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Over the past couple of years we have been working on products that help new customers to get up and running in e-learning with ease as well as helping already established online learning organisations improve and automate their offerings.

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We are looking forward to the new year and helping our clients get the most out of their learning management systems.

In Moodle, there are multiple ways to grade your student(s) work. Some popular activities that are commonly used to grade student work are the Assignment and Quiz activities. You may already be familiar with these activity types, however, today we will focus our attention on the various grading options when working with these activities.

It is important to mention that not all activities and resources within Moodle support grade settings. Activities and resources within Moodle will have their own grade settings that associate with them. For example, when adding a new assignment activity to your course, the following grade options are available:

• Grade: Select the grade type that will be used (none, scale, point). You must also provide a Maximum grade value for the assignment activity when using the point grade type. If you decide to use the scale grade type, then you must specify the scale to be used for grading.
• Grading method: Choose the advanced grading method that will be used to assess student work (simple direct grading, marking guide, rubric). Set this value to simple direct grading to disable advanced grading methods. Otherwise, select the advanced grading method you would like to use.
• Grade category: The grade category that the activity grade will be placed in within the gradebook.
  Grade to pass: Specify the minimum grade required in order to pass the activity. This value is used when assessing activity and course completion.

• Grade to pass:  Specify the minimum grade required in order to pass the activity. This value is used when assessing activity and course completion.

• Anonymous submissions: Specify whether student identity is hidden from the grader/markers.
  Hide grader identity from students: Specify whether grader/marker identity is hidden from the students.
  Use marking workflow: If enabled, the marks will go through a series of workflow stages before the grades are released to students. This allows for multiple rounds of marking and students will all receive marks at the same time.

• Hide grader identity from students: Specify whether grader/marker identity is hidden from the students.
• Use marking workflow: If enabled, the marks will go through a series of workflow stages before the grades are released to students. This allows for multiple rounds of marking and students will all receive marks at the same time.

Advanced grading methods:

When setting up the assignment activity, you can choose to use Advanced Grading Methods. To do so, you can click the Rubric or Marking guide over the simple direct grading methods.

When working with the Rubric method, you will be required to define a rubric that will be used by graders to assess the student’s grade, based on criteria plotted against levels of achievement. Each level is assigned a numeric grade which is then used to calculate a sum of all criteria grades.

Here is an example shown of a rubric grading method. In this scenario, the student received a 2/2 in Grammer, ½ in Research, and 2/2 in the Syntax criteria levels. This results in a total grade of ⅚ (83.33%) in the gradebook for the assignment activity.

The marking guide advanced grading method allows teachers to provide comments and grades for each criterion. For example, here is an example shown of an assignment activity that utilizes the marking guide advanced grading method. There are 2 criteria defined, one for Research, and one for Grammar. In the image below, the user has obtained a 2/2 in research, and ½ in grammar. This results in a ¾ and final activity grade of 75% within the gradebook.

Quiz grading methods:

With the quiz activity, you can specify the number of attempts allowed. Depending on your requirements, you can specify the maximum number of times a user can attempt a specific quiz.

When setting up the quiz activity, you can select from the following grading methods:

• Highest grade: the highest grade from all user attempts.
• Average grade: the average grade from all user attempts.
• First attempt: the grade from the user’s first attempt.
• Last attempt: the grade from the user’s last attempt.

Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) is a learning technology standard developed by IMS Global Learning Consortium. LTI acts as a medium to integrate learning tools (virtual applications developed by providers) into another platform, which is the tool consumer. Moodle can be both an LTI tool consumer and provider; we can export content available in a Moodle instance as a resource to other platforms, and we can also import content from other providers into Moodle.

Using Moodle as an LTI consumer

Teachers can use the External tool to link external resources from LTI compliant platforms to their Moodle course page and also have users’ grades sent into Moodle from where they are being externally calculated. This means that users can conveniently just log into Moodle to access resources without having to go to the provider’s platform with a separate login.

