 Welcome. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning. Whatever time zone, wherever you are watching Moot Global. Day three, welcome back to the technology room. Really excited to have with us today Michelle Lohman, a regular at our Moots, really well attended sessions and really engaging subjects is what Michelle presents. She's based in Victoria, Australia, and today she'll be presenting making even better Moodle courses. We encourage you to put your questions into the forum if you want to do that early. If we have time at the end of the session, we'll run through those Q&As. Otherwise, we'll respond later in the forums. Thanks, Michelle. Welcome. Thank you very much. And yes, welcome to Melbourne, Australia, where it happens to be evening. And do you know what that means? It means it is story time. So once upon a time, there was a young blonde girl, okay, a youngish blonde girl who moved to a new village. And in that new village, she got herself a job. And her job was working with online courses and she was loving this job. It was amazing. And one day in this job, this mysterious orange stranger came along whose name was Moodle. And she thought, oh, well, you seem very interesting orange mysterious stranger called Moodle. And so she thought, I'm going to get to know them. And so she did. And she thought, this could be really useful for online courses. So she thought, I know, I'm going to make my very first Moodle course. So she opened it up. Oh, gee, there's a lot of features. There's a lot of activities. Oh, okay. So I'm going to start to put together my Moodle course. But I'm afraid because there's so many things that I could break and there's so many options. So she didn't put much into that Moodle course. It was pretty cold. And well, it wasn't very good. She thought, okay. All right. Maybe I'll get to know this mysterious orange stranger called Moodle a little bit better. And so she opened it up and she thought, I'm going to learn all these different activities and features and options. And they were exciting. There were all these fantastic things that she could do. So she got her Moodle course and she grabbed all these really cool things and she shoved them into her Moodle course and it was jam-packed full. And it was really exciting for her. And it was so full. And just while it was too hot, it wasn't very good. She thought, okay, this isn't very good. What am I going to do? So she thought and she thought and now what she thought? Maybe the Moodle course should be about the learner and what they're going to learn and what would make it easier for them. She thought, I'm going to make another Moodle course. So she opened up Moodle again and she thought, right, I'm going to think very carefully this time and every activity and features that she chose she thought very carefully about how it would help her learners. And so she put together this very thoughtfully tailored Moodle course. And you know what? This one was just right. Oh, she thought. So after making many, many, many, many Moodle courses over the years, this youngish blonde girl tonight is going to share with you some of the top tips that she's learned over the years in making these Moodle courses and how to make Moodle courses even better. So let's get started. Now the top tip and it doesn't sound very sexy but it has to be consistency. Now we're not talking about same-same. You don't want to create boredom. But you want your learner to be able to focus on what they're learning rather than having to figure out where to find things and how to do things. And there's some really simple ways that you can create this consistency. So one of the simple things is to think about what you're going to call each part that you put into your Moodle course. So this can be your section names and it can be the names of your activities and resources. Don't leave your learners guessing and if you're consistent in how you name things it's going to be intuitive for your poor learner. Now when it comes to things like quizzes and assignments it'd be handy to put just some consistent instructions in there to give the learner a heads up on what I have to do and what are the requirements to get a tick. Now a little bit of a tip though if you're having to put too many instructions in there probably means your course design isn't that great. So you've got to find that balance. Now if you want your Moodle course to pop of course some imagery and icons can be really handy. So for instance if you've got a great suite of icons up your sleeve it can help to give the learner a visual cue of what you're asking them to do. So make sure you've got a nice consistent useful set of icons. And if you are adding images such as photos throughout your course try and have a consistent approach to the style of your images because it will make it look more professional. When it comes to text well you're super lucky because Moodle has a great text editor available to you and it already has textiles built into it. Use it because it will help keep things nice and clean and simple and accessible. One of the tips here is watch out for when you're doing a copy and paste from the good old word straight into your Moodle course. It's a very easy way to make things inconsistent very quickly and easily. Some of the other things that you can do with consistency is think about your blocks. Now they're fantastic for adding features to your Moodle course but I'd have to say that less is generally more. So think about which of those blocks are going to add the best value for your learner and also think if your learners are accessing multiple Moodle courses well can you use consistent blocks and perhaps have them in the same order so again the learner can intuitively find what they're looking for. Of course with your Moodle course you can control the layout with sections. So think about particularly again if your users are accessing multiple Moodle courses can you have some consistency on the sections? Is there an introduction and is there an assessment section and what are the names of each of those sections going to be? Of course Moodle is really powerful. It's got all these great settings where you can customize things. You have course settings. You have section settings and for every activity and resource you put in there. But again if it can be fairly consistent in how you set those up it can really make the user experience well intuitive. And then we have good old green ticks. Okay the things a learner will do for a green tick so use it against them. I mean for them with them So with your activity completion settings again try to be a little bit consistent with this but be meaningful. Make it very clear what they need to do to get that green tick because if they don't understand they're going to get frustrated pretty quickly and easily. So think about is it a grade to pass? Do they just need to submit to get that tick? Some of the other options with activity completion are also things in like forums. Now generally with forums I'll just say well you just need to post or reply to get a tick but if you're using something like the Q&A forum then you might want to specify well you need to post once and you need to reply once to get that tick. And again you might want to put just a little instruction in the forum to give the learner