December 2019 Moodle News

woods cover in snow background and a cow with a hat and scarf.

Hello Instructors!

Welcome back from Thanksgiving break! Check out this month’s Moodle News, which includes information about our Winter 2020 Faculty Workshops, Important End of Semester Dates for Fall 2019, Request your Moodle and Echo360 course in SPIRE for Winter and Spring 2020, Moodle tip of the month: Release students grades using Workflow on Assignments, and Moodle help and resources.

Winter 2020 Faculty Workshops are here!

Take a moment during this Winter break to join us in our Winter 2020 Faculty workshops series. Our workshops will be covering teaching with technology ranging from Getting Started in Moodle, creating and editing media in Camtasia, Getting started on how to use blogs for your teaching and learning, Introduction to Trello,  Quizzing in Moodle,  Using Feminist Approaches in Moodle, and more. Check out our Innovation Events page to see more Workshops and register.

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

Important End of Semester Dates for Fall 2019

Take note of these important dates for the end of Fall 2019 semester:

  • Last day of classes: Wednesday, December 11th, 2019.
  • Final exams: Friday, December 12th to Thursday, December 19th, 2019.
  • Grades are due in SPIRE: Tuesday, January 2nd, 2020 by noon.

If you are using the Moodle gradebook, you can import your grades from Moodle directly into SPIRE with the click of a button. Don’t forget to approve the grades that you import!

Request Your Winter/Spring 2020 Moodle Course in SPIRE

Request your Winter and Spring 2020 Moodle courses. Remember that every semester you will have to request a new Moodle course through SPIRE.

 Requests your Echo360 Course in SPIRE

Request your Echo360 course in SPIRE for your Winter and Spring 2020 semester. 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 Universal 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: Release Grades Using Workflow on Assignments

Did you know that in Assignments on Moodle there is a feature called Workflow? Workflows can be especially helpful when you are managing big courses. Instructors and TAs can set grading stages and view the workflow status of all student submissions at any time. When grading is done you can release grades individually or in all students at once. To find more about this feature read our documentation in Grading Workflow and Allocation for Moodle Assignments.

Moodle Help and Resources for Instructors

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

Skip to toolbar