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. Since these settings are specific to each course, this menu will only be visible once you have entered a specific course.

Note: You may see the term 'Online Assessment' when navigating courses. This is the course category. At uniPHARM, we really only need one course category, so for the most part course category is not important. To make another analogy to the traditional school setup, 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, click and enter the resource first to see its administration options in the administration pane.

Important note: You cannot edit quizzes that have already been attempted. This is logical as any edits would practically invalidate all previous attempts. It is possible to delete and clear all attempts however, so that edits can be done. This is an important step during development and testing, as you will likely want to attempt tests to completion as way to dry-run the user experience. See Clearing attempts.

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.