Mary Cooch: Hello everyone and welcome to this
Moodle Academy webinar, introduction to Moodle for educators. I'm Mary Cooch and I'm Education
Manager here at Moodle. I'm going to be presenting to you today, and with me monitoring the
chats and at intervals during the webinar, answering your questions and comments
is Education Advisor Anna Krassa. Anna. Anna Krassa: Hello everyone. Welcome in
our session today. I hope it will be a live and vivid session. Feel free to keep
an eye on the chat and, of course, all your questions and everything, your comments in
the chat. We are actively monitoring it. Mary: Okay, thank you. Now, this webinar
is for complete beginners to Moodle, and I just want to make it clear that when
you're a beginner in Moodle, there are actually 2 parts to learning Moodle. There's
what we call Moodle administration, which is setting up your site to make it attractive or
to brand it and adding the teaching spaces, which Moodle calls [inaudible] courses
and then getting teachers and students into those courses. That's administration. Then
there is what we call teaching with Moodle, which is how a teacher can actually add resources,
files, activities, assignments for their students to do in their subject in the course. This
webinar is about teaching with Moodle. If you are actually interested in
the administration side of Moodle, then last week, we did a webinar, and in the
course where you came to get into this webinar, you can access that recording introduction to
Moodle for administrators and also the slides. Don't leave us now though. Watch this webinar
and then afterwards, feel free to access the administrator recording as well. Looking at an
introduction to Moodle for educators, I think it's important to clarify certain key terms
that are part of Moodle before we get started. Now, as I just said, the teaching materials
and activities that you want to use Moodle for live in what Moodle calls a course,
and it is basically just a page or a space on your Moodle site. It might be that it lasts
several weeks or months and it's divided into weekly sections with a start and an end time, but
it doesn't have to be. It could just be a place which is permanently available where
you just have your files that you used in your face-to-face classes. It's very
much what you want it to be, and courses are usually created by the Moodle admin or a
manager who tends not to have a teaching role. Now, of course you might be a new MoodleCloud
owner and you might be both an administrator and the teacher if you have a small
site or a few users. That's fine, but typically in organizations,
teachers don't create the course, but they do add the materials and teaching it.
That's our focus for today. The official name for that role in Moodle is editing teacher. That
means that you can add the teaching materials and delete them. You can add activities and
you can teach and grade within the course. The people who come into your course to
learn have the official name of students. However, I'll show you that if you don't
like those, you can actually change them within your course. Maybe you want to call your
student learner or trainee or employee or pupil. Maybe you don't want to be visible as teacher but
trainer and so on. You might also be interested in a role called non-editing teacher. This
is a little bit like a classroom assistant, so they will help you in the course. They
can't add or delete your teaching materials, but they can grade and moderate the forums
and so on. Those are some useful words. Now, we're going to look at how we're
going to divide up this webinar. In the first part, we're going to look at setting
up your course. Then we'll have a quick break for questions. Then we're going to look at how you
can add your teaching materials, and then once we've added our course content, then and only
then, how we can give our learners access. Then at the end, I'll share with you
some links and resources and courses to find out more because obviously, we
can't tell you everything in this one hour. Let's imagine then that we are a teacher on a
Moodle site. We're going to follow Alex, in fact, and Alex has had a course already
created for them by the Moodle admin. Here it is in the "My courses" page, which in
Moodle 4, that's the latest version of Moodle. That's what MoodleCloud people have on others
sites if they've upgraded to the latest version. There's a page, "My courses", which shows all
the courses where you're either a teacher or a student. So, Teacher Alex has been given a
course, Basic French. There's no explanation about it. No description, and it's got quite a
dull blue pattern that doesn't say much. One of the first things we will do is how we
can add some information about Alex's course and perhaps add a photo to make it a bit more
attractive. Let's follow Alex going into this course as a new teacher in a completely new
course. You see there, but this is quite empty. You also notice that what's in the central area
is divided into sections or course, Topic, 1, 2, and that's replicated or repeated on the left
hand side. I'll explain about that in a moment, but first of all, let's take a look at the links
that are underneath the title, Basic French. This is the course navigation. Some of it kind of
makes sense. Only the teacher sees all of these. Participants is where you would go to
see who is a student in your course or to add more reports. That kind of makes sense. If you click the more link, there are more
links for you, the teacher. For example, question bank is where you would go if
you wanted to start creating questions for quizzes in your course that you could then
bring into various quizzes. Content bank is where you would go to create an activity called H5P.
