Information Systems:Moodle Instructor's Guide

Overview

The term instructors as discussed throughout this guide here refers to managers.

When managing Moodle, it is important to first understand the layout of the Administration menu pane on the left side of the page. This menu pane is generally broken down into two parts: section-level administration (course, quiz, lesson etc.) and site-level administration (Site administration). This is important to keep in mind especially when navigating the menus, as the menu options change depending on which page you're currently on within the site, and because links nested in these sections often share similar names (i.e Users, Grades etc.), which can be confusing. The easiest way to understand why Moodle is set up this way is if you consider that for any given school, there are rules/settings/policies that apply at the school level and at the classroom/course/student-level.

Here is the general pattern of how administration settings are nested in Moodle:

Site administration --> Course administration --> Resource administration (Quiz administration/Lesson administration)

Site administration

Instructors will be less concerned with the settings in Site administration, but one important setting to note here is the Users section. Just as students must be registered at a school before they can be enrolled in a course, users will have to be set up at the site-level before they can be enrolled in a GMP course and assigned GMP tests. User management is currently the responsibility of the I.T. department. Thus, all documentation related to user management and other site administration settings are instead located in the Moodle Administrator's Guide. Please consult the I.T. department with any questions related to initial user setup and site administration. This policy is open to change in the future depending on the ability and willingness of other departments to assume greater administrative responsibilities in Moodle.

Course administration

Course administration is where lessons, test questions, and user enrollment can be added, changed, or removed. The Course administration settings are specific to each course, and as such, the menu will only be visible once you have entered a specific course. For example, after initially logging in to the home page, you will not yet be in any one course and thus will have to click into one of the available courses before the Course administration menu appears on the left side of the screen.

Note: You may see the term 'Online Assessment' when navigating courses. This is the course category. At uniPHARM, we really only have the one course category, so this is not important. To make another analogy to the traditional school, a course category would be something like 'Biology', and the courses within would be 'Biology 101', 'Biology 201', etc. All our courses will be categorized under 'Online Assessment'.

Managing Quizzes

As an instructor, a primary interest will be to edit quiz content. As always, enter the resource to see its administration options in the administration pane.

Managing Lessons

The format and setup of the GMP lessons in Moodle is somewhat peculiar. Instead of using Moodle tools to create lesson pages, each lesson is basically an embedded Powerpoint-style slide presentation hosted by Google Slides. Just as a YouTube video can be embedded on a website, such is the way the slide presentations are embedded on an otherwise empty Moodle lesson page.