Introduction to Moodle: video and transcript
Hi. This short video will show you around the Moodle environment we’re using for the Teaching Online Open Course.
When you’ve arrived at the course site, the first thing to do is log in. If you prefer, you can visit the site as a guest, but you won’t be able to contribute to the discussion boards, so do create an account and log in so you can join in the conversations.
Once you’re into the course, you’ll see the tabs across the top of the screen for each topic. The full contents of each tab will only appear a week in advance of that topic, so for this video we’ll look at the ‘inducting’ tab, because that’s where the course starts.
These boxes down the side of the screen appear in all the tabs, and you can use them to find the discussion topics that are active throughout the course, like the news and cafe spaces, you can see all the discussion boards on one page if you prefer to browse them that way, search the forums, see the list of participants, and look at recent activity. This box will show recent forum posts, and you can see things that people have posted to Twitter with the course hashtag, TOOC14.
Over on the left, there’s the navigation menu, which you can use to jump between sections and activities.
In the main page content for each week, you’ll find the week’s title and dates, and then a short text description of the week, and one or more videos introducing the week’s content. Three weeks have webinars, and you can find information about that here, including a link to a page which tells you more about the system we’re using for our webinars.
Next on the page we have the activities for the week. Each week the main activity displays a badge, and there’s a tick box you can use to tell us you’ve completed the activity, so we can award you the badge to recognise this. Badges act like mini-certificates, and they can be a useful way to demonstrate your involvement with the course, perhaps as part of your training record.
Each week also has several other different activities, some use things like Google docs, or involve working in small groups, and many of the activities use discussion boards, and Moodle offers various ways for you to manage that. If you go the ‘all discussion forums’ page, you can change your ‘track’ and ‘subscription’ settings for each discussion board, by clicking in the track and subscription columns. Tracking means the system keeps track of which messages you’ve read, so it can highlight new messages for you, and subscription means that you’ll receive an email when someone comments in a thread. Those email notifications can quickly become overwhelming, but if you go to your profile settings at the bottom of the left hand menu, Moodle offers you a daily digest email, where it sends you one message each day with all of your subscriptions in the same message, and it can do this either with the full text, or with just the subject line.
Back to the main page for week 1, and the last part of each week’s content is a link to a page of readings around the week’s topic, but we’ll always mark one as the key reading, which has a star next to it. So if you only read one thing this week, read the one with the star.
If you’re taking the module for credit, you’ll probably want to read more of the suggested articles, and refer to them when writing your assignment. All the information you need about the assessment is under the tab marked P70408 information — that’s the Oxford Brookes module code for the assessed part of this course. There’s a module guide, assessment brief, and information about how to get feedback on your draft essay, and how to submit the final version.
Finally, if you have any problems with the course site, something isn’t working, or the technology is misbehaving in some way, post in the ‘technical questions’ discussion board, and someone will help you.