Many people are familiar with it. It's not Moodle, but it is integrated or works with Moodle to
make some attractive activities that can be graded and other links as well. Badges, course
reuse is where you can go and save your course to give it to someone else or maybe where you can
bring in a course that someone's given to you. We're going to start right at the beginning
and we're going to go to the link settings, which only the teacher sees. I always like to
describe it as going backstage or round the back of the course page into the course settings
where we can, for example, if we are allowed as a teacher, change the course, full name
and short name. They can both be the same if you don't have a very long name. Then we'll
notice that there are quite a few settings. It's worth exploring all of them. Check the question
mark icons, they always give you a bit of help. What we'd like to do, though, I think, following
Alex is to give a summary of what this course is about so that when people come to the course, they
actually have more information. We've added that, then we can scroll further down and we
can add a course image. I tend to make mine about 600 by 400 approximate pixels
that will then display instead of that rather bland blue pattern.
We can add a course image. You might need to experiment if you want a
certain aspect of that image to display. Then some other settings that might be interesting to
you. We sadly don't have time to look at them all. Course format. You'll see that it says here
topics format. This is the most versatile because this is simply those numbered sections,
which you can change to suit your purposes. Alex as a French teacher would rename them
from Topic 1, 2, 3, etc. to listening, reading, speaking, writing, the skills. If you
have a course that runs on a time schedule, if we click the drop-down, you can choose
weekly format. Weekly format will start the weeks and display each section as weeks
according to when you begin your course. There are other formats as well, and make sure
you check the question mark icons for information. Personally, I think most of the time,
I'm quite happy using topics format. Now, we can't go through all of these because
we don't have time, but a couple that might be interesting to you. Completion tracking, sometimes
called activity completion, is something that's turned on by default in your course, and it
allows your students and you to see what needs to be completed, what your student has to do and
what they still have to do. You also can have a report of what they've done and what they need to
do. If you don't think you'll need this because you don't need them to have anything checked
off, then you can turn it off, but wait and see how it looks and how it's used before you make
that decision. Many people think it's helpful. If you recall, I said if you don't like to see
the word student or you don't like to see the word teacher, you can rename those roles in
role renaming. Let's just go back to the my courses page, where you can actually see now
that the image is much more attractive. Alex has a new image of the Eiffel Tower in a francophone
country. You'll see on the right, you can select the kind of view for the my courses page. We're
looking at card view now, but if I click the drop-down, there's also list view and summary
view. Summary view is what I'm showing you now, and that's where the course description
went. Just out of interest there. Now, we need to get into the course and get
started. So, let's take a look at these sections now. There's a number one, top left, next to
something called the course index. The course index repeats what is in the main central area,
and that's where you have your documents, files, your activities and so on. Everything that's
in the main central area is also in the course index. You can see that it's a lot more compact,
so it's easy for you to search for things or move things if you wish, if you have a long page in
the course index. If you want to, if you don't want to see it, you can collapse it by clicking
the X, and then you'll have the whole page view. On the right at the top, my number two is
pointing to a toggle that says edit mode. Now, we can't at the moment change anything
on this page, and I'd like to change this general to something more welcoming like welcome.
I think as a language teacher, Alex wants to change those numbered topics to listening,
reading to the skills, but we can't do anything until we toggle edit mode. Let's do that now and
see how it changes. Now, you can see edit mode is on. That's where my number two is, and you can see
on the left, the course index has been collapsed, so we can view the whole page there. We
can click to open it again if needed. Also, on the right hand side, next to where I put
the number three, there seems to be a tantalizing little arrow, wanting us to open it up, and this
is what is called a block drawer. Let's open it up, where you can add blocks. Blocks are areas
that you can add extra information to your Moodle course. It's not where you do your teaching,
but you can have some extra useful things in the blocks drawer as a teacher, which your students
can then see. Now, we're not going to add blocks or focus on them, but if we just click it to see
the kinds of things available, you can see, for example, activity results. That's a league table,
so you could have an activity results block as a league table for quiz results if you want to get
some gamification or competition in your course. There is a course completion status block. This is
a block that your students could see to find out in one view what they've completed and what
they still have to complete, and they can click to see exactly what they need to do. Other
blocks as well. Let's just leave that for now. Because we have edit mode enabled, we can now
change those names to something more suiting to this course. The easiest and quickest way of
changing the titles is with edit mode enabled. Just clicking that pencil icon, typing in the
title or name that you want for that section and then pressing enter or return or whatever.
