Making Moodle courses more interactive is a great way to engage students and increase their participation and retention. Here are some tips and tricks to help you make your Moodle courses more interactive:
Use multimedia
Moodle allows you to add multimedia elements such as videos, images, and audio to your courses. By incorporating these elements, you can make your courses more engaging and interactive. For example, you can use videos to introduce new concepts, images to illustrate key points, and audio to provide audio instructions. You can also use screen recording tools to create interactive video tutorials that can be used to guide students through a particular process or concept.
Use forums and discussion boards
Moodle has built-in forums and discussion boards that allow students to interact with each other and with the teacher. These tools can be used to facilitate discussions, ask questions, and provide feedback. By creating open-ended questions or discussions, you can encourage students to express their opinions and share their thoughts. You can also use these tools to create peer-review assignments, where students can provide feedback on each other’s work.
Use quizzes and assessments
Moodle has a variety of quizzes and assessments that can be used to test students’ knowledge and understanding. These tools can be used to provide immediate feedback and to encourage students to participate more actively in the course. You can also use these tools to create interactive quizzes, where students can get immediate feedback on their answers and see explanations for the correct answers.
Advanced Reporting
Moodle provides a great selection of reports for both administrators and teachers to conduct their e-learning. Despite this wide array of reports, some administrators and teachers may require additional reports that provide their organisations with advanced information. With Virtual Slate, our interactive dashboards allow you to report against your courses, activities, and users and view detailed reports.
Use collaborative tools
Moodle has a variety of collaborative tools such as wikis, blogs, and group assignments that allow students to work together on projects and assignments. These tools can be used to encourage collaboration and teamwork among students. By creating group projects, you can foster a sense of community among students, and give them opportunities to learn from each other.
Use gamification techniques
Gamification is the use of game elements and design techniques in non-game contexts. You can use gamification techniques to make your Moodle courses more interactive and engaging by incorporating elements such as points, badges, and leaderboards. By making learning feel like a game, students will be more motivated to participate and engage with the course material.
Use feedback and analytics
Moodle has built-in analytics and feedback tools that allow you to track student progress and engagement. These tools can be used to identify areas where students are struggling and to adjust your teaching methods accordingly. By using these tools, you can get a better sense of what’s working and what’s not, and make changes to your courses to make them more interactive and effective.
Incorporating these tips and tricks into your Moodle courses can help to make them more interactive and engaging for your students. However, it’s important to remember that every class and every student is different, so it may take some experimentation to find the best approach for your specific situation. Don’t be afraid to ask for student feedback, and be open to adjusting your approach as needed. With the right strategies in place, you can create an interactive and engaging learning experience that will help your students to succeed.
Within Moodle, there are various methods for teachers to grade their students’ work. One of the most popular Moodle activities is the Assignment activity. With this activity, teachers can set up the grading method as follows:
Simple direct grading
Marking guide
Rubric
In this blog post, we will be focusing our attention on the Rubric advanced grading method. The Rubric grading method can be utilised within Moodle for criteria-based assessments. Similar to how a rubric works in real life, it will consist of a set of criteria that is assessed against various levels of achievement in which each grade is assigned to a specified level. When the teacher marks a student’s work, they will select the level of work that the student has achieved for each criterion.
Eg: A criterion provided for Style, Content, Late submission penalty with the various levels provided.
Set up Rubric grading method for an assignment:
When setting up your assignment activity (or by editing activity settings), teachers can select the grading method and set it to Rubric.
Next, on the assignment activity page, click the settings drop-down and select the Define rubric option.
Note: You will be redirected to this page automatically if this is your first time setting up the activity and selecting the Rubric grading method.
1. Provide a Name and Description for this Rubric on the Define rubric page.
2. Next, provide a criterion and the corresponding levels. Additional criteria can be added via the + Add criterion button, and additional levels can be added via the + Add level button.
3. Additional Rubric options can be defined below.
Finally, click the Save rubric and make it ready button to apply it to the assignment activity.
Grade student submission with Rubric
After a student has made a submission on the assignment activity, the teacher can go in and grade the submission.
On the assignment page, the teacher can click the Grade button to grade the student’s submission. In the right panel, under the Grade tab, the teacher can select the grade level for each criterion and provide a comment. In addition, Feedback comments can be provided below for the student to view.
The above image displays that the user received a 1⁄2 for Research and 1⁄2 for Grammer. The total assignment is worth out of 4 points since the max points for each criterion specified are 2. This results in the user receiving a 2/4 (50%) total mark.
In this example provided below, the total assignment would be worth out of /6 points. This user has received a 2⁄3 in Grammer and 3/3 in Research. This would result in a final grade of 5⁄6 (83.33%).
