Moodle Spring 2006

In order to have your course appear correctly for Spring Term, Moodle instructors will need to do three (3) things.
These changes very easy and take just a moment of your time.

FIRST, login to your class and click your Course SETTINGS link to make these 3 changes.

All instructors teaching official classes in the Distance Learning program will choose the Distance Learning - Online Classes - S06 category.
All others will choose the Spring Term 2006 category.

The Winter Term 2005 categories will be hidden from student view starting the first day of Spring Term, April 3rd.

#2 Course Full Name

Reformat/Retype your course Full name so it looks like the following examples.
Please be exact, using spaces between course letters and number, space on each side of the hyphen, parenthesis around CRN and instructor last name, # sign in front of CRN).

BI 231 - Human Anatomy and Physiology I (#30407 Vandegrift)
BT 120 - MS Word for Business (#31443 Maitland)
BT 129 - Business Web Pages (#32440 Arnaud)
BT010 - Computer Keyboarding (#30118 Jennings)

Since the course Short name MUST be unique, we will use CRN numbers in this field.
Enter the CRN number (no # sign) as your course Short Name.

40123
44392

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Since this number shows in Moodle's "cookie crumb trail" and in class emails, instructors may prepend their class name to the CRN. Since it must be a single word, you should probably use an under_score character.

HST203_40123
BT120_44392

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There are 2 ways to accomplish this tast in Moodle.

#1
Create a backup of your existing course, without the student data and submissions.
Then restore it TO A NEW COURSE

OR

#2
Create an empty course in the Spring Term 2006 category. (Login, click Courses, scroll to the botton and click ADD NEW COURSE)
Then use the IMPORT COURSE DATA button to "get" the items you want from an existing course.
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Directions for Backing up and Restoring a Course

Login to the course you'd like to backup and click the BACKUP link in the Administration block. You will be led through a series of questions asking you what you'd like to save. If this is for archive purposes, save the student data. If this is for the same class in a new term, do NOT save the student data (Users - NONE). (or save it once WITH the student data and once without... you get the idea.)

When complete, you will see a zip file with a long name (including "backup" and some numbers) in your Moodle course FILES section. The number is important. The code is YYYYMMDD-HHMM (year, month, day, hour-in military time, minute)

xxxxxx-20060225-1530.zip is the file that was backed up February 25, 2006 at 3:30pm

IMPORTANT - At the END of the restore process, you will have a VERY IMPORTANT drop down box to select. When given the opportunity, be sure to restore your course as a NEW course.

RESTORE TO: NEW COURSE

Your class will have the same name as the old one, except "copy 1" will be appended to the end. Be sure to click the course SETTINGS link and enter a new full name and short name for the class and choose the correct category (according to the instructions above about naming your courses). You have successfully duplicated your class.

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Resetting deadlines and dates for all Moodle assignments

Don't do this one assignment at a time. Add the Moodle block called Course Program to your class (the instructor is the only one who can see this block).
You have 2 choices, Program Visibility and Program Dates. Click Dates and you can reset deadlines for all assignments in a single week or topic AT THE SAME TIME. This should prove to be a great timesaver.

Showing and hiding weeks, topics, and even individual assignments and activities AUTOMATICALLY

Use the Program Visibility choice in the Course Program block, mentioned above, to automate when things "appear" and "disappear" in your courses. This is a very helpful feature to help automate your classes and reveal to students only what you want them to see at any given time.
Of course, you can still click your eyeball icon to show or hide items manually (this will override the Program Visibility settings).

Moodle messaging system can be internal only, or both internal and external

It is up to the individual. Anyone can disable their email address in their user profile (get there by clicking EDIT PROFILE). Some of your students may have already done this after they confirmed their Moodle accounts. They will still be able to read messages sent to them in Moodle.
Instructors may even choose this option to avoid Moodle class emails being sent to your Groupwise account. All Moodle users should receive a pop up window when they login and have messages waiting for them. Of course, if your browser is set to block pop-up windows, this could be a problem. You may want to add the Moodle Messages block to your class to assure that everyone can get to their messages.

Click it and take a look. When you change scores here, and save your changes, the scores are changed all the way back to the original assignments, when you first graded them. This will certainly help instructors with many offline assignments AND those instructors who regrade and adjust points.

Some instructors have asked for a feature that will allow students to upload multiple files in a single assignment. This has always been available in Moodle, but students were required to ZIP those files before uploading a single .zip file. Now, instructors can require multiple separate files. When creating a new assignment, you will see an option to upload multiple files. All you have to do is to decide how many files you will require, and the rest should be self-explanatory. Enjoy.

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With just a few clicks, you can easily change the look of your site to more suit your needs, style, and personality. Under Course Settings, look at the various THEMES that you may choose from. I've installed four themes that use an updated, very nice set of new Moodle icons, compliments of Humboldt State University.

They are called:

metal_newicons
standard_hsu
standardgreen2
standard_newicon

You should really take a look. I think I'll be using either metal_newicons or standard_hsu for the Moodle homepage next term.

Go to your course, click SETTINGS, and at the bottom of the page, where it says FORCE THEME, choose a new look.
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Take a quick look. THEY SUPPORT YOUR STUDENTS USING MOODLE. This is a great resource for students and a terrific aide for instructors who should not have to serve as the primary and/or only technical support for their students. I am excited to be working with the folks at the SHeD.