a bit of a heads up what do I need to do to get that elusive green tick? Now green ticks we want them says the learner and with the activity completion report something some people miss is that well let's think about it for every group of students you work with there's that one special little cherub isn't there? You know who they are. You can name them later but they're the one that's going to say they computer ate their homework and they didn't get their tick and they're desperate for the tick it's frustrating. So remembering the activity completion report you can actually click on an empty box and give them a tick manually the bottom couple of rows there the teacher has done that and they get a little blue tick with the red outline on there. Now when you're putting together your modal course you've got some options right you can put things into folders and folders are super handy let's say that you've got a whole bunch of files that you would like the learner to download easily folders do that quite nicely but it can get out of hand pretty quickly and it can be more difficult to organize a sequence of activities and content just with folders and of course sections are really handy for that but again think about how you're naming your section so that the learner knows where to go and are you going to use restrict access to control how and when they can get there and how are you going to organize the bits and pieces within the sections so for instance you could use groupings so on the sections that we looked at before you might want to set it up so that they can see what's coming but they can't get in there yet now a very simple way of doing that is to use a grouping restriction and the advantage of doing this is you can set up on your section your restrict access requirements once and then when you're ready for your learners to get into that section you just add your group into that grouping and they're in so it's quick and it's easy and you set it up once we've been talking about ticks course completion is a great way to actually help your learner to focus in on what they must do so often a Moodle course will have a combination of they must do this and then there's other things that can help them along the way if you set your course completion requirements on the dashboard and throughout the Moodle course it can make it quite obvious to the learner where they're at and it helps you as the teacher to hone in on the things you really care about so in my Moodle course as I set up you need to do the assessment tasks and there might be some other declarations you need to do and there's also a pass grade that you need to achieve as well and by doing that you end up with this course completion report which is a lot cleaner than what we're looking at on the activity completion report remember each of these reports you can also export as a spreadsheet because everyone loves a good spreadsheet stick it up on your fridge if you want overrides super super super handy so if you're like me and you often use things like quizzes and assignments for assessment tasks then okay let's think about that one little chair begin one student in your group you've put your heart and soul into making a quiz put it in there and day one they've jumped in and they've done the quiz and they've chewed up one of their attempts and they weren't even ready so you can use a group override to very quickly and easily specify when they can do the quiz you can either hide things away or obviously you can let them see that it's there and remember when you put dates into Moodle you help Moodle to notify students and control their timeline and have upcoming events so that learners can track what you're asking of them and you can also have individual user overrides as well which is really handy again for that special student now overrides can also be used with assignments one tip here very quick and easy way to outsmart yourself is the cut-off date now the difference between due date and cut-off date is cut-off date after that they can't upload and you might want to achieve that that's fine but again when that one little special chair comes along you might have outsmarted yourself because they can't upload so you might need to think about how you're going to manage things like grant extension the greater report now this is the holy grail of this is what you must do to pass right this is the one true source and it controls what the user is going to see on their report so couple of tips here use categories so in this greater report I always have an activity category these are the things that are nice they're going to help you along and then there's the assessment category you must do these things to pass now in the activities section we've actually got a couple of activities that the learner will submit but they don't get graded they might be getting a bit of feedback but it's not a formal grade so a bit of a tip is to actually hide it in the greater report so that for the end user they're not then chasing an elusive grade that's never going to come in the assessment section you can see there that we've got a combination of quiz and assignment a satisfactory and so I use a calculation in the category total to give them a meaningful outcome of satisfactory overall and then at the course total I actually tell it to use that calculation to grab that and then Kim gives them a competent now another tip in the greater report is you might have missed the turn editing on button so let's say you've set up a quiz it's got 30 odd questions in it one poor special student they've got say 3 or 4 of those questions wrong and they've had a few attempts and so you've had a chat with them and they do actually get it but they're just misreading the questions and so you've got a couple of options you could go into each question and manually override that or you might decide to come into here in the greater report and actually give them 100% because they get it and you can go pop a little bit of feedback or comment as to why you did that one tip though with that greater report I wouldn't do your general grading in there do that in your quizzes and assignments so that all of your notifications and attempts get managed as you expect we've been talking a lot about consistency but it's really important that you also have variety now the balance here though is not just variety for the sake of it so again apparently need to think about the learner and so what you want to consider is what is it that I want them to do do I want to grade what they're doing do I want them to see what each other have done is it going to be self-marking and so in your sections and across your courses you want to use a bit of variety of different types of activities but maybe choose a bit of a sweet that you're going to use with those students to best suit their needs because if you try and do every single type of activity in there it just becomes overwhelming and doesn't actually add to your noodle course tip if you haven't explored this before in every text editor spot there is the camera icon and that allows you to provide up to two minutes of video directly into your posts so that could be in your announcements forum a general forum or in this case into some feedback for an assignment that day the icon to the left of that is the microphone