Policies

The following are suggestions for effective practice and link to existing policies (where appropriate).

Please note that a number of these policies are regularly discussed and consulted on to ensure that are inline with needs and requirements.

Scheduled Maintenance

The e-Learning Team have agreed with BUCS scheduled maintenance periodas on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 8.00am and 9.00am.

The Moodle service may not be available during this time.

Access to samples (all work) by External Examiners

Whilst it is true that Moodle is only available to users with BUCS accounts, anyone with a legitimate reason to access Moodle (and other tools such as the LMF and Confluence) is eligible for a ‘BUCS Lite’ account. More information is available from: http://www.bath.ac.uk/bucs/tools/waaa/.

Should external examiners require access, the School should contact BUCS with the examiners name, email address and date of birth. Upon receipt of this information, BUCS will assign a user name to them and then you can enrol them onto the relevant Moodle courses in order to give them access to the course content.

Acceptable Use Policy

Moodle is a University of Bath service. Therefore, all people who use it must abide the the University of Bath’s Acceptable Use Policy (http://www.bath.ac.uk/bucs/aboutbucs/policies/acceptableusepolicy/)

Archive (course) Policy

Due to the many and varied period slot codes to which university units adhere, there is no single time in the academic calendar that would ensure central archiving of Moodle courses (for audit purposes) captured the correct data in all cases.

However starting in 2010, a snapshot of Moodle will be taken (on or around 31 July each year).  Locked in time, the snapshot will be available to staff at a separate web address  (http://moodle-archive.bath.ac.uk) for 6 academic years – in line with the university Records Retention Schedule.

Whilst other forms of backup are also taken by BUCS, these are intended for disaster recovery purposes only and may not cover all eventualities.  As this is the case, it is recommended that you backup individual Moodle courses yourself at key times – for example, student submissions uploaded to Moodle in September will not be centrally backed up until the following July.

Further details on how to do this are available in the Moodle FAQs at:  http://go.bath.ac.uk/mbom, and further support and advice can be obtained from the e-Learning Team (e-learning@bath.ac.uk).

Automated student enrolment on Moodle Courses through SAMIS

Moodle uses SAMIS for automatically enrolling the student on the appropriate Moodle courses. Therefore, if you are encountering the situation where students are not appearing on the appropriate course then you are advised to ensure that the student has been correctly enrolled on the Unit in SAMIS. If they have, and the student still does not appear on the right Moodle course then please contact e-learning@bath.ac.uk

The longer term plan is to maintain the policy of using SAMIS as the primary method of enrolling students on Moodle Courses. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the Department / School to ensure that the SAMIS data is accurate. It is not the responsibility of the Moodle Team to to find short term workarounds.

BUCS maintained backups

Maximum data retention using the procedures currently operated for BUCS central file and email backup is 3 months. It should be noted however, that this does not necessarily mean that staff will be able to recover backups of specific Moodle courses from any given day in the last 3 months. BUCS keep daily backups of Moodle for 7 days, weekly backups for a maximum of 1 month, and monthly backups for 3 months.

However, whilst individual Moodle course can be restored from these BUCS-initiated backups, it is a time-consuming and sometimes difficult task. Staff are often advised that backup restorations can take between 3 and 7 working days, depending on how far back they want the backup from.

Enrolling Staff on Moodle Courses

The overarching principle for our enrollment of staff on Moodle is that control sits with the individual members of staff who are indentified as teaching the unit through SAMIS. They own the courses and have control over what other members of staff can access their Moodle course. Therefore, if you are a member of staff and you need access to a Moodle course then please contact the person who runs the unit who will be able to enrol you.

High Stake Online Assessment using the Moodle Quiz activity

You are advised not to use the Moodle Quiz activity for summative assessment. This is due to a number of reasons. In particular, Moodle is not a bespoke e-assessment tool. The application has not been optimised for this sort of activity and there are a number of known issues with both the Quiz activity and the Gradebook functionality. A related issue is that current method by which we backup Moodle, implies it is very time consuming to retrieve any information, for example, if you deleted information from the Gradebook.

Additionally, it would be easy for students to switch windows and open up a new tab in their web browser or sending messages to each other using the Moodle messaging facility. The chances of this type of thing happening could be reduced by invigilation but there is absolutely no guarantee. Consequently, should you wish use the Moodle Quiz activity for summative assessment, you would do so at your own risk.

Moodle Roles

Moodle allows many different system and category roles. These will allow people to access courses without needing to be enrolled. At the University of Bath, we take the view that ownership of the course is with the individual academic who runs the course and is identified through SAMIS. To maintain this position we do not allow people to have a category or system wide role unless they are involved within the e-learning Team.

We are in the process of contacting individuals who currently have a category or system wide role to migrate them off. There are (will be) alternatives that enable the same results but place ownership of the decision with the academic who is associated with the day to day running of the Moodle course. These alternatives include using SOOT for enrollment with the non-teacher course role.

Currently, the exceptions to the above include giving people access to Moodle for external audit purposes, and those who need access for a short period to complete School or Department wide Moodle archives.

Email address policy (University of Bath)

Moodle by default uses the University of Bath email address. If people wish to use another email address then they are recommended to set up email forwarding through the BUCS web page (http://www.bath.ac.uk/bucs/email/) as opposed to changing the email address in their profile.

For more information on the University of Bath Email Policy, see http://www.bath.ac.uk/bucs/aboutbucs/policies/bathemailpolicy/

Service Level Agreement for email questions

The e-Learning team have a policy of responding to all queries sent to the e-learning@bath.ac.uk email address within two working days. We can not guarantee a resolution to your question within this time, however, we will have started the resolution process and inform you of our progress.

If you have not received an email response after two working days then please email again and cc: in Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou, Head of e-Learning, (k.anagnostopoulou@bath.ac.uk).

University of Bath’s Applicants Database

The Applicants Database is designed to allow applicants see their offer(s) accept them and communicate with Admissions. The database will allocate them a University username and password via SAMIS. Once in SAMIS, the applicants can potentially be granted access to Moodle. In the initial period (Semester 1, 2010/11), we will not enable this functionality. This is due to the fact that development work will be required to ensure that these additional users will not have an impact on the service. We hope to be in a position to re-visit this at a later date. If you have any questions related to this, or would like to develop material for potential applicants on Moodle, please contact us at e-learning@bath.ac.uk

Moodle Customisation Protocol

Moodle is the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in use at the University of Bath.  It is an open source environment that can be customised in many ways in order to change the way that it functions or the tools that it offers.  As it applies to this protocol, a ‘customisation’ is defined as any change to the basic (out of the box) build of Moodle.  This may be through the application of a plug-in, a filter or some other modification to core code.

Only staff may request changes to Moodle at this time [further details are available here...]