Just like this, okay? So, now, it says welcome. You'll also see next to the right of Topic
1 that another way you can do this is by clicking the three dots. You can see,
it says edit topic. If you click there, you can not only change that Topic 1, but you can
also give a little summary of what is going to be in that section because our teaching materials
will go in these individual sections. From those three dots, you can also highlight
it, you can hide a topic until you're ready to show it. It's one way that you can move
it. You can move things by drag and drop in several ways in Moodle or you can delete it if
you don't want it. If we click edit topic, we can change this Topic 1 to listening and then add a
little summary. As a hint, make sure to go to the bottom of the page and click the button so you've
saved your changes. There we have listening. Alex, we'll leave Alex to go and rename the other
topics as well. Reading speaking, writing. If you discover that you've got your topic setup and
then you realize you need to add another one, see, you can simply click to
add a new topic or new section in between the other sections. That's fine. If
however your course runs weekly, do you remember the weekly course format? You have to do that
from the bottom of the page to add a new week because it's simply not possible
in the laws of the universe to actually insert a week in the second week of
September before the third week of September. So, you have to go to the bottom to do that. That's
one reason why topics format is quite handy. Now, we've got our course set up. We've got
edit mode turned on, we've renamed some of the sections, so I'm going to pause for a little while
to see if you have some questions or comments before we then start adding the teaching
materials. So, over to you, Anna. Anna: We had a few notes and
questions. Actually, I have already answered them. Eggert said that
in the old version of Moodle, there was this possibility to move the URL and
files to the side. I cannot do that anymore. I think he is referring either to the
social course format, either to theme. Mary: I think you might possibly be referring
to what we call indent, which is an arrow, and you press the arrow and then you can have
some resources going a little bit into the right. Anna: Oh. Mary: If that's what you mean. Anna: Yes, that could be also the case. Yes. Mary: It has been removed for various research
reasons. It was suggested to remove it. However, the Moodle team, the developers are currently exploring the possibility of ways
of bringing it back. Not for the immediate future, but if this is under discussion because
quite a few people have asked about this yet, if you're new to Moodle and you don't know
what we're talking about, it's fine. It's fine. Anna: Harold says, "Is it possible to share the
recording of the session with course assistants who have known editing teachers in my course?"
Of course? The recording will be available through the course and it will be available
through YouTube in a couple of days after some fine tuning[?]. Julia says, "How do you
change the main course name, Basic French?" Mary: All right, so if you remember, when we
clicked settings in the course navigation, that's where you saw Basic French and French
101. If you wanted to change the course name, that's where you would go to change it, from
settings. In some organizations, they don't let teachers change the course name, but if you're
in charge of your course and you can, that's where you would change it. So, not on the main page, but
backstage, round the back in the settings, okay? Anna: Dawn is asking, "Can you change
role names as a default setting for all course trainers and delegates?" Mary: You can from the site administration,
so that's a site admin thing. However, if you've got MoodleCloud,
I don't think you can do that. The site admin can change the language for
all of them if that's what you want and if they have that possibility. That's
more of an admin question, really. Anna: Sharon asked, "Is there an
option to add an image to a category?" Mary: An image to a category? I think, yes.
However, we're not actually dealing with categories, we're dealing with
individual courses. Could I just point out one of the resources
I'm going to give you at the end is moodle.org forums, and questions like that
are great for the moodle.org forums where I live there basically. So, I'll be more than happy
to answer that kind of extra questions over there. Anna: Garcia[?] says that in
topic format, what would be a good way to announce events with date and
time content with speaker, etc.? Is it through format, or is there another activity that would
treat[?] better? Not format, but forum. Okay. Mary: Okay. Well, forum is great. The
announcements forum is probably the best. However, I have a new feature
of Moodle 4 that I want to show you that will enable you to very easily announce new
activities and resources and so on, certainly. Anna: Also, Julia says, "Is there a way to
make the course category yourself? I'm not saying that it doesn't pull up a lot of
options. [crosstalk] getting Solano's[?]" Mary: Yeah. If you have a brand new Moodle site,
then you will get a free category ready-made depending on whether you are MoodleCloud or
a different Moodle site. It will either say miscellaneous or it will say Category
- If you want to make more categories, then you need to be the admin and you need
to check our administrator webinar, I think. As a course teacher, you can't create a category.
