much out there) we created an E-Learning Costing Calculator so you can start putting in some numbers and start to see some cold, hard, financials. Hurray?

Go – play with what we’ve created

Access E-Learning Costing Calculator on Google Sheets 

Warning: multiple users will obviously see one another’s calculations but I couldn’t find a better way of doing this while also retaining Alpha status for testing. Ideas welcome in the comments below…

Images / captures (of the above sheet)

Main tool, questions and numbers input:

Cost and recovery

Charts for the boss

 

Breakdown by role

Approximations!

If you spend any time in the sheet you’ll notice there are some approximations going on in there (quite a few). It doesn’t produce an exact answer (because it really does depend). I think we’ve been asking the wrong question. We still need to ask – what data do we have to suggest how much e-learning might cost? How can we generalise and remain detailed enough to find ballparks? How close can we get to accuracy? and finally, What are we missing to increase accuracy?

Disclaimer: so far all the work on this comes from smaller, shorter courses (CPD, continuing education). Moocs and fully accredited courses are slightly different. The biggest problem is to add in some economy of scale (more on this in Maths).

Seeking improvement

Firstly – I want people to roadtest this spreadsheet. So please contact me and we can collaborate in Google Sheets (for now). I’m confident we could get a little closer to understanding why and it involves maths, early solutions and more questions.

Maths

Bryan Chapman, Chief Learning Strategist for Chapman Alliance asked in 2010 how long does it take to create e-learning:

Bryan surveyed 4000 learning development professionals and obtained data (US-based) on CPD and short courses. He created a series of development hour timeframes based on teaching approaches of f2f and three-level e-learning (basic, intermediate and advanced). For each approach he discovered the number of development hours required to create one hour of ‘e-learning’ (vague as it depends on your teaching approach). These numbers were the primary driver to start calculating an idea of costing, and the questions to ask.

This is the only data found. There’s corporations offering consultancy, and sure they have their ROI models (of course, it’s business). There’s bloggers and co. with their ideas and comments – but nothing with much evidence, especially when compared to Bryan’s work.

Economy of scale / new vs old

One problem with all this is that all costs tend to follow the rules of economies of scale. Producing one of anything tends to be proportionally more expensive than 10, then 100, and so on. Logically one hour of e-learning would cost a fair whack – say £15k. But the second should be cheaper, say £10k. Then from here you should see some sliding scales of efficiency. This isn’t so easy to build, so I omitted it in the sheet (for now). Idea welcome on this part.

New content is probably not the same cost as reusing old. Converting old content vs producing new content both come with different costs. To try and not complicate things it’s best to avoid this question for now, but see a sliding scale could help here – but I don’t know how to calculate the cost of conversion and comparing it to the cost of creation – so it’s lumped in together (for now).

Solutions

Running a few generalisations – the data from the Chapman Alliance can be used to start calculating the cost of courses. By taking some known courses, and their approximate costs, we simulated with some UCL courses how much they cost. During a project (UCLeXtend) we had provided some seeding resource to prime the new platform and provide examples to the wider community of what’s possible. Due to the transparency of these courses we could also see how much they all cost, and whether any calculations made were accurate. Sometimes the numbers hurt (never making a profit in this corner…) they also looked kinda accurate.

This motivated the creation of an E-Learning Costing Calculator – which we’re now crowdsourcing people’s opinions on to improve.

Questions

Armed with one data source (dangerous, I know) I looked to break it back down and discover if it could be reverse-engineered to build a calculator for everyday use. The idea was to ask broad questions within the calculation to then align with the data from the Chapman Alliance’s research. I think there are more questions to ask, but how to also generalise for calculating answers?

See also

UCL recently become friends with the IOE. A tool they have is the Course Resource Appraisal Modeller  -it’s much more detailed than this and I think it goes a long way to answering some of the questions I have posed. It also takes a fair amount of time and information to complete it. I can see the validity of both, or (better) one feeding into the other / merging. What do you think? Have you used CRAM? 

http://web.lkldev.ioe.ac.uk/bernard/cram/launch.html

 

What’s next?

Please comment on this, in the sheet or in this post (or Twitter). I feel a bit stuck on this now, so feedback is essential to move forward.