Back Up Your Moodle Course
At the end of each semester, we recommend instructors take action to Back Up Their Moodle Course contents, and archive student work and grades. There are a few easy steps to give you some peace of mind.
Request Your Summer and Fall 2022 Moodle Courses in SPIRE
Summer and Fall 2022 Moodle Course Requests are available in SPIRE. 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 Echo360 Courses
Echo360 course requests for Summer and Fall 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: Let Students Select Their Own Groups
Did you know that you can create a Group Self-Selection activity in Moodle? You can use this to let students join study groups, build a team for a project, and more. You can specify which groups are available for the activity, and can place a limit on the number of members in each group.
Planned Downtimes
There are no planned downtimes outside of regular maintenance windows for May 2022.
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.