Possibly for the other categories are there, you can change your category,
but that's an admin thing again. Anna: It seems that we have quite a
lot of questions. William's asking, "How can you change the layout
of the course?" That is like boxes that students can click on it
instead of the default list view. Mary: As well as the weekly and topic schools
format that we showed. There are other formats, that's what Moodle calls them, displays of the
course that your administrator can add for you. You might be thinking there is one that's
called a grid, that's a series of boxes, but that doesn't come with standard Moodle. If
your administrator is able to add additional course formats, what we call plugins, then they
can do that for you. It's not a standard format. Anna: Robert says that, "I noticed that
the report option moves depending on the course type. Sometimes, you see it on the
menu bar and for other types of source, it is under the course option in the menu bar." Mary: Yes, quite possibly. I
don't know. As a course teacher, I would access it from reports that are in the
course administration- course navigation. Sorry. Should we [inaudible] more, or should we- Anna: Yes, we should move on. Yes, we are good. Mary: Okay, and remember, we have a forum in
this course and introduction to Moodle. We also have the moodle.org forums. Please go to
the teaching with Moodle forum on moodle.org to ask there the teaching related questions.
I think we're going to start now looking at adding our teaching materials. In terms of
adding our teaching materials, if you remember, we'd already got our course with edit mode
turned on and so the simplest way and the first way that many people want to add materials
is simply by finding them on their computer. I got one on my desktop, a PDF, clicking on them
and simply dragging them into the course page. Here is a PDF that's living just out of
view on my desktop, and I'm clicking it and dragging it into the welcome section. You
can drag it to anywhere. If you make a mistake, you can move it. Once you let go of it,
you can see it says, "Drop files here to add them to the bottom of this section." When
I let go of the PDF, there it is, file, class rules. If you didn't want it there after all, if
you click on it, you'll see this crosshair icon, you can move things up or down into a different
place. Dragging and dropping is a really quick and easy way of bringing in PowerPoint
presentations, Word documents, files and so on. Actually, in terms of dragging and dropping, you
can drag and drop not only in the central area, but you can also drag and drop from the
course index here because remember, it repeats or replicates what's in the central
area. If you have a long [inaudible] page, you can drag something from a course section
up into where you want it in the course index, which is a bit compact, and it might be easier
to manage. It's not only documents and resources that you can drag and drop. You
can also drag and drop sections. Alex here has renamed the sections to reading and
speaking and then decides that they want to move reading up above listening. I don't necessarily
agree, but it's not my course. Alex simply needs to click reading, you see the crosshairs icon
and drag it and let go up above listening, and there it is. As you can see, there
are various ways of dragging and dropping activities and sections. Not to mention the
one we saw from the three dots earlier on. Now, it's all very well dragging and dropping
files, but that's only one tiny aspect of teaching in a Moodle course, and perhaps you
can't or don't want to drag and drop files. If we click add an activity or resource in any section,
and remember, if we click the wrong section, we can always drag and drop things to move them,
we get what Moodle calls the activity chooser. Here, we see all of the options that you
can use to teach with Moodle. Most of these come with all Moodle sites as standard depending
on who is hosting your Moodle. You might have some extra ones. For example, attendance is an extra
feature that MoodleCloud users benefit from, where they can have students recording their
attendance. Most of these, everyone has. Now, you can see that they are div-, this is
all of them, but they then divide them into activities and resources. If we click resources,
a resource in Moodle is something static that a student listens to, reads or watches. They don't
actually engage with it or interact with it. You can see we have URL. That's a link to a
website. That's an easy one for you to make a web link so they don't have to get lost
in Google. You can upload your files from here instead of drag and drop and you can organize
them neatly into a folder with the folder results. If there is a resource or activity that you don't
understand, maybe you don't know what label is, you can click the eye and it takes you to Moodle's
documentation, which will explain it and even have a little video to help you use it. If there's one
that you think you're going to be using a lot, you can click the star. That's your favorite or
bookmark it, and Moodle will create another tab here for your starred, favorited, bookmarked
resources and activities. If you're planning on adding a lot of files, Word documents simply
with information, I would suggest you look at Moodle's page instead. As an example resource,
let's just click a page and see how it works. Alex is going to make a page called about
your teacher, where they're going to add some information about Alex, the teacher.
