ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Course Facilitation Tutorial In this tutorial, you will learn best practices and techniques for course facilitation specific to the Moodle platform in the areas of: communication, maintenance, grading, and reporting. Overview | Tutorial Instructions

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Overview This tutorial was designed to introduce you to some best practices in online course facilitation. At the conclusion of this tutorial, you will be able to: Discuss facilitation techniques used in the online classroom. Identify resources, activities, and blocks. Use standard communication tools in Moodle. Overview | Tutorial Instructions

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Tutorial Instructions To use this tutorial, click on the topic you want to learn more about. Some topics have sub-menus directly beneath the main menu. Explore the tutorial in any order that you would like. To return to the main menu, click on the Home icon located in the lower left corner of the screen. For additional Help resources, click the Question icon located in the bottom right corner. Overview | Tutorial Instructions

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Where to Find Help Moodle is literally a world-wide system, and there are many places where you can find assistance to further your Moodle knowledge. Here are some recommended resources for finding more information on any Moodle-related topic: Using Moodle by Mary Cooch (video tutorials on Youtube) Moodle Manuals at moodle.org (text-based) Remember that you can always search on Moodle.org as well for help with core Moodle questions. You may want to bookmark these sites so that you have direct access to them later. Overview | Tutorial Instructions

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Facilitate Overview Before you begin facilitating a course, there are a few things you will want to do beforehand that will not only make your course run smoother but make your life easier too. In this section you will learn how to set up a practice course with a fake student account, update your profile so it is optimized for facilitation, use feedback activity to improve your course instruction, and then wrap up with a few reminders and tips on facilitation. Practice Shells & Accounts Your Profile Feedback Things to Remember

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Facilitate > Practice Shells and Accounts To practice using your facilitation skills, do the following: Create or request a practice course shell and fake student account. Be assigned as an instructor in the course shell and create a test account to be assigned the student role in this course. Log in with the student account to complete course activities and build out user data. Log in with your personal profile to practice grading, and see how auto-graded items appear. Practice Shells & Accounts | Your Profile | Feedback | Things to Remember

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Facilitate > Your Profile Get your profile set up for facilitation! Make sure that is enabled. Select the digest type you wish to receive. Decide whether you want to be auto-subscribed when you post to forums. which sends you an to all forums in which you post. Determine if you want to enable forum tracking so you are alerted to unread posts. This can be visually helpful for grading. Determine if you want HTML capabilities. Practice Shells & Accounts | Your Profile | Feedback | Things to Remember

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Facilitate > Feedback Activity Custom Built The Feedback activity allows you to custom build surveys for your courses with anonymous submissions. Anonymity typically generates truer feedback but make sure to let your participants know whether the feedback is anonymous or not. Templates Create a template from your questions to be utilized later. With a simple drop- down choice, you will be able to recreate these questions in a future instance in your course. Using the Feedback Activity Start and end your course with a Feedback activity. Even consider doing one halfway through. Gauge student competency, goals, and aspirations at each stage. Practice Shells & Accounts | Your Profile | Feedback | Things to Remember

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Facilitate > Things to Remember Make sure your presence is known in the course, particularly in the first few days. Post daily course announcements in the morning to keep participants on track and progressing through the course. Speak to those you are reaching. Sometimes it's helpful to use an imaginary student as you are writing. Establish a routine for yourself and stick with it. Don't use your peak work times for more mundane work like grading. Encourage communication from participants, but post answers to frequently asked questions in a help forum for the entire class to benefit. Give authentic, personalized feedback on every assignment you can. If you’re having fun, so will your participants. Practice Shells & Accounts | Your Profile | Feedback | Things to Remember

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Communicate Overview Communication with students in an online/virtual environment is critical. Consistent communication ensures that students feel connected and part of the online and course community. Strategically use Moodle functionality to communicate with your students through tools you will explore in this section. Messages News Forum

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Communicate > Moodle Messaging There are many advantages to using Moodle messaging. There are several blocks and areas to use for messaging users – like the Messages block or People block. Messages are private communications between individual Moodle users, similar to g-chat, Yahoo chat, or Messenger. Messages are not course specific. Teachers who have multiple courses can view messages from any of their students in any course section. And other users can as well. Moodle Messaging | The News Forum

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Communicate > The News Forum The News forum is another effective means of communication in Moodle. It’s the default forum for general news and course announcements found in every Moodle course. Users enrolled into courses are also automatically subscribed to the forum, meaning they receive copies of posts made by the instructor. Any post to the news forum mails automatically, if the Mail Now button is selected, or within 30 minutes by default. The News forum is recommended for important announcements because it also shows up in the Latest News block, as well as being archived in the forum and sent to the students’ . Moodle Messaging | The News Forum

