Moodle @ University of Bath

The e-Learning team, having been contacted by the BUCS Out of Hours service, are aware that some students and staff are experiencing problems in trying to access Moodle courses related to taught units and programmes. We are currently investigating the issue and will update this blog as and when we have an update.

If you would like to be notified when service is fully restored, please contact the e-Learning team at: e-learning@bath.ac.uk.

Staff/Teachers

Student cohorts can be manually re-synchronised with your Moodle course. There is a screencast (with accompanying audio) showing you how to do this at http://go.bath.ac.uk/nqop – click on the Play button to watch the video.

Please note that you will need to do this for each cohort that is currently “missing”.

Over the summer months, and as part of a commitment to supporting the re-drafting of the Code of Practice, QA53 Examination & Assessment Offences, the e-Learning team integrated Moodle with Turnitin, the plagiarism detection service. This was reported upon in an earlier blog post.

More recently, Nitin Parmar and Geraldine Jones from the team have delivered a number of presentations on both online submission of work using the Moodle Assignment activity and the Moodle-Turnitin integration to several departments around the university campus, with over 70 colleagues attending in total.

The presentation is now available as a 25 minute Panopto recording and can be viewed at your convenience. It can be found at http://drgn.in/q0mvXz.

As well as this resource, Frequently Asked Questions on both the Moodle Assignment activity and Moodle-Turnitin integration have been developed to support users on an ongoing basis. These can be found at http://drgn.in/q6llkg.

Both Nitin and Geradline would still be delighted to come to your Department to discuss these topics further. Should this be of interest, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with them at e-learning@bath.ac.uk.

Please find following some guidance on your enrolment to units on Moodle. Your enrolment on units in Moodle are automatically linked to your current enrolments in SAMIS.

If you are not able to see a Moodle unit you think you should have access to this semester:

• Please check with your Faculty/School administrator that your SAMIS enrolments are correct for this semester.
• Ask a unit tutor/convenor whether that unit on Moodle has been made available to students.

If you are still enrolled on Moodle units from last semester:

• Please check that your SAMIS enrolments are correct for this semester
• If your SAMIS record is up-to-date and the unit still shows in Moodle, this may be because you were manually added to the unit instead. Please contact the unit tutor/convenor for that unit, who should be able to arrange for you to be unenrolled.

If you have previously self-enrolled on a Moodle unit which you no longer wish to have access to, you might be able to unenrol yourself. You can do this by following these steps:

• Go to the unit on Moodle
• Click on your name (top right) to open your Moodle profile or go to the Administration block
• Click on Unenrol me from ‘coursename’
• If you find that you do not have the option to unenrol yourself at this point, you will need to contact a unit tutor/convenor for that unit, who will be able to unenrol you.

Those with ‘teacher’ access to Moodle may be pleased to hear that the e-Learning Team has made a small improvement to the way in which they can search for users when adding them manually (via the ‘Assign Roles’ link).

In the past, Moodle teachers have been able to search for users by name or by email address, but not by BUCS user name.  Following a number of requests from academic and administrative staff, this has now been modified and users can now be found either through their name or their BUCS ID.

It is hoped that this small change will make life easier for staff responsible for administering Moodle courses, however anyone with questions may wish to contact the e-Learning Team who will be happy to assist.

It has recently come to our attention that users attempting to access Moodle (off campus) using either Chrome or Opera, may be having difficulty in accessing the system.

Early investigations suggest that the issue is related to single sign on, and has therefore been reported to BUCS who manage the single sign on service.  In the meantime, users who are presented with the following pop up window should be able to cancel out of it and log in as normal using the standard log in screen.

Screen shot of pop up window

Alternatively, both Firefox and Internet Explorer appear to be working correctly, so users may wish to switch browsers until this issue has been resolved.

Staff may be aware that all SAMIS courses have an associated ‘period slot code’, and that this defines the start and end date of courses in Moodle.  This information is then used by Moodle to identify when students should be added to / removed from the relevant Moodle courses.

The SAMIS team have very helpfully made the list of period slot codes (and their associated dates) available online, and it is hoped that this will help to provide users with some clarity regarding their Moodle enrolments – that is, when they can expect students to be added to (or removed from) a specific Moodle course.

Please note that the e-Learning Team has extended each of the start/end dates (with the exception of Semester 2) by 3 weeks, in order to provide an additional ‘buffer’ to enrolments and unenrolments.  Moodle teachers should also be aware that users who have been added manually to a Moodle courses will not be removed automatically and that these dates do not apply in these cases.

Should you have any questions about the enrolment or removal of students on Moodle courses, please contact the e-learning team via e-learning@bath.ac.uk

Colleagues may be aware that from 1st October 2011 (as part of the University’s Academic Integrity Initiative), ALL students will have to undertake training and a test to give them a baseline understanding of academic integrity and plagiarism.

In order to streamline the work-flow processes for individual Departments, the e-Learning team have been working closely with a number of other support teams to identify ways of updating SAMIS records automatically as students successfully pass the test.

This work was scheduled into the Moodle downtime, and is now on the live system in readiness for the next academic year.  Any questions about the initiative should be directed to the Student Learning Experience and Quality team.