You can if you want to add a description which if you tick that box will display on the
course page so students know what it's about. They would click the link which is formed
by name to get into the page. Again, note I've mentioned these little question mark
icons. In Moodle 4, bottom right of all of the pages where you're a teacher, you'll
see another question mark icon, which takes you to help and documentation
that will go straight to Moodle documentation for that page. So you have context in context
specific help for wherever you are in Moodle. If you're using an older version of
Moodle or another version of Moodle, you might see it in the footer, saying Moodle
docs for this page, but do be aware of that. Obviously, the content now that Alex is
going to add goes where it says page content, so typing some information about Alex's
qualifications and enthusiasm for the course. You'll see that in this toolbar, this text
editor, it's called Atto. That's Moodle's default text editor's name. If your administrator
allows, you can use something called TinyMCE, which is a very popular text editor used
in many other sites around the internet. See, the benefit of doing this on Moodle is that
you can add links, which people can click on, you can add images. There's a microphone
and a webcam there, video camera. You can even record your voice or record your
video, introducing yourself as a teacher in the course, which you can't do if you simply upload
a Word document or a PDF. So, do consider using a page. It's better for your students as well and
particularly if they're on their smartphones. Something else that I would like to point
out towards the bottom here is whenever you add something new in Moodle 4 or if you update
something, then there is a box you can tick to notify your students and they will get alerted
either as an email or maybe on their smartphones or on the website that something is new or
something has changed. This is, to me, a great feature of Moodle that allows you to very easily
let them know when you've added something new. Okay. Now, if you think you're going to
have a lot of pages that are connected, then I would suggest you look at a book. A book
is exactly that. It's a series of connected pages. Some people like to teach in Moodle using a book
where you have different information on each page and of course, you can also embed videos or
links and images in those books. I won't show you how to make one because the process is quite
similar, but in the course where this webinar is, Introduction to Moodle, there is a book called
about this course. You should already have clicked on it. If you haven't, go and you will see it has
a table of content and each section or page has different but connected information. That's the
book, which is several connected pages together. However, although resources are very useful
and in some cases essential, many people think that to get your students really motivated and
engaged, you need to get them typing into Moodle, interacting with each other, collaborating with
each other and so on. We would look at activities. Activities are aspects content in Moodle where
students have to do something. Quite often, they're also graded. We have forums, for example,
that's where you can start discussions. We have choice. That's Moodle's quick poll.
Think how useful a quick poll would be. There is a quiz activity, and Moodle has many
different types of quiz questions. Although you need to think carefully when you create them.
We are running a webinar and we are starting a course, creating quality quiz questions in
November. If you're new to quiz and you think you might use it a lot, sign up for that
webinar, creating quality quiz questions from the front page of Academy. Actually,
as our example, I'm going to use assignment partly because it's the first one alphabetically
in the English version of Moodle, but partly because it's a good way of me showing you the
settings in common for all of these activities. If we click assignments, again, you'll see that
whatever we type in name is going to form the link that the students will click on to get to
that assignment. Assignment is where they have to submit something to you, the teacher, and you
grade it manually. If you want automatic grading, think about quiz, for instance. You can give it a
description if you want and tick that box if you want, but what is important, and this is new in
Moodle 4, is that you need to type the activity instructions. When the student clicks to begin
the assignment, they know what they are doing. I'm going to read these out to you because
it's important as part of the assignment settings. You may type directly into Moodle or
upload a word process document. In other words, you can do whatever you want. They
can submit whatever you request, any type of file. If you can read it yourself,
one or more files, links to somewhere online, or if it's an essay and just information, they
can type it into Moodle as an online assignment. You may not write more than 500 words.
If it's an online text they're typing, you can actually set a word limit. My third
sentence, you will be required to accept the agreement that it's your own work. In
other words, this is an option that you can set. Before they can submit their work, whatever
it is, they have to promise that it's their own. Those are just three of the many
assignment settings that you can see when you set one up. You can see here that all
of these are different settings and you can click to expand them to find out more.
Submission types is where you decide, do you want them to type online or do you
want them to upload a file? In feedback types, you can decide how you want to give them
feedback. Do you want to type directly over their work as if it was paper? Do you
want to record your feedback audio or video? Or would you prefer to type it offline in word and
upload it? You have all these possibilities. Okay? What I want to do, again for lack of time, is I
want to show you two settings which are common to all activities and resources that may interest
you. The first one is called restrict access. Now, restrict access means that you can hide either
this assignment or any of your other content until such a time that you decide. So, for example, our
teacher Alex could hide this end of unit essay until the end, the last day of the course,
or the week before the end of the course, a specific date. Or, and this is a very
popular way of using restrict access, you could hide it until they've completed one
or more of the other activities in the course. When I say hide, you can either hide it
completely so they don't even know it exists or you can hide it with a little teaser, say,
"This activity is available when you have done this, this, this and this." Okay? That's
activity completion. If you want to do that, you need to define what those completion
conditions are. If we look at activity completion, remember, this is also called completion tracking
in the course settings, you can for each of your activities either turn it off if you don't
need it or you can set it to be manually marked so they would have to click a button to
say, done this. Sometimes, that's useful, sometimes not because they don't actually
have to do it to press the button. If you select students can manually mark the
activity as completed, as soon as you select that, Moodle then presents you with conditions or
criteria dependent on the activity that you are doing. So, for instance, a graded activity
like an assignment or a quiz, student must receive a grade to complete this activity
or Student must submit to this activity. You decide what the criteria are.