The following instructions need to be followed to set this up:

1) In a course, find and click on the Turn editing on button
2) Go to the desired course section and click on the Add an activity or resource button
3) In the pop-up that opens, go to the Activities tab and click on the option External tool

External tool settings

This section covers the settings of the External tool activity when it is added to a course and also the site administration level settings for the course module.

The activity settings have eight different setting groups. Except for General and Privacy settings, which are specific to the External tool, the remaining groups are general activity settings that you can read more about from these links:

• Common module settings
• Restrict access
• Activity completion
• Tags
• Competencies

General Settings

• Activity name
  • Add a title, description if required, with your choice of display
• Activity description
  • Give a short description here
• Display description on course page
  • Choose to show the description along with the activity name
• Display activity name when launched
  • Have this appear when the student clicks the link.
• Display activity description when launched
  • Have this appear when the student clicks the link.
• Secure tool URL
  • This overrides the tool URL when moodle uses SSL (if your site is configured to use HTTPS in the web root)
• Consumer key
  • This tells the External tool’s site that your Moodle is allowed to connect.
  • The site will issue you with this key
  • If you are merely linking to a tool with no secure access or gradebook sharing, you won’t need a consumer key
  • If you are linking to a course or activity from another Moodle site, you can add any consumer key
• Shared secret
  • This is the authentication passphrase to connect to the External tool’s site
• Custom parameters
  • The tool provider might use this to allow you to display a specific resource
  • This setting may be left blank for most External tools
• Icon URL
  • Enter the URL to a different icon you want to display instead of the default External Tool icon
• Secure Icon URL
  • Enter the URL of a different icon here if your students are accessing Moodle securely via SSL
• Preconfigured tool
  • This is how Moodle communicates with the tool provider. If in doubt, leave as default
  • If your administrator has made a tool available site-wide, you will be able to select it here
• Select content button
  • This button is for LTI Content-Item configuration
• Tool URL
  • This is the URL for connecting to the tool’s external site.
  • If your Moodle site uses SSL (is on HTTPS), you will only be able to use a tool that also uses SSL. Make sure the tool URL has HTTPS before attempting to use it or you may get a blank page
• Launch container
  • This is how the External tool will be displayed and one of the following options must be picked:
    • Default – If in doubt, leave as default
    • Embed – The External tool will be embedded in the Moodle course page with blocks and navigation bar
    • Embed without blocks – The External tool will be embedded in the Moodle course page but without blocks
    • New Window – The External tool will open in a new window (a new window or tab will open with the External tool and the old browser window containing the course page will not change)

Privacy

• Share launcher’s name with the tool
  • The student’s name will be displayed on the connected External tool site
• Share launcher’s email with the tool
  • The student’s email will be displayed on the connected External tool site
• Accept grades from the tool
  • The connected External tool site will send back grades to Moodle’s gradebook
  • This will be discussed in more detail

Site administration settings

Adding a tool site-wide

A site administrator can manually configure External tools from Admin dashboard > Site administration > Plugins > Activity modules > External tool > Manage tools to render them available across the site.

A tool can be configured so that it is shown in the course module selection pop-up menu when adding an activity/resource to a course.

Registering a tool using a cartridge

A cartridge can be used to register a tool type. This will configure all the necessary settings info so you don’t need to from the settings page. Enter the tool’s cartridge URL into the “Tool URL…” field and click on the Add button, as shown in the screenshot below.

Then, you will be asked to enter a consumer key and shared secret. If you do not possess these, you can leave the fields blank.

Registering an External tool

To register an External tool, enter the tool URL into the same “Tool URL…” field and click on the same Add button. This will open the tool and prompt you to provide some settings.

Then, you will be shown the capabilities the tool wants to use and you can decide if you want to proceed with it.

Viewing more details

On the Manage tools page, you can also go to Manage preconfigured tools to view the preconfigured tools under Active, Pending, Rejected tabs.

You can also go to Manage external tool registrations to view the tool registrations under Configured, Pending, Accepted, Rejected tabs.