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Maintain Overview Although you may not be building out your own course, it is important to understand how that process works. Having basic knowledge of this will allow you to maintain your course, should something need to be changed. We will have a high-level overview of course building pertaining to modules now. Resources Activities Activity Settings Blocks

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Maintain > Resources Resources are links to files, URLs, repository items, or constructed web pages that are not graded, which the instructor provides for the students. Moodle provides a variety of ways to input content into courses via Resources. Labels provide organization, structure, and direction within course topics. Books create content in a chaptered format, to download or save. Pages contain text and multimedia, linked from the course home page. URLs are links directly to other web pages, outside of the Moodle environment. Files allow students to download content. Folders group multiple downloadable files in one spot. Resources | Activities | Activity Settings | Blocks

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Maintain > Activities Forums and Advanced forums are discussion tools with many types. Quiz uses both manual and automatic grading settings and over 10 question types. Assignment allows teachers to collect work from students, review it, and provide feedback including grades. Lesson is a series of HTML pages in which a student makes a choice, sending them to a new page within the Lesson. The Glossary has entries that can be searched or browsed in different formats. Wiki is a tool for creating collaboratively built content. Activities are interactive components of the course that are typically graded upon completion. Think of activities as those which foster communication, assess or provide feedback, and which require the student to interact with content. Resources | Activities | Activity Settings | Blocks

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Maintain > Activity Settings Each activity module has different settings that control how it works for the teacher and the students. Many of the options that you will find in the settings are similar, but some are activity specific. If something in an activity isn’t working the way you think it ought to, check the settings to make sure some feature is not disabled. Resources | Activities | Activity Settings | Blocks

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Maintain > Best Practices with Blocks Don’t visually overwhelm students with too many blocks that are not vital to your course. Align blocks to the right or left of the course for a two column view. Instruct students about the purpose of the various blocks in your navigational instructions for the course. Instruct students on features available to them from the Settings block, such as their profile and grades. There are some best practices to consider when utilizing blocks. Resources | Activities | Activity Settings | Blocks

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Grade Overview As the course facilitator, you may not necessarily be building your gradebook, but you will be grading. If something isn’t working as expected, you should at least have a basic working knowledge of the gradebook. In this section, you will look at the basics of the gradebook, briefly review categories and aggregations, look at tips for grading and some general best practices for grading. Gradebook Management Grading Tips Best Practices with Gradebook

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Grade > Gradebook Management The Gradebook … Is the repository that stores and reports on all course and activity grades. Has grade category groups grade items together and has settings for aggregating those graded items. Grade items which represent each gradable course activity. The grade item stores a grade for each course participant and has settings for affecting these grades. Also has settings that affect how it is displayed to the users, as well as locking and hiding functions. Gradebook Management | Grading Tips | Best Practices

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Grade > Grading Tips To make your grading life easier, consider doing the following: Utilize automated grading features when available. Quiz and Lesson are examples of this. Don’t grade all activities. Forums and glossaries are often just as effective without grading. Conditions for grading vary slightly from activity to activity, but you will generally be making choices under the Grade category settings area. Determine points to assign for a grade, any time-based restrictions, and whether you will allow more than one attempt on certain activity types. Gradebook Management | Grading Tips | Best Practices

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Grade > Best Practices with Gradebook When grading, you want to keep several general best practices in mind. Manage student expectations for grading. Publish an expected turn-around time for most activities. Share the structure of the gradebook with the course participants through the syllabus. Create Categories in the Gradebook, and organize your activities. Make sure you understand the Aggregation method you have selected in the gradebook. Look at the gradebook from a student view to ensure all settings are to your liking. Determine how you will address empty grade categories (activities that are not yet submitted). Find your preferred grading method or methods, and stick with them. Gradebook Management | Grading Tips | Best Practices

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Report Overview Reports allow teachers to track, in detail, course, item, and user activity. Moodle reports instantaneously log user interactions straight into the database. It logs views, actions, grades, uploads, and many other interactions that are done by users. Moodle Course Reports Using Course Reports

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Report > Moodle Course Reports Course reports are one of the most used reports in Moodle. Accessing reports is quite easy: just enter the course in which you want to gather the data and use the Navigation block to find the link to reports. The reports page display four different reports: Logs Live logs Activity reports Participation reports Moodle Course Reports | Using Course Reports

ReportGradeMaintain Communicate Facilitate Report > Using Course Reports The Logs list users interaction with the system. You can see what pages the student accessed, the time and date they accessed it, the IP address they came from, and their actions. Use filters to sort information by course, participant, day, activity, and action. The Live logs show the same information but are only taken from the database records of the last hour. The Activity reports show the number of views for each activity and resource. Information is organized by topic. The Participation reports display which students have participated in a particular activity. You can use filters to look back on days, or sort by role or action. Once the report is generated, you can select a user and send them a message. Moodle Course Reports | Using Course Reports