Each activity and resource has its own personal customized settings. For example,
I'm going to hide all of the other settings and just expand the activity completion
conditions in another Moodle activity. You can see here. What might this be? Well, you
can grade it, but that's not the most important feature here because if you look, some of the
criteria are focusing on students must post discussions, students must reply to discussions.
These are the criteria for activity completion of a forum, for example. Okay? Those are
two settings common to all the activities that you might like to explore. I'm going to
stop there simply because we're short on time and I think it's a good time to start
looking at the questions in the chat, Anna. Anna: Yep. Again, we had several
of them. Azman[?] asked that, is it possible students' work in assignment to be
assessed with a rubric by more than one teacher? Mary: Yes. This is a bit more advanced than basic
Moodle, but yes, you can set up something called marking allocation and workflow where teachers
can can look at each other's work and so on. The short answer is yes, the long answer is
it's a bit more advanced than this webinar. Anna: Yep. I have actually redirected him
to the assessment exploring assignments, where this is something that
he can find there. Julia, so, how did you get to the add
an activity or resource view? Mary: Well, we turned on edit, we enabled
edit mode, top right, or turn on editing depending on your version of Moodle. Then you
will have the link in each of the sections, add an activity or resource. If you have an older
version of Moodle, it might be a little link. In the latest version, it's that
big link in the central area. Anna: Okay, someone from West College Scotland asks, is the folder resource
accessible for screen readers? Mary: I don't know, but you've made me want to go and try as soon as we finish
this webinar. Do you know, Anna? Anna: I haven't tried either. I think that
the environment is accessible, but of course, the content needs to be downloaded
and open it as a file[?]. We have a question from Malik. The question is in French.
I have managed to translate it. This is about the translation, he actually asked if it's possible
to translate in France this webinar so he can understand things better. Of course, I
found the chance to mention that we are translating the courses in Moodle Academy, but
we are inviting volunteers from the community and you are very welcome to participate in
this process. So, hopefully, at some time, we will have everything translated into several
languages, but we cannot predict till when. Mary: Yeah. This course introduction to Moodle,
I think, is already translated into French, but the webinar would need someone to translate
the transcript or even to give us a transcript for YouTube when it appears on YouTube.
Okay. [foreign words] Any other questions? Anna: Theresa is asking, can you then narrate
the[?] PowerPoint slides so in Moodle? If so, what is the best way
to put it in the course? Mary: Personally, I wouldn't simply because I
mean, you can add a narrated PowerPoint slide, you can add anything in Moodle. You would just upload
it as a file, but your students would then have to download it in order to get it working. You
can't easily embed them. There are ways, but to be honest, you can't easily embed a PowerPoint. You
can do something in Google Docs and SlideShare. I think that's one way that you could put it in
SlideShare, but that's an external site, and embed the SlideShare. I've seen that done sometimes.