This will be reflected to the user when viewing their assignment grade:
What about Scale and Point grade types?
When defining the grade settings for an activity, the teacher has the ability to specify the Grade type.
You have the ability to select the Scale, Point, or None grade types. If the Point grade type is selected, then the teacher can specify a maximum grade and assign a grade point within the maximum range. You should also specify the grade to pass when specifying a maximum grade.
If you choose to use the Scale grade type, then you will need to select the Scale from the drop-down menu. The scale grade type is a great way to evaluate the student’s performance. Administrators have the ability to create standard scales which can be utilised across the site in different courses. Teachers also have the ability to create their own custom scales to be used within their courses.
The image above demonstrates an activity that has been set up using the scale grade type with the Default competence scale selected with a grade of 1 required to pass. When teachers assess student’s work they can select a grade from the scale:
Moodle offers course creators the ability to select from an array of formats to meet their learning goals. The course format refers to the layout of the course, determining how its information is presented to and accessed by enrolled users. Site administrators can enable, disable or delete course formats by going to Admin dashboard > Site administration > Plugins > Course formats > Manage course formats, the page displaying as follows:
Note: The default choice is the Topics format which can be changed by visiting the link titled “Course default settings” at the bottom of the above image, which can alternatively be accessed from Admin dashboard > Site administration > Courses > Course default settings. Under the section “Course format”, the drop-down setting “Format” can be changed to any other course format.
When setting up a course or editing its settings, you can find the course’s edit settings page has a section “Course format” from where the “Format” field can be used to select the course’s format. There are additional settings to company each format:
Default Moodle course formats
Weekly format
In this format, courses are organized on a week-by-week basis. Each section within the course will have a date corresponding to it. Moodle will create a section for each week of your course. The current week will be highlighted for users to see. The course start date and end date will be utilized to determine the number of sections within your course.
Note: If you wish for your students to work on the same material at the same time, then this course format would be ideal for you.
Topics format
In this format, the course will be organized into topic sections that can assign titles to. Each topic section consists of activities, resources, and labels.
Note: The topics course format is ideal if the course is objective-based. In this case, each objective may take different amounts of time to complete. This is great in scenarios in which students build upon the knowledge from earlier topics.
Single activity format
The single activity format only consists of one section and permits the teacher to add just one activity to the course. The entire course is thus situated around one single activity (by default forum, but this can be modified by a teacher or course creator).
Social format
The social format is situated around one main forum (the social forum). This forum will appear on the main page of the course. The teacher or course creator can specify how many discussions they wish to display on the course page.
Recommended course formats from the community
Grid format
The grid format is a modular and visual course format. When using this course format, each topic is displayed as a grid icon. When users click the grid icon (topic section), the contents for the clicked topic section will be displayed. Otherwise, the contents of each grid icon are hidden by default.
Tiles format
The tiles format displays course topic sections as tiles instead of the default list format found within the topics format. When users click on a specific tile, the content within that topic section will expand below the tile with an animated effect transition.
The accordion format displays the topic sections in a list format. However, it doesn’t allow more than one section to be expanded at any given time. This means that if students expand one section whilst another section is open, it will result in the first section being collapsed and expanding the second section. This is why it is referred to as the Accordion format, due to its similar nature to that of an Accordion. Teachers may wish to utilize this course format over the topics format due to its aesthetic and transition appeal.
Tabs format
The Tabs format displays the contents for one topic on the course page at a time. In many ways, it has similar characteristics to that of a web browser. Only content from the selected tab will be displayed to the users at any given time. For example, clicking Topic 3 in the tabs section above will display the activities and resources available within Topic 3.
The above tabs have a horizontal layout. This can be changed to a vertical layout in the course settings page, by changing the tabs layout setting to “Vertical” from “Horizontal”. When this is done, the tab navigation appears vertically on the side instead of on the top of the topic view.
You can find out more about Virtual Slate via the link below:
Lingel Learning is proud to announce we are the winners of ‘Moodle Certified Service Provider of the Year 2021 (APAC region)’. The dedicated team at Lingel Learning have excelled this past year in developing and delivering innovative solutions to give our clients the most effective Learning Management System experience possible.
The incredible support we received from our clients, our collaboration with Moodle, along with the drive of the Lingel Learning team, has allowed us to celebrate this outstanding achievement today. As a Moodle Partner, we have been deemed experts in our field of educational technology.
2021 has brought new opportunities for Lingel Learning. Over the course of the pandemic, the massive popularity of e-learning has been both rewarding and challenging for us. We have risen to the occasion and measurably accelerated our products, listening to common pain-points from our customers and tweaking our features to deliver what our valued clients need.
