September 2022 Moodle News

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Announcements Moodle News

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Fall 2022 is here!

Classes begin on Tuesday, September 6, 2022. We’re here to help as you explore and use Moodle in your courses.

Moodle courses will automatically open to students on Tuesday, September 6 at 9:00am.

Where’s My Moodle Course?

So you have requested a Moodle course, and receive a confirmation email that it’s ready, but you still don’t see it in your Navigation tray. It’s ok! Check the very bottom of your Navigation tray. New Moodle courses will appear on the bottom of the list until you make them available to students.

Request Your Fall 2022 Moodle Courses in SPIRE

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:

Request your Echo360 Courses

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. Echo360 course requests for 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 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: Getting your course ready (Part 2)

We’re doing a second round of tips to help you get started on the right foot. Check out the previous post for part 1.

Did you know that…

  • You can take attendance directly in Moodle? The attendance activity gives you a list of your students, and you can mark their attendance. You and your students can see what they’ve missed to keep on track. You can even set up custom values for attendance to match your grading style.
  • You can create a shared Class Notes? Use the Wiki activity to create a shared page that all students, or groups of students, can access and edit. Students can use this to create and share notes, and you can monitor their development to make sure everything is accurate.
  • You can control access to resources and activities in your course? Beyond the un/hide option, you can use the restrict access options to make content available based on time, dates, scores on previous activities, and more. The logics can be complex but make this a versatile option in your course.

Planned Downtimes

There are no planned downtimes outside of regular maintenance windows for September 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:

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