 Hello everyone and welcome to our week four tutorial. We've got a variety of things to cover this week. In a minute I'm going to pass over to Helen who will give you the latest on the statistics from the last week. And then for about 15 minutes I'm going to do a tutorial on advanced moodling and how you can take your moodle up to the next step. Then we're going to go behind the scenes in the workshop activity and then again as last week together we'll look at some practice courses and answer as many of your questions as we can. So let's get started. I'm going to pass the camera over to Helen to talk about this week in the teaching with moodle course. There you go. Thanks Mary. Great that you can join us for another week. Okay let me find a special screen now to share with you. Inside moodle we have, let me find it, okay a special overview statistics report showing we've got here the first screen users logging in. We can see that on the 1st of September logged in users 1,734 and then each week it peaks again on the Sunday. Maybe I'll just increase the size a little bit there. Just refresh the page. Then down we've got the number of countries that you say you're all from. 189 different countries. What's there? Including page is just refreshing. Jamaica, 20 people from Jamaica. Welcome to you from Taiwan at 11 and all the way down 189 countries right down to the Virgin Islands. We also have a report of user languages. These are the languages you selected in your profile. 52 different languages on the site. Obviously English is the most prominent but lots of other languages there including some using the pirate language pack, 8 people. It was a talk like a pirate day earlier this week and then the number of courses, total number of courses on the site is 2462 which means we've got 2461 practice courses. I'm still getting inquiries from people wanting a practice course. It's not too late to request one. Just look out for that button on the course page and our last overview statistics report is the number of courses per size. What this is this shows we have over a thousand courses with up to four resources or activities in them. 379 courses with between five and nine activities and so on. So obviously lots of courses with only a few things in but we have got quite a few courses. There we go 18 courses with up to 24 activities in them. That's it for my statistics roundup. Back to you Mary. Okay thank you. I'm going to share my screen now and talk to you a little bit about what we're doing this week and advanced moodling. So if you bear with me while I share my screen okay and I'm just waiting for a moment to make sure that it comes up on the video. If Helen can just give me a quick word to say that you can see it. Yes. Okay so the title for this week is week four taking it further and over the next 15 minutes I'm going to try to answer three questions. As usual what do you might do in week four? What are the tasks for this week? What is advanced moodling? In other words what are the features that you might like to explore once you've gone beyond the basics and how can you do that? How can you learn more Moodle? Where can you go to increase your Moodle skills? So if we begin with question one this week in week four we'd like you first of all to assess the entries that you've been given or that you will be given in the workshop activity from week three and you will have hopefully submitted an entry now is the time for you to assess five other people's entries to get a feel for the peer assessment tool. Then if you want to there are instructions in week four to show you how to make a copy which we call a backup of your course so that you can download it and take it away with you and if you want to upload it which we call restore into your own Moodle site. And then finally looking at those check boxes over on the right that I've highlighted in yellow there making sure that all of the activities have been completed if you want to get the badge for completing the course. So those second two if I move on to my next slide here's a screenshot from week four and there is what we call a lesson which is an advanced module I'll talk about shortly to show you how to save your practice course and that's something to do this week. If you look over on the right there are those check boxes which are against every activity for some of them you'll need to click them to say manually to state that you've completed them for others the checks or the ticks will appear automatically once you've fulfilled certain criteria and so make sure all those ticks or checkmarks are there if you want to have a chance of getting the complete a badge. This activity completion actually is one example of advanced Moodling which I'm going to talk about now it's obviously a very very broad item because there are so many different features and elements of Moodle that go beyond the basics that we only had time to do in these three weeks. So I thought I would choose my five favorites and these are they and I'm just going to outline each one very briefly I'm not going to explain how to set them up because each one really requires its own tutorial to go through it but I'm hoping that you might be interested enough to want to explore them further and perhaps with some extra training with the Moodle partner as I said to improve your workshop, lesson, activity completion, badges and something known as conditional activities. If we start with the workshop and I move on to the next slide you may have seen my home country which is a peer assessment activity that is undergoing at the moment. You can also as a teacher use it to have your students to self assess because you the teacher with this workshop activity you can decide the assessment criteria against which your students can either assess themselves or assess their peers and you can either if you have a very large class ask Moodle to allocate automatically who is going to assess whose work or if it's a small class or you know them well then you the teacher can manually decide who is going to assess whose work and you get a grade for submitting and also a grade for how you assess others. I'm not going to talk more about that because Helen will take us inside the workshop later but for each of these advanced features I'm giving you a documentation link so docs.moodle.org slash n slash workshop will give you more about the workshop. The second advanced activity is a lesson and as I said this week instead of making a book with the tutorials I've made a lesson and lesson is like a book in that it gives you a series of web pages you can go forwards and backwards in them but it also allows you to include different types of questions