Introduction to Moodle
Transcript
Hi. This short video will show you around the Moodle environment we use for online courses.
When you’ve arrived at the course site, the first thing to do is log in, and then go into your course. For this example, I’m going into the Academic Writing course.
Once you’re into the course, you’ll see discussion topics that are active throughout the course: the announcements and cafe spaces, and the problems with technology board, where you can ask for help. You can also see all the discussion boards on one page if you prefer to browse them that way.
The rest of the page is divided into sections, usually one for general course information, one with information about webinars, and one for each topic. You can use these buttons to expand and collapse the topics, which can be useful to orient yourself in the materials.
For now, I’m going to go into the week 0: induction activity, so I just need to expand that one.
You’ll see a summary of the week’s topic, and perhaps a video from the course tutors welcoming you to the topic.
Each topic also has several other different activities, some might use things like Google docs, or involve working in small groups, and some or all of them might offer you a box to tick, to visually indicate that you’ve completed that activity.
Many of the activities use discussion boards. 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 subscribed columns. Tracking means the system keeps track of which messages you’ve read, so it can tell you how many new messages there are since you last logged on, 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 email 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 course page, and on the right hand side, there are blocks which allow you to search the forums, see the list of participants, and track recent activity: recent forum posts will appear here when the course starts. If the course uses Twitter, there will also be a Twitter feed here, showing all recent tweets with the course hashtag. If you find these blocks getting in the way, or you’re working on a small screen, you can ‘dock’ them, like this. They now appear on the far left, and if you hover over the block name, it will pop out, and you can then put it back in the sidebar by clicking on the little arrow icon.
Over on the left, there’s the navigation menu, which you can use to jump between sections and activities.
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 ‘problems with technology’ discussion board, and someone will help you.
