How To Moodle

What is Moodle

Moodle is a widely spread Learning Management System (LMS). Such systems can automate multiple educational procedures. In our university we use Moodle for 2 major tasks: professor-to-student and professor-to-administration communication. In particular at least we use Moodle:

• as an entry point for a course for offline and online students;
• to publish a course structure, regulations, and materials;
• to schedule graded activities (quizzes, homeworks, exams, ...);
• to store a digital footprint of a student, mostly in a form of uploaded assignments and quizzes;
• for timely grading and grade publishing.

Moodle minimum

As soon as you get access to the course, you should:

1. Upload or link a course syllabus, preferably in a form of an eduwiki page.
2. Create Attendance element, and then create teaching sessions inside. Attendance check is mandatory for electives and labs.
3. Create course sections, preferably with respect to syllabus topics.
4. Create all graded activities with submission deadlines in advance.
5. Setup grading. Moodle by default equally weights all assignments and uses default letter scale. To adjust this behavior please refer to Grades menu of the course. Useful tips are given in this video about grades setup and this video about mid-semester evaluation. NB University administration automatically imports final grades from Moodle, thus you should ensure that grades are correct in 2 days after a final exam.

Expected state

As Moodle is used as a default professor-to-student communication channel, we expect to see there:

• Course material: slides, lecture notes, lecture recording, scientific acticles, links to repositories and chats, and other course artifacts.
• Grading feedback. Assignments and quizzes graded in Moodle should include justification of the grade. This can involve explicit grading schemas, personal feedbacks to student uploads and their answers to open questions.

Good to have

• Our university has a default Academic Misconduct Policy. If you want to override this rules, you can do this in Moodle.
• Dedicated grading policy section in a course header.

Furter reading

Some useful motivation words and useful tricks are given in this YouTube playlist. To get Moodle assitance, please don't hesitate to contact Miloslav and Rinat.