and to grade your student. The main feature of the lesson is this idea of branching which is why I have an extract from the London Underground train station what we call the Tube in London so just as on the London Underground you could start at one station one page and then you could move and choose in which line or which direction you were going to go so you can do with a lesson and so that means if we move on to the next slide that lessons are very good for for example role plays or simulations what I call decision-making exercises where you go on a different path according to the choice you make so it reminded me of a lesson when I was calling to report a problem with my internet a while ago and you would get a message if you want to report a fault press one if you want to discuss your bill press two and then when you press that you might get some more options and eventually if you're lucky you might get to speak to a human being and this is taking you along a different path according to the decisions or the choices you make so lesson is very useful for independent or self-paced learning where you want your students to learn a new task for instance or a new piece of software or something new at their own level some people like in a lesson to the choose your own adventure books which you might have read as a child or read to your children where for example if you think the knight in shining armor should rescue the princess in the castle you go to page 80 and you have a completely different story from if you think the knight should go to the forest and kill the dragon and you go to page 33 and you carry on from there so docs.moodle.org slash n slash a lesson gives you some information as to a lesson but again this is more advanced which is why we haven't suggested that you try it at the basic level my third advanced feature is something that you've experienced throughout the last three weeks and that is the check boxes which are activity completion this needs to be enabled by your site administrator first and then within your course you go to course administration edit settings and make sure that completion tracking is set to yes you can then decide for each activity if you want it manually so your students have to check a box manually to state that they've completed it if you trust them otherwise for each activity you can set it to be completed automatically so that check mark or tick changes dependent on the criteria that you choose the conditions it might be that the student simply has to view it that means click on it we can never guarantee that they will actually have read it or perhaps they might need to get a grade or if it's a forum they might have to post or a choice they might have to make a choice the conditions or criteria depend on what the activity actually is so docs.moodle.org slash n slash activity completion and if you have this enabled and you use it it can also help you with my fourth advanced feature which is badges there are site badges which your administrator can award and as a teacher in a course you can award course badges which you can get to from administration course administration and then clicking add a new badge you need a good quality image which you have permission to use for your badge so public domain or even better when you've created yourself or even better than that perhaps one that your students have created and as a teacher you can either award the badge manually to whom you want or you can use this together with activity completion to have badges awarded automatically once your students have completed one or more activities and now the link is docs.moodle.org slash n slash badges but here is an example on the next slide which is the learn moodle participant badge and you see that the condition was if you completed any one of the forums on the course then you would automatically get the badge and 3037 people so far have done that and been awarded the badge my final advanced feature is something called conditional activities and this is a way that a teacher can restrict access or view of activities in their course according to conditions or criteria they set that message that you see there is the message that i saw during the last two weeks of august when people were registering for the course and discussing it anticipating it in the forums because we had actually made everything in the course in all the sections but we had set conditional activities so that it was hidden until the launch day and time and so again this is something that the administrator has to enable first and then you as a teacher in each activity or resource you can choose the criteria you want to make your activity visible so number one here for example as we did you could set a date on it it becomes visible after a date or it could be that they have to have a grade in a previous activity for it to become visible or even a certain user field and you can also use activity completion and so on my next slide you might have it such that in order to be able to see and to access a particular activity they have to have completed a previous activity and you see where it says activity completion and there is a drop-down which i've highlighted in yellow so you then choose from the list of activities with activity completion the one that you want so in this case if your student has done that final assessment then it will open up and reveal the next activity and for display you can decide whether as we did you want those activities to be completely hidden and the students have no idea that they're there or to have a teasing message saying you can't access this until you have done such and such and so that's docs.moodle.org slash n slash conditional activities and that is the fifth of the five examples of advanced features that i wanted to introduce you to and if you're interested in these then i'd like to move on to the final question which is how can i learn more Moodle and the best way if we move on to the next slide over on the right there you may have seen in the teaching with Moodle course a block supported by certified Moodle partners and here you see links to partners in your language or region who can offer not only extra training but also hosting so if your organization is starting with Moodle they can host it and support it if you would like a custom theme ours has been very popular if you would like a theme made for your organization they can make you want if you need a feature that you haven't found in a standard Moodle they can also develop a feature for you and if you look in the week full section i've highlighted in yellow here learn Moodle the next steps go and take a look at that because that gives you