Established in 2011, Lingel Learning has prided itself on its commitment to Moodle. With offices in Canada and Australia, we continue to deliver exceptional services to our clients across a range of industries such as Corporate, Government, Education and Not-for-profit.
Lingel Learning offer its clients the benefit of using Moodle’s latest and greatest features along with enrolmart and the Virtual Slate framework that comes bundled with advanced plugins, integrations, and user-friendly dashboards.
Understanding how your learners are performing is one of the most important feature of an LMS. As an administrator or an educator, it’s important to rely on this assessment information to further develop the learning, to track retention level and to inform where learners need to go.
Course Reports and Activity Completion
Moodle has always allowed Teachers and Administrators to look at Course Reports and Activity Completion to follow learner’s completion on a course. We can see what our users have been doing throughout their course and when they completed each portion.
Out of the box Moodle provides a variety of reports, such as:
Course reports:
Competency breakdown report
Logs
Activity report
Participation report
Statistics
Event monitoring
Activity reports:
Course activity reports
Individual activity reports
Complete Report
Moodle Analytics
With the introduction of Inspire Analytics into Moodle core educators can now support their learners by analyzing their performance. This helps educators go beyond simple descriptive analytics to provide predictions of learner success, and ultimately diagnosis and prescriptions to learners and teachers.
Built in modules include:
Students at risk of dropping out
No teaching activity
Moodle can also be easily extended with new custom models, based on reusable targets, indicators, and other components.
Virtual Slate Advanced Reporting
Moodle Administrators have used plugins and third party tools to extend Moodle’s reporting capabilities. Although these tools are great, educators and administrators can lack the skills to take advantage of these tools. To get the most out of Moodle reporting without having to install a third party tools or plugins Lingel Learning has included Advanced Reporting Dashboards directly into Virtual Slate, our custom framework that extends Moodle LMS.
Virtual Slate Advanced Reporting Dashboards
Overview Dashboard: quickly get a complete picture of your Moodle LMS from a single dashboard. Use the Date Filters to further analyse your Moodle data and drill down into detailed reports. Access interactive charts and filterable data tables from a single screen.
User Dashboard: learn how your users engage with your Moodle LMS. Better monitor your learners through filterable reports which keep track of user engagement, activity and enrolment. Understand who are your most active and inactive users and then drill down into the data to get a detailed understanding of them.
Course Dashboard: understand how your learners interact with courses in your Moodle LMS and analyse your course data based on enrolment, completion, activity and inactivity. Get to know your top courses based on enrollment and completion. Improve your learner engagement by understanding the courses that they like and don’t like.
Advanced Reporting: get access to course, grade, scorm, resources and certificate reports. You will also get instant access to any new report we develop and upload into Virtual Slate.
Click here to find out more about Virtual Slate LMS.
Lingel Learning is pleased to announce we are officially a Certified Moodle partner!
Moodle, the maker of the world’s most popular learning management system, welcomes Lingel Learning to its network of Moodle Partners – Certified Service Providers in Canada.
Working across a diverse range of industries, including corporate, government education and not-for-profit, at Lingel Learning we offer a broad range of Moodle services including hosting, development, support, integration, training and course development.
As a Canadian Moodle Partner, we will continue to improve and create innovative solutions that help our clients get the most out of Moodle’s learning platform.
Speaking about the recent partnership, Gavin Lindeman, our Chief Learning Architect, said: “We are excited to be working closely with Moodle HQ and be at the forefront of Moodle development. We relish the opportunity to work closely with Moodle HQ, putting forward ideas and helping contribute to Moodle core.”
Moodle Founder and CEO, Martin Dougiamas, added to this sentiment, saying “Welcome aboard the Moodle Partner program, Lingel Learning! We’re very happy that our Canadian Moodle users will now have more service options that help support the Moodle product.”
Our strategy is to constantly improve and innovate solutions that help our clients get the most out of Moodle. We offer a diverse range of Moodle services from hosting, development, support, integration, multi-tenancy and training, to course development. We are a dynamic e-learning development company, with a development process that focuses on deliverables which can be adapted to fit with a client’s needs. This is combined with creative design to deliver materials that will result in clearer understanding and retention rates.
Our track record of delivering exceptional results for our clients is one of the many reasons Lingel Learning have been accepted into Moodle’s Partner network. Some of our notable clients are Gallagher Bassett, The Royal College of Surgeons, Intralot, Pallium, Ausenco and Westland Insurance.
We are thrilled to become a Moodle Partner and help improve the quality of eLearning in Canadian and furthermore, global organizations.
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