November 16, 2012

Contact:   Mur Muchane

As you may already know, your spring courses are now available in Moodle. Course names are brought over directly from Banner. If you prefer a different course name, you can change that by going into the course and clicking "Edit settings". The field to edit is the "Course full name". Please do not change the "Course ID number". That field is needed to pull enrollments from Banner through the Drop/Add period.

On December 17, we will host a Moodle Day in the CTL, Open Tutor Room. ITS Instructional Technology staff will be on hand to walk you through all of the functionality in Moodle. A schedule of areas covered will be announced closer to the date. You can also schedule an individual consultation with your instructional technologist at any time: Consultation Services

Based on faculty feedback, we made some changes to the default course settings.
• All courses are preset to the weekly layout with the correct start date (January 14, 2013) and number of weeks (16).
• We added a plugin called "Subpages" that allows you to create more structure on the course home page. This addresses the need for functions similar to "folders" in Blackboard. This video explains how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3lynb89BeY
• We changed the default file size uploads in all activities to the maximum 500MB.
• Due to issues with some browsers and pdf files, we changed the default action on files to "Force download".
• The new default action for web links is to open in a new window.
• HTML settings have been changed to allow simple formatting via HTML tags in Name and Title fields. For example, if you need to make a title bold, you can enter HTML tags to achieve this: <b>Title</b>. We are working toward allowing similar formatting options for those using the Topic layouts.

Over the winter break, we will make additional changes to enhance usability.
• We will add more professional theme options for courses.
• We will modify the main page view for better aesthetics.
• When you log in, you will be taken directly to the view of your own courses, and we will add a module called "Course Overview Plus" that will allow you to filter your courses by semester and hide any you are not using.

As you may recall, the transition from Blackboard to Moodle was recommended by a group of faculty, students and ITS staff following a year-long evaluation of Learning Management Systems. Moodle has also been widely adopted by most of our peer institutions. One of the benefits of open source software is the potential for greater flexibility in design and functionality. We are members of the Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (http://www.clamp-it.org/), where peer institutions test the latest upgrades to Moodle and share ideas about plugins that work best in a liberal arts environment. Moodle modules are plugins that can enhance functionality and are developed by communities of educators and programmers in higher education. We can investigate and test compatible plugins with you, and we invite you to browse what's out there: https://moodle.org/plugins/.