more information about what Moodle partners can do for you to help you with Moodle we've been looking at learning Moodle and so if i focus on the training side what Moodle partners can offer is they can offer basic training similar to this or intermediate or advanced so they can tailor it to the level that you and your colleagues are at they can also come to your organization and give you face to face training or they can offer you online training like webinars where you can ask questions and so on and if you're if you've done more Moodle if you're more experienced then take a look at certificates.moodle.com and the Moodle course creator certificate this is run by Moodle partners and it gives you an accreditation to certify that you have a certain level of skills in creating and managing a Moodle course and i did it in 2008 and i was so proud of myself that here is a picture of me holding my certificate in our garden there along with other people who've put it on the the Moodle site and i i thought i knew quite a lot about Moodle but there was a lot more that i learned so i can personally recommend it for people who have done more than just the basics of Moodle and it's certainly something to aim for once you get more comfortable with Moodle. So that's one way a very good way via the Moodle partners that you can take your Moodling further and so we've taken a look at the week four tasks i've given you five suggested five examples of advanced Moodle features and some ideas for how you can learn more Moodle at the end of this week when our course is finished so i'm going to stop sharing my screen now hello again and i'm going to pass the camera to Hella who's going to take us back into the workshop that first advanced feature and go behind the scenes there hello thanks mary okay let me just share my screen and we go behind the scenes into the workshop so can we see that screen mary is that all right perfect yes absolutely perfect thank you okay so this is how it looks as a teacher in the course we can see lots of nice green ticks showing that we've done all these things in the setup phase and in the submission phase got a red cross there because well i didn't submit my work because i'm not a student and there's also a cross there that allocates submissions i don't know if you can see it's quite faint but it says underneath the expected 9,080 it's a number of participants in the course up to now we've got submitted 805 and then underneath that it says to allocate two that's because we've allowed late submissions for this workshop there was a submissions deadline and anyone who wants to submit work after the deadline is still allowed to do so they just can't edit their work so if you've not yet submitted and you want to then go ahead but remember when you submit that's it there's no editing allowed so every day David our workshop developer and expert he really allocates these submissions for people who submitted late and at the moment there's just two awaiting allocation okay what else do we have scrolling down now here we can see those all the people that have submitted their work and this first guy and sorry i don't know how to pronounce your name we can see that his submission he's received grades the ones in blue he's received a 53 and 80 and 80 and he's been great and gone and assessed all the submissions he's been given so he's given full marks to all of them we can see after each grade is in brackets a dash what that means is with the workshop every participant gets two grades they get a grade for submission and they get a grade for their assessment though the grade for the assessment is what's going to come in the brackets here where the dash is and that won't be calculated until let's just go up until we go to the grading evaluation phase so you won't get your grade for the workshop until we move into this grading evaluation phase we haven't decided quite decided yet when to do that but we'll definitely do it sometime this week and we may switch back to the assessment phase for any late-comers we'll just see that one thing i realized i forgot to mention the allocate submissions let's have a look at that at how that looks i just opened it in a different tab here when you allocate your submissions there's three ways of doing it one way is manual allocation where you can choose who allocates who who sorry who reviews who but obviously in our course that's just not feasible with 9 000 participants so we use random allocation another method is scheduled allocation this works if you set your workshop to automatically move on to a different phase as i said we're using random allocation so we just set how many reviews we want per submission or per reviewer and then click the save changes nice and easy hopefully okay anything you'd like to add mary i think you've covered it very comprehensively actually it's a very difficult complex tool for beginners but it's something that's definitely well worth persevering with i think so hopefully you will have encouraged some people to try it thanks mary okay let's move on then to having a look at some practice courses we've got a few practice courses lined up but remember if you'd like us to look at your practice course then just let us know then either the name or the the address of the course you can post it in the the chat in the course you can post it on twitter if you use the learn moodle hashtag or you can also post it on your google plus page we're trying this new experimental feature of google plus questions and answers for our hangout on air so but anyway let's first of all look at a course uh i'm just trying to click on it in okay toolbox maybe mary you need to do it this is a course from Anne Morgan via twitter and Anne's course is the moodle gradebook basics i'd certainly like to take this course myself to learn more about the gradebook it looks a very interesting course and there's lots to learn mary do you want to say anything about it i i do like the way that she's made it clear what each of the different sections are and i like her use of books um you know i'm a fan of books myself putting things out clearly now Anne is a very experienced moodler and so she's used some different ways of navigating i think she's used one section per page when you access it first you see all the sections and then when you click on one section you just go from one to another to another um as i think Helen is going to show us here i love the picture of Anne with some information about her in the block and i think that's a nice friendly thing that you can use in a course uh to personalize it um also i'm wondering though there are lots and lots of really good useful information there i just