Don't know if you have any other ideas, Anna. Anna: Well, what I did in the past was to
export the narrated PowerPoint into a video and upload the video into the course, but
depending how big your file is, I'm not sure that that would be the best idea either for
every case. Kathy is asking, is it possible to send students notifications in form of text
message or similar like a reminder or something? Mary: Yes. Well, you can message them from the the
messaging within your course. If you go into the course... Let me think. If you go in and set up
groups in your course, from participants' groups, you can then create a group messaging where
you can then go to the messaging in your course and you can message all of the students together
in your course if you put them into a group. Groups is something that we look at in some of our
academy courses, which I'll be pointing out later on. That kind of thing is something that's covered
in our Moodle teaching skills program. Okay- Anna: Well, I'm happy to see that Julia
found the ten[?] editing button and found how to add an activity. Eggert says that,
is there a text reader built in the Moodle? Mary: Is there a what? Sorry. Anna: Text reader. Text reader. Mary: Text reader, no, I don't think there's a
text reader built into Moodle. There is a plug-in, I think, called Read Aloud, but I don't
think there's anything standard in Moodle. You can use things from your browser,
for example, or there are other open source options that you can use to read
what is in your Moodle course, I think. Anna: He also asks, is it possible to buy
more space for files to host in Moodle? Mary: In MoodleCloud, I don't think it's possible
to buy more file hosting space in MoodleCloud. That's why you are suggested to try and- you and
your students to try and use external sites such as Google, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive,
Dropbox and so on. Depending on what your hosts are, if it's not MoodleCloud, certainly,
you should be able to negotiate with them. Anna: Yep, and I think we are ready to move on. Mary: Okay, then. Assuming we've added lots
of exciting, engaging teaching materials, we're now going to look at how to give your
learners access to the course. It's important to understand here as beginner Moodle teachers that
getting into your course is a two-step process. First, you need to get on the site and
then you need to get into the course. If you imagine this blue and orange house is your
Moodle site, learners must first have accounts on the site before they can access your course. As a
teacher, you can't get them into the site. You can only get them into the course. It's the admin
who creates the accounts or allows learners to create their own accounts. Then you, the teacher,
can decide how to allow them into your course. We're looking at two things here, and
the first is called authentication. It's useful to know these key terms for if
you have any problems and you need to contact the support, help desk. Authentication
means getting people onto your site, giving them accounts, letting them create
their own accounts. That's what the admin does. We as the teacher and Alex as our example
teacher here needs enrolment. Enrolment means getting people into your courses either
by adding them yourself or letting them sign up themselves to your courses. Enrolment
with one L if you are British or Australian, enrolment with two L's if you are American,
both are correct, neither is a spelling mistake. If we're going to look at enrolment,
we need to go into the course. Here is Alex's course, and we need to click
participants. When we click participants, we'll see a big blue button here, enroll
users, and that is where we can click to manually individually enroll people into
our course. If you click that button there in the first box, you would search for and
select people from throughout the Moodle site as long as they already have accounts to add
to your course and then you would give them a role. Now, most times as the teacher,
you will assign them the role as Student. It's possible as a teacher, you want to give
your colleague the non-editing teacher role. If you remember the classroom assistant,
a regular course teacher cannot add other editing teachers to their course. You'll need to
ask your admin for that, but most of the times, you would add them as a student. Now, this
is fine if you only have a few students, but many of you might prefer it if your
students could actually just see your course, read the description, look at that attractive
Eiffel Tower and sign up or enroll themselves. Let's cancel that. Instead, if we
click the drop-down enrolled users here and notice whoever was asking
about groups and group messaging, this is where you'd set up a group, then you could
enable group messaging. We need to click enrolment methods. That's the different ways
that people can get into the course, and you'll see grayed out, self enrolment. If
we simply go to the right where it says "edit column" and click the eye icon to open the eye,
make it visible, that will then enable or turn on the feature for students to enroll themselves
into the course. That's all you need to do. You might like, however, to explore a few options
by clicking the cog icon. So, if you click that, optionally, you can add an enrolment key that's
a password to the course. Only the people you've already told the enrolment key or password, only
they can get into the course. If you're running a course over a period of time and you only
want, say, twenty-five people or fifty people, you can limit the numbers you can enroll and
a nice touch, you can personalize the welcome message they get when they receive the email to
say they're enrolled in your course. Those are three things which you can optionally do, but as
long as you open the eye icon to make it visible, a student can then see your course on the
front page, the homepage, available courses. You see, there's a little arrow there. Click
it and you'll see, it says self enrolment student. They just need to click that
button and they are in your course. Now, that's two ways that you the teacher
can get students into your course. There are other ways more useful, particularly,
if you're going to have a lot of students, and they are in the control of the admin. So, I
can't show you those, but I will point them out so that you're aware of them. For example, your
administrator can upload a CSV file, a spreadsheet with all your students in your course. I
put them straight into the course for you. Your admin can also do something called cohorts,
which are groups of students, which he or she can put into your course for you as a unit.
These are the kinds of things that admins do. Feel free to look at our introduction to Moodle
for administrators webinar if that interests you or if you are an admin as well as a teacher,
okay? That was very short because in terms of adding teachers and students, and there's not much
that teachers can do, but I hope I've explained a few of the things. So, I'm going to quickly go
onto if there any other questions and comments, then we'll finish with the links to get help
more and just a little bit of other information. Anna: Great. We do have a couple of questions.