From here, you can click on Configure a new external tool registration to add a tool with limited capabilities.

• Tool provider name
  • Name given by the provider
• Registration URL
  • URL given by the provider
• Capabilities
  • Select all capabilities you want the provider to have
• Services
  • Select all services you want to offer the provider

Once you have configured these settings and saved the page, click on the checkmark to register.

After a success message is displayed, click Register to complete the registration process.

If all requirements are met, you will be able to register automatically. Now, you can go to Admin dashboard > Site administration > Plugins > Activity modules > External tool > Manage external tool types and click on the Pending tab, then click the checkmark to activate it.

• Secret
  • A string of characters which is shared with the remote system (LTI consumer) to provide access to the tool.
• Grade synchronization
  • Whether grades from the tool are sent to the remote system (LTI consumer).
• Require course or activity completion prior to grade synchronization
  • Teachers can specify whether a course or activity should be completed before the grade synchronization is to be triggered.
• User synchronization
  • Whether a scheduled task synchronizes enrolled users in the remote system with enrolments in this course, creating an account for each remote user as necessary, and enrolling or un-enrolling them as required. If set to “No”, at the moment when a remote user accesses the tool, an account will be created for them and they will be automatically enrolled.
• User synchronization mode
  • Whether remote users should be enrolled and/or unenrolled from this course.

After you have successfully added the LTI enrolment method to your course, you can navigate to the Course administration page to view and copy the registration URL for the LTI consumer site. Go to the Published as LTI tools page from the drop down menu.

Note: You should share the registration URL and secret key with the LTI consumer site in order for them to access your site. The above links will be different for your Moodle instance, but relatively follow the same format such as “http://yourmoodlesite.com/enrol/lti/”.

For more information on the Publish as LTI tool plugin, please read the Publish as LTI tool Moodle article.

Scheduled tasks:

Moodle allows administrators to schedule routine tasks. These tasks are often referred to as “scheduled tasks” and run in the background. These scheduled tasks should run on a regular schedule however, administrators have the ability to change the scheduled task’s default schedule if required. Scheduled tasks will run as often as the cron is run in Moodle. It is recommended that the cron run every few minutes to get the maximum benefit from your scheduled tasks. This requires the task to do less work on each execution. The scheduled tasks essentially allow for task automation within Moodle.

Administrators can access the scheduled task for their site by navigating to:
Site administration > Server > Tasks > Scheduled Tasks

Clicking the Edit icon allows you to edit the task schedule:

You can specify the month, day, hour, and minute interval that this task will be run. Optionally, you can reset the task back to its default configuration or disable it entirely. In the example above, the scheduled task is set to run every 15 minutes.

The format of the fields that you can specify for the settings:

View task log:

Administrators can view a log of their scheduled task by navigating to:

Site administration > Server > Tasks > Tasks log

Manually executing tasks:

Administrators can manually run individual scheduled tasks via the “Run now” link under the scheduled tasks. The “Allow ‘Run now’ for scheduled tasks” setting must be enabled.

Site administration > Security > Site security settings

In addition, the “Path to PHP CLI” setting must also be provided:

Site administration > Server > System paths

Task processing:

Administrators can define the additional configuration for scheduled tasks by navigating to:

Site administration > Server > Tasks > Task processing

Executing task from the command line:

You can view a list of scheduled tasks by entering the following command:
php admin/cli/scheduled_task.php –list

Here is an example in which a specific scheduled task was executed from the command line:
php admin/cli/scheduled_task.php –execute=’\enrol_imsenterprise\task\cron_task’

For more information regarding scheduled tasks and the command line, please navigate to:
https://docs.moodle.org/39/en/Administration_via_command_line#Running_cron_via_command_lin 

Why should I consider scheduled task?

Scheduled tasks are a great way to keep the information on your site up to date. This includes user submissions, notifications, course progression, etc. Scheduled tasks are one factor that makes Moodle the leading LMS. Plugin developers should consider utilizing scheduled tasks in their development to create more immersive and consistent plugins.