wonder if it might be a little busy uh in terms of the number of blocks i don't know what do you think Helen i'd certainly like a copy of it i think that the comments block uh is probably put in uh just for the benefit of uh learn moodle participants to give feedback um um and i think is asking about the the uh the quick links here um which where with my screen uh reduced in size a little bit unfortunately makes a scroll bar which is a bit less than ideal so if i was asked do we want quick links i'd probably say no for that that reason thinking about uh smaller screen sizes um what else um uh i can see Anne has enabled uh activity completion which is great and uh here's here's where Anne's using uh uh uh uh an add-on activity big blue button web conference thing that's great as Mary mentioned uh this course is is um one section per page so we've got the first section here um rubric scales and outcomes oh my and then we can move on to the second section there by clicking that link there that's great for if you've got uh a lot of content in your course you see for each section there's quite a lot um as Mary said we have got quite a lot of blocks um which means they scroll down and down the page so maybe um to to reduce the number of blocks would be would be my suggestion like perhaps we don't need this block showing all the different activities used but possibly Anne included that um just to show uh learn little participants all the different activities okay shall we um have a look at another course okay um i think we have some in different languages don't we actually um yep are you clicking on these in uh google plus Mary because i'm not not sure how this new feature works anyway let's have a look at this course here from Martina um this course is in German so um hopefully Mary can help us out with it uh again uh Martina has has got a really nice block here on the right introducing herself um and i really like um the use of labels in the course showing the different sections i think that's that's really nicely done but quite a few uh database activities there and the glossary and i see on the right the recent activity block uh which is can be very helpful for uh participants seeing uh which activities and resources were last updated or recent forum posts or other activity here we've got a new forum post and i'd always recommend if you do include this block to for it to be the last one in a column as as Martina has put the last one in this column because then if it gets really long it doesn't matter you're not expecting students to just scroll forever um if it gets too long okay Mary would you like to say anything about the course um well mentioning the thing about the creative commons license that Martina has added underneath her profile um her picture there in that block um there was a discussion going on amongst experienced moodlers that uh people who have created very very useful courses it might be nice if they made them creative commons and if they could upload them from their own moodles to Moodle.net which is a place where you can find and from your own Moodle if your administrator's allowed it you can upload a course that you think might be useful to other people and i think uh together with Martina we're going to add this one to Moodle.net and experienced moodlers might like to consider doing that with theirs too hey Mary do you know if we've we've enabled that on the learn Moodle side we haven't but we could we haven't great okay well hopefully we will very soon and yes we have look we've got it here published all right okay yeah i think we have uh but we'll just double check that uh but if you'd like to investigate it then you try clicking this publish link and see how far you get okay okay let's look at another course um this course here is from someone else on twitter um uh i don't know their name um and i can't see the question now questions are coming in thick and fast by the way so we've got quite a lot to answer later which is great um uh linguas uh link um linguas via twitter okay um this is a great course it's uh a language i don't know very well galego i think you you call it um uh and um it's got a nice block here with it with a little welcome message that's very attractive i must say that you make me welcome because you want to go there i like the i like the clear layout of the presentations i think they are writing grammar uh reading um spoken works i'm just guessing from the languages but i like that because it makes it very clear what the student is going to when they go to each section it might possibly be nice to have um little graphics next to each one because although it's very clearly set out i think visually it could do with a few more images of some small images perhaps um another thing i like about it is uh it's got this block here which uh um to translate as i know the blocks quite well is an online users block showing who's active in the last five minutes and i know a lot of course participants really like to see who else is is active and and you can click there if you want to uh send one of your um uh fellow students a message okay have we got any other courses we'd like to look at has anyone asked in or should we answer a few questions should we answer a few questions because it's nice to be able to answer them in real time rather than if you were forum um i saw a question just now from anu saying is activity completion available in 2.4 for badges activity completion has been available in all versions of Moodle 2 your administrator needs to enable it as i explained badges are only available since Moodle 2.5 this current version can you see the questions as well Helen um yep um i can see a question um i can't click on the questions to say they're answered maybe you can do that mary well i'm just answering them anyway so uh okay uh mary i just got a little message uh from x y uh digital marketing specialist saying um you seem to have an echo that maybe you're from your other laptop is it um i have a echo maybe okay okay when you're thinking about that i'll answer this question from nick by a twitter uh i think he asked in the um the the chat and the course as well he says all of us have been joined to a course called to a lateral degree what's that about is it part of the main course well um uh on the site learn Moodle uh you all have a practice course in which you're a teacher and um with your teacher rights come responsibilities and you can enroll as many people as you like in your course manually and you can allow uh guest access and you can allow people to self-enroll and the the owner of this course to a lateral degree um decided that uh he would enroll lots and lots and lots of people