Alina is asking, how can we enroll a list of students like input from Excel? Alex has said[?]
the link from Moodle documentation cohorts. Mary: Okay. Those questions have already
been answered in my last slide. Your admin will upload a list of students in Excel saved as
a CSV file. All the admin can add cohorts. Okay. Anna: Julia says that, is there a max
on how many people can self enroll in a course based on your plan with Moodle? Mary: Well, if you are only allowed 200 users,
and I'm making up a figure, you can only enroll 200 users into the course, really. If you've
got a huge site that's got thousands of users, you could enroll thousands of users
into your course. It's the limit of the number of people
allowed on your Moodle site. Anna: Okay. Also, I get- comes back in a
question that he made at the beginning about the option to move the topics to the side, but I'm not sure exactly what he means. He asked
at the beginning, how can we move links and files to the side? You perceive that as the-
then the option that used to be there? Mary: Most but not the same question. Anna: Yes, you're saying that I can... I had a reply that perhaps I have perceived
differently. I thought that in a social post format, all the links of the activities
and resources are set aside into the block. Mary: That's a good format to use. Yeah. If
you just- social format is basically a big message board of lots of different forum
discussions, and then any other activities you want in your course will appear
to one side in an activities block. Anna: He says that, I cannot find the social course format to move the topics to
the side. I'm not sure exactly what's the problem. Mary: Okay, perhaps you'd like to either post
in the introduction to Moodle forum or in the teaching with Moodle forum, and I can explain
to you step-by-step what to do there, okay? Anna: Yep. Okay. I think we can move on. Mary: Okay, then. Right. Anna: Okay. Sorry. One last- two last, actually.
Hilary said that, before the last Moodle update, had the student block for comments and notes
in a block at the site, is this still possible? Mary: I'm not sure which block you
mean. Student block for comments on- Anna: The blog, blog. Mary: Blog, the blog. Okay. Yes, you should
be able to add the blog block. With Moodle 4, some blocks that are not considered useful have
been hidden from various areas in Moodle. So, it might be worth checking with your admin there. Anna: West College Scotland asks, your admin might not allow you to use the social
topics format. That's an answer [inaudible]. Mary: Okay. Okay then. I'm just going to give
you a few tips as to where you can find out more and then how you can help us to build and grow
Moodle Academy. So, you'll notice, I said several times about the question marks not only next to
each setting but also at the bottom of the page as a course teacher, do check them. If you get a
bit lost, help and documentation, which takes you to the Moodle documentation. moodle.org is the
direct link if you want to go there directly, and we also have documentation in other languages,
some better than others. It's very comprehensive in German and Spanish. It's quite good in
French as well. Other languages, less so. I do want to point out finally that if you're
new to teaching with Moodle or if you know a little bit, please explore our educator pathway.
We have a program of courses designed both for beginner teachers that's teaching basics and
for teachers who've done a little bit. On this site on Moodle Academy, Moodle Teaching Basics
program and certificate, everything you need to begin with Moodle. Then if you've been using
it for a while as I feel some of you have here, Moodle Teaching Skills program and certificate,
entirely free. You get a free badge, you can purchase a certificate by all means, but
please explore those as an educator in Moodle. Continuing with the Moodle Academy theme, please
go to our get involved. You'll see a light bulb, click get involved and suggest topics that
we can cover in future webinars and courses. If you are an experienced Moodler or you know
someone who is, co-present with us or present a webinar on Moodle Academy or even
co-creator create courses such as the ones that you'll see on Moodle Academy. For
both of those, you can get an academy badge. Then finally, we want more people coming to
our webinars and doing our courses so we can spread the word. Please tell your friends and
colleagues about Moodle Academy. Earn a badge. Also, when you become an experienced Moodler or
any experienced Moodle educators, please explore our Moodle Educator Certification. This is a very
high quality program of courses for experienced Moodlers, which is run through our certified
service providers paid for purchased. It's a very high quality certificate for experienced Moodlers.
All of those options are available to you. Anna: Okay, I'll just quickly go
through a couple of notes in the chat. Matt is asking about the future plans for
further development in Moodle future versions. I have redirected him into the roadmap and
Moodle documentation. West College Scotland says, "Thank you very much. I think this recording
will be very useful for our tutors, and we have been highlighting, promoting the Moodle Academy
to them and this might be a good in[?]." Yeah, thank you. Lots of thanks from
pretty much everyone, I would say. Mary: That's nice. Anna: Thank you all very much for
being here. It was really a pleasure. Mary: Thank you. Thank you very much. [END]