November 2018 Moodle News

Announcements Moodle News

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Hello Moodle Instructors!

This Moodle News includes information about Instructional Innovation Workshops, Course Materials Due, Moodle Course Requests Begin, Echo360 Course Requests Open, Moodle Tip of the Month, What’s new in Moodle, and Moodle Help and Resources.

Instructional Innovation Fall Workshops Continuing

There’s still time to register for the last Instructional Innovation Fall Workshops. We have our final few workshops to help get you an early start on your Spring 2019 Moodle course and make your course content accessible to all your students. To see a full list of events and register, check out the Instructional Innovation’s Event Page. 

Can’t decide which workshops to take? Have questions? Contact the Instructional Media Lab for help in deciding which workshops are right for you. Call us at 413-545-2823 or email instruct@umass.edu

Course Materials Due Sunday, November 4th

UMass Amherst is using the eCampus FAST Adoption Tool for listing required course materials. In order to ensure students can make informed choices about class selections and the costs associated with them, federal law and UMass Amherst policy mandates that course materials should be entered into the campus system no later than Sunday, November 4th.

Moodle Course Requests Begin Monday, November 5th

You’ll be able to request your Spring 2019 Moodle courses beginning on Monday, November 5th. Don’t forget that each semester you will need to request Moodle for the courses you are teaching. Once your new Moodle course is ready, you can start adding content or import content from previous courses you’ve taught.

For details, see:

Request Echo360 Courses in SPIRE

You can request your Echo360 courses in SPIRE for Spring 2019. Just like Moodle, each semester you will need to request Echo360 for the courses you want to use it in. While making your request you can specify that you’d like to:

  • Automatically record in-person class meetings in Classrooms Equipped with Lecture Capture.
  • Re-use recordings from a previous semester.
  • Create screencasts and record custom lessons for students to watch outside of class with Echo360 Personal Capture.

For step by step instructions, see Request Lecture Capture. Once your Echo360 courses are ready, it’s easy to give students access to Echo360 recordings through Moodle.

Moodle Tip of the Month: Changing Grade Displays in the Moodle Gradebook

Did you know that you can control how grades are displayed to students? Using the advanced gradebook options in Moodle, you can let students see a real value, a percentage, a letter grade, or even a combination of those. This can be especially useful in helping students understand their grades and staying on track after midterms. And don’t forget, you can always edit letter grades for your course, too.

What’s new in Moodle?

UMass Amherst IT is planning to keep Moodle at UMass Amherst and Open UMass on Moodle version 3.1 for the 2018-19 academic year.

We may periodically add features and will perform security updates during our regularly scheduled update window (Thursday mornings), but no major upgrade is planned at this time.

Moodle Help and Resources for Instructors

To learn more about Moodle or to get help, you can:

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