in his course um maybe well we're all learning on the site and maybe he didn't quite realize the implications especially um because there's a news forum that has forced subscription which means everyone gets email copies of the forum posts um so if you if you get some emails uh something to do with to a lateral degree that's what they're about and uh after our live session uh mary and i'll have a look into it and see see what we can do about it so uh not to worry about it um it's just uh someone's practice course that he's enrolled everybody in by accident okay and well i've switched off my other laptop and i can still hear my echo so i'm not sure where that's coming from there's a question from Graham in the chat who is asking about the uh theme that we're using and will it be released to be included in future Moodle releases it's called learn Moodle it was made by our designer and it is already available um i think if you understand about these things it's on Barbara Ramiro's account on github if you search in the forums on learn Moodle and also on Moodle.org there is the link for you to download it from your own site now actually and uh it's it is really beautiful and if you look um in the other themes that you're available there are different variations of it also that you can access from our learn Moodle site um another thing that you can download i forgot to mention when i was showing you the overview statistics report this is a special customized report for learn Moodle site developed by david mudrack um if you'd like that on your own site it's now available in the Moodle plugins directory for you to download looking at another question now uh david on twitter he says how do you add boxes like the welcome in the course page so uh we're just still in um this course here so we can have a look at this box here if i turn editing on hopefully you will understand the language um and we should be able to see if the site responds quick enough that um it's a html block in which the the author has just added a bit of text and a picture so this is um something which is covered in the week one book about um learning on the side which talks about blocks and i explain there how you can set up an html block with an image it's really nice a nice touch yes the html block is an extremely versatile block that you can use for a lot of different purposes and you can choose whether or not it has a title in the block you can have a bit of an experiment there okay any more questions um we have a question how do you share an activity across courses now you don't tend to have an activity in one course that people access from other courses because they tend to stay within their own course however what is useful to know is that if you've made a good activity in one course then you can import it into another course by going into your second course and using the import option in your course administration block and that's the way within the same moodle site of easily bringing in activities that you've used in other courses and helens showing it to us there so there you go you can import from another course in with your teacher um any more questions i can't see any more questions i don't know about you mary um i see someone who says lovely echo chamber well that's really kind of you to say that thank you as do some one says do you have pro portal i'm sorry i haven't ever heard of that i that probably makes me sound ignorant but i don't know what that is i don't think it's the moodle i'm afraid there are some people helen asking about um how long we have access to this site and the courses and i think in the um course overview faq um helens added an answer to that in terms of how long you have access to your courses and how long the site will actually be available for um yep i'm just getting out so that we can have a look um in the overview let me turn editing off the course remain available for on the first of october so that's a week on tuesday now the teaching with moodle course will be read only so you just you have just over a week to try and uh finish all their activities to get your complete a badge and you'll have a further week to work a bit more on your practice courses if you'd like to and now we put into read only mode as well and the sites will remain in read only mode until the first of january 2014 so in answer to another question saying i've joined i joined on friday will i be given extra time uh no the course actually the activity will stop on the first of october but you will be able to continue with your practice course um one thing that we have extended though is the teach your group forum because you want to mention about that helen oh yes the teach the group forum following our choice activity it was voted most people wanted it to stay as it is and just to leave it open so uh it's still open and um as more people joining the course our enrollments are up to over nine thousand now in the course and so when new people join the course they contact me to uh be added to a group because we allocate to groups automatically something to be aware of when you calculate group membership and then new people join the course you need to add the manually to to groups so i'm still adding people manually and uh the the activities is picking up now i think most an awful lot of groups have got some some discussions going at least remember if you'd like to uh get your completers badge you need to make sure that you you post in the forum too we've got an activity completion set for that forum that you have to make at least one post yes i've just seen i know was actually asking what was the final decision so we've answered that we have another question from marietta and i just wanted to answer this because she was so nice she said this is one of the best moodle courses i have taken so i just wanted to say that um are we doing another one in the future we don't know but if we do there are no plans but if we do i'm sure x y who does all of our social media will be the first to let you know um any more questions so we will be back next week with a course wrap up just looking over the final week and tying up all the loose ends so we hope you'll join us then and if there's any questions that we haven't answered don't forget there's always the questions and answers forum in the course and also don't forget to post about your course in the show as your course forum to enable everyone to give you feedback anything you'd like to add mary before we okay well i'm thinking perhaps um my internet's a little bit slow so i think the timing is just right at the moment so i'm going to hope to see you next week and thank you very much thank you very much bye bye