Moodle @ University of Bath

Colleagues may have noticed some minor changes to the layout of this support site in the last few days.  These changes were necessary due to the large amount of data being represented as static pages on the site, and it is hoped they will make the site more usable as a consequence.

Key changes include:

• The addition of a ‘Moodle Service Catalogue’
• Relocation of ‘Contact Information’ to the side panel on the right
• Amalgamation of ‘Training’ and ‘Support’ pages
• Amalgamation of ‘Policies’ and ‘Development Plans’ pages

As this site continues to grow, we expect that further layout changes will be necessary.  It is hoped however, that these will not be too disruptive to those users who are familiar with the old layout, and we will endeavour to highlight these changes as they occur in order to minimise any confusion.

A question, how did the Moodle service perform for you at the start of this semester? Given its availability and responsiveness could you achieve what you wanted to do?

The following survey enables the e-learning Team to gather information on Moodle performance during the start of this academic year (2010/11). Whilst there have been some minor issues relating to SAMIS integration, overall the service appears to have been fairly robust this year, however we are keen to know what the experience was like from the perspective of staff and students who were attempting to complete tasks.

The survey has only 7 questions and should only take a few minutes to complete. It will be available until the 28th November, and your input (both positive and negative) is greatly appreciated. The survey is available from:

https://www.survey.bath.ac.uk/moodle10

Whilst the survey is anonymous, respondents do have the option of including their email.  If you have a specific issue, please consider adding your contact details so that we can follow up with you.

As previously reported in this blog, we recently had an issue with old student cohorts being brought through into Moodle alongside the current cohorts.

We applied a fix on Monday and are pleased to report that (following the nightly synchronisation with SAMIS) Moodle now seems to be bringing in only the current cohorts from SAMIS.

Whilst the fix appears to have been a great success, there are a few cases where legacy enrolment data persists within courses.  In these cases, the recommendation is to remove all users from the course and allow the synchronisation to repopulate the it over night.  Only the current SAMIS cohort will be brought through into Moodle – removing in the process those users that no longer require access.

**Please note that the synchronisation does not run on Friday or Saturday nights.**

As always, we would like to thank staff for their patience whilst we dealt with this issue.  Should you have any questions about this (or any other aspect of e-learning), please contact the team via e-learning@bath.ac.uk

Students: If you are having trouble logging into computing services today 13 October 2010 please check that you have registered your University account at http://www.bath.ac.uk/registration-on-line/

At the beginning of Semester 1 there is a two week grace period where students are able to log into services before they have registered on their course, this period has now come to an end. Students were warned of the need to register but if you have not, you may find that you can no longer log into Moodle.

It has been brought to our attention that a proportion of new Moodle users were created this year with their personal email addresses as opposed to their Bath ones.

Unfortunately this was caused by an unexpected change in the way that the university manages new user accounts.  We have done what we can to minimise the number of users affected by this, and will be working with colleagues in other departments to ensure that this doesn’t happen next year.

In the meantime, staff may wish to remind students that they can update their user profile in order to ensure that Moodle uses their Bath email address instead.

Colleagues may be aware of an issue with student enrolments which has caused previous cohorts to be brought through into Moodle courses alongside the current cohorts.  As this can be a cause of confusion for both staff and students we are keen to resolve it as soon as possible.

We have been looking into the issue and plan to apply a fix to Moodle on Monday afternoon which we hope will restore the correct enrolments following the nightly synchronisation.  Whilst this fix should remove many of the unexpected enrolments, it should be noted that it is unlikely to remove graduated or left students – this will be dealt with in a few weeks by a housekeeping exercise which will remove those accounts that are no longer active.

Whilst we are not anticipating any problems with the code change, we will ensure that we are able to roll-back to the previous nights enrolments – should that happen, we will of course advise staff via this blog.

In the meantime, should you have any questions about this feel free to contact the team on e-learning@bath.ac.uk

Over the last academic year, the e-Learning team have been developing and releasing a number of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) databases. In particular, the following are currently available:

• Moodle FAQs: http://moodle.bath.ac.uk/faq
• Learning Technologies FAQs: http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/ltfaq/

The aim of these FAQ engines is to provide quality assured, just in time information around the use of key e-Learning tools. The intention was to provide this in a bite sized, relatively unstructured format so departments and schools could use the content in their own specific student support material, and customise at the local level if they deemed it appropriate.

A recent news item on the LTEO website reported a high level of use of the Moodle specific FAQs database, with nearly 9000 unique visitors and nearly 40000 page views in the period January – May 2010 inclusive. For the full article, please visit: http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/news/?p=224. The FAQs have been released under a Creative Commons licence as a set of open educational resources.

If you have any queries related to our FAQs databases, please do get in touch with the e-Learning team at e-learning@bath.ac.uk.