Message-ID: <254901.1182532575604.JavaMail.joeescobar@joe-escobars-computer.local> Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 19:31:12 -0800 (PST) From: moodleadmin Reply-To: Online@lanecc.edu Subject: Start-of-term email Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="----=_Part_68_9327456.1182532575602" GWItemID: 459A5090.LCC-Mail.MC_PO3.100.1346735.1.2BFC.1 ------=_Part_68_9327456.1182532575602 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Webmaster-type-people: Below is a draft of a message I plan to send to faculty today, on start-of-term issues. If you like, please go ahead and look it over and suggest revisions. I plan to change some of the formatting. Sorry for the last-minute nature of the draft; I actually planned to send it this morning, and it occurred to me you might want to take a look. I still plan to send this out this afternoon. David ---- Instructors, This message is the start of the usual flurry of start-of-term emails about Moodle. I'll try to keep them to a minimum this term (no daily "Sorry, Moodle is still not ready!" postings this time!), but I'll also apologize now, in advance in case the number becomes onerous. Now, to business. First: timelines. The first load of student enrollments will take place on Thursday, sometime before 1:00 PM. This means that students will be enrolled in your courses, and that you will be able to see them (and do things like assign them to groups); it does NOT mean that they will be able to log in yet. I'd be grateful if you could do a quick check on your Moodle enrollments, if you have the time, and let me know if you see anything strange (no students enrolled, vastly fewer students enrolled in Moodle than are enrolled in Banner, or vastly MORE students enrolled in Moodle than are in Banner). I will turn on the ability to for students to log in to Moodle on Sunday afternoon. But please note that enrollled students will still be unable to see your courses UNTIL you explicitly make the courses available. When students log in, they don't automatically see all the courses they are enrolled in: they see the courses that they're enrolled in that the instructor has made visible. So even though we will allow them to log in to Moodle on Sunday (this is for troubleshooting purposes--it allows me to run some tests to make sure that everything is working), your students will not see your course unless you've made it available to them. In fact, they won't even see that your course exists unless you've made it available to them. That brings me to my next point: Please make sure that you make your course available to students in the course settings page, before 8:00 AM on Monday, January 8th. That is the official 'availability date' posted on the front page. Students will be confused if they log in after that point and don't see courses for which they're officially registered in ExpressLane. That is something that you need to do: we cannot do it for you. To make your course visible to students: go into your course. In the left-hand administration block, click Settings. On the settings page, look for the Availability menu, about half way down the page. By default, it's set to not available (which means it's hidden). When you set it to available, students will see it. That's all you have to do. Enrollments Students who are enrolled in your course in ExpressLane are automatically enrolled in your Moodle courses. During most of the term, enrollments will be updated each day at 5:00 AM, 12:00 noon, 4:00 PM, and 11:00 PM. In order to keep the load on the Banner database low, the noon and 4:00 PM runs will probably not happen January 5 (this Friday) through January 9th (next Tuesday). We will monitor the load on the database and add these loads back in as quickly as we can, but the first few days of the term have traditionally been pretty high-traffic, so we are doing everything we can to minimize the load on Banner, so we can keep things running smoothly. The net effect of all of this is that there may be some lag time between when a student enrolls in your course in ExpressLane and when they're enrolled in Moodle (for example, if a student enrolls in ExpressLane at 8:00 AM on January 8th, she won't be enrolled in Moodle until 11:00 PM that day). Two other things to keep in mind: - Students cannot enroll themselves in classes. This has to be done either through Banner, or by the instructor. If a student has already logged in to Moodle, the instructor can do a search on the student's name and add him to a course. But the student can't enroll himself: either the student must enroll himself in ExpressLane (which will then be propogated to Moodle), or the Instructor must do it. - Moodle does not automatically drop students when they drop in ExpressLane. This was a request dear to many of you (myself, too), and I'd hoped to have this up and running for Winter term, but unfortunately we aren't there yet. We will allow students to unenroll themselves, however, so that should help remove some of the cruft from your class lists. As the instructor, you also have the ability to do that. Students should be sure to drop in ExpressLane first, however, because a student who unenrolls herself from a course in Moodle without also dropping in ExpressLane will simply be re-enrolled in Moodle. Other terms The main moodle address (moodle.lanecc.edu) now redirects automatically to Winter term, not Fall (that change was made on January 1). There are links to the other instances of Moodle (Fall, Summer, and prior to that) on the Moodle main page. At the moment, students continue to have access to their courses from Fall 2006. I plan to cut off that access one week after Winter term starts, so the last day they would have access is Friday, January 12th. Support Just a quick note here: this address (moodleadmin@lanecc.edu) is for issues related to things related to administration of Moodle itself--course creation, accounts, enrollments, and so forth. Students who need assistance logging in should contact the Student Help Desk (SHeD) by email at SHeD@lanecc.edu or by phone at 463-3333. There's a link on the main page of the Moodle site that will take them to our Moodle information page. For instructors with questions about how to use Moodle, the faculty webmasters are currently the folks to ask (this will be changing in the not-too-distant future, as IT takes over faculty support). They can be reached at online@lanecc.edu. There's also a link to the faculty support page (https://teach.lanecc.edu/moodle) That's it for now. Please let me know if you have any questions. David Walton =============================================== David Walton Moodle System Administrator Lane Community College For enrollment, course creation, logging in, or general server issues, email moodleadmin@lanecc.edu For faculty assistance using Moodle, email online@lanecc.edu Voice: 463-3367 =============================================== ------=_Part_68_9327456.1182532575602--