Winter and Spring Moodle Course Requests Open November 8
Winter Moodle course requests are already available in SPIRE, and Spring 2022 course requests in SPIRE open Monday, November 8, 2021. Don’t forget that each semester you will need to request Moodle for the courses you are teaching.
If you haven’t requested your Moodle course yet, see:
Moodle courses will be hosted on Moodle in the Cloud (umass.moonami.com). Don’t forget to update any links and bookmarks accordingly.
Request your Fall Echo360 Courses
Echo360 course requests for Winter and Spring 2022 are available in SPIRE. Just like Moodle, each semester you will need to request Echo360 for the courses you want to use it in. For step by step instructions, see Request Lecture Capture.
Echo360 allows you to create recordings of your lectures to deliver to students. Students can access recordings to learn new content or review content to reinforce the information. The system also allows you to add interactive content and measure student engagement.
Echo360 Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) uses speech to text algorithms to create an interactive transcript for your recordings. After you do a little editing for accuracy, your students will be able to study for exams, find relevant information in recordings, and even turn on Closed Captioning for your media.
Once your Echo360 courses are ready, it’s easy to give students access to Echo360 recordings through Moodle.
Automatically copy your Zoom cloud recordings to Echo360
You can connect your Zoom and Echo360 accounts, and have all cloud recordings copied into Echo360. If you enable this, you can even have a recurring Zoom meeting publish directly to an Echo360 course. Unlike Zoom recordings, which are kept for 120 days, Echo360 does not have a storage limit on your recordings.
Moodle Tip of the Month: Check Originality of Student Work with Turnitin
Did you know you can use Turnitin in Moodle to check student work for originality? As the semester begins to close, many instructors assign written projects for the class. The Turnitin activity allows students to submit their work, which will be compared with their peer’s submissions, journals, books, and websites. This can be useful to help students ensure they have cited work correctly, or as a tool to help you assess the originality of a final submission.
Planned Downtimes
There are no planned downtimes outside of regular maintenance windows for November 2021.
Scheduled routine maintenance windows for UMass Amherst Moodle in the Cloud are Thursdays 11pm-12am (ET). Regular maintenance is a necessity for a stable, secure, and improving service. Many of these maintenance windows will not actually have the site unavailable for more than a few minutes, but it is still not advised to plan activities or set due dates during maintenance windows.
You can check the status of Moodle, Zoom, and other supported teaching technologies on the IT Services Status for Remote Teaching and Learning page.
Moodle Help and Resources for Instructors
To learn more about Moodle or to get help, you can:
- Review our Moodle Support Articles.
- Contact the Instructional Media Lab (instruct@umass.edu) with a question, or to set up a time for a one-on-one consultation.
- Request a consultation with an Instructional Designer.
- Join our Instructor Support Zoom room between 10am and 3pm to meet with a staff member.