August 2018 Moodle News

Moodle cow on the beach on a sunny day

Summer Workshops

There are still a few workshops left in our Summer Workshop Series covering instructional technologies, accessibility, and managing group work. We even have an additional session of our popular Building a New Moodle Course available. For a full list of workshops, check out the Innovate Events page.

Request Moodle and Echo360 Courses for Fall in SPIRE

Moodle and Echo360 course request is open in SPIRE for fall 2018. Instructors must request a Moodle course each term they wish to use Moodle for a course. Once your new, empty course is created, you’ll have the option to import previously used content.

For details see:

Fall 2018 Moodle courses open August 31

Once your fall 2018 Moodle course request is processed you can begin building your course or import course material from a previous semester.

Fall 2018 Moodle courses will open August 31, 2018 around noon. You can choose to make your course available to students earlier, or choose to hide your course on that day by using Course availability on the Quick settings block of your course.

Moodle Tip of the Month: Contact your students using the Announcements forum

Did you know that by default every Moodle course at UMass has an Announcements forum? Announcements can be used to contact all of your students to let them know about class schedule changes, special events, reminders of due dates, or anything else you can think of. Using the Announcements forum add a post to the forum on your course page, and send an email to students as well. Just be aware announcements made this way are unidirectional; students cannot reply to posts in Announcements.  

What’s new in Moodle?

We’re Continuing with Moodle 3.1 for 2018-19

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.

Summer Session Two ends, grades due

Summer Session Two ends on Friday, August 17th. Summer Session Two grades are due on Wednesday, August 22nd. You can import grades from Moodle to SPIRE. During the upload process, you can enter Incompletes. You can also assign the Student with Incomplete role for students who will need access to a course to complete work.

Moodle Help and Resources for Instructors

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

Skip to toolbar