and that allows you to provide two minutes of audio for your learners remember that in perhaps a forum you could even encourage students to use this tool as well and speaking about our learners particularly in these times where they might be feeling a bit isolated so they may be missing some of the the collaboration or camaraderie they'd usually experience and can easily create showcases in your noodle courses so let's say that you've got them working on some projects you can get them to take some photos and upload them to show how they're going and allow other learners to then comment on that progress or it might be just a simple forum where they're uploading a document they've been working on or a short reflection piece that they're then talking about what they've been experiencing it's a great way to allow your learners to collaborate rather than just relying upon input from you all the time now the assignment tool in Moodle is super powerful and really really handy and remember it does have the online text option but sometimes you might have a question that's multifaceted maybe it's a question where you've got multiple questions that you would like the learner to answer there's another plugin called Questionnaire which you can use to do a couple of things so you might in this case have a little mini case study and so the learners can answer a number of different questions and you've even got the option of setting it that they can then see what each other wrote after they've submitted the questionnaire the only thing I would bear in mind is that Questionnaire is not a core Moodle tool so I don't tend to use it for formal assessment tasks I tend to only use it for activities now video most Moodle courses have video and there's lots of ways that you can handle it you've just got a single video obviously you can just whack that into a page in Moodle and that's a good way of just going okay you've got a tick going in there and viewing the video let's say you've got a collection of videos like here there's a session and there's three videos that the students are going to watch a book is a great way of providing that collection if you're after a search function for this you might consider using a glossary now of course videos can also be used in activities so for instance here on the left we have a questionnaire tool where there's a video and then a series of questions that either only you as the teacher can see their answer or it might be that they can then share their answers with other users afterwards and on the right got old H5P so there's some self-marking questions that they then follow up with and of course speaking of H5P interactive video very cool tool pretty simple to set up I thoroughly encourage you to explore it so on the left here we've got a self-marking question and there's a whole range of different question types you can use my one tip for that would be by default questions are put in as buttons sometimes users miss that so you might want to change that to poster like you're seeing on the screen where it's very obvious the question just pops up and the other tip there is to set the summary screen because if you don't their score isn't going to be contributed but the cool thing about the summary slide is that you can put it at any point you like throughout the video so you don't have to actually use the whole video for your series of questions and on the right here now you might have vague recollections of when you were in the classroom maybe I think it was some time this year and where you would pause a video and you would make some comments well that's what you can do here just by putting some text into an interactive video so it's a pretty cool tool and nice and easy to use the Q&A forum we were talking about before so let's think about if you've got different sections that you're dealing with or different sessions it's a great tool that you can put in and put in a little mini challenge the cool thing about a Q&A forum is you can post something in there and the learners they can't see the answers from the other learners until they post their reply so a little bit of stopping of them cheating live chat, you probably have zoomed them Webex them and Skype them and everything else to them the live chat is a nice low bandwidth tool so you can either just whack a live chat into one of your sections and allow students to chat to each other or you can set it that you might be online every Tuesday afternoon at two o'clock or you'll be answering questions so check it out, it's a nice easy to use tool and if you're into the assignment tool don't forget the good old rubric it actually is pretty quick and easy to set up so rather than sitting there ticking things off and then scanning and uploading or duplicating by then uploading your web document it's a nice easy thing to set up the one tip that I've learnt by doing this one is actually to set up edit letter so that for instance here our learners have to get a satisfactory and I set it so that until they get 100% or each box is satisfactory they don't get a satisfactory overall and I tell the grader report to display a letter that will actually come up as satisfactory Okay, how are we doing? Do we need a vodka? I think I do Alright, I'm ready let's keep going Okay, possibly go wrong Okay, the choice tool very cool tool, lots of things you can do with it so here it's being used to select groups so it's a cool tool so in this particular case the teacher wanted the students to divide them up into groups to work on some projects so you can very easily say here are the groups there's four students in each group you can even set it that the students can see who's already picked the group so that they can avoid that one pesky student we've been picking on all night but you can also use the choice tool for things like declarations so it can be a really non-sexy one like the one we're seeing here or it could be for things they're doing offline and coming back and saying that they did it or there was a cool quiz out on a different website, they go off and do that and come back and maybe tell you the score they achieved or the outcome that they got and again you can have them actually see what each other achieved or you can keep things anonymous and another cool way of using the choice tool particularly at the moment is to have it so that students can book time with you or maybe they can book time to come in to say a practical session where you need to restrict how many are coming at once and then the good old quiz love a good quiz, a couple of things I always do in a quiz, just a few short instructions for the learners and they're really clear on their expectations our quizzes are set that you need to get 100% to pass so I remind them of that in the overall feedback and when it comes to the actual questions themselves there's a number of settings that we're going to look at and remember that we can use things like group overrides and we can set that they need to get a particular grade to pass and as I was talking about before multiple choice questions for instance couple of tips from me I remove the numbering so I don't have ABCD I keep the focus on the answers because our learners are going to get 100% to pass I remove the penalty for having more than one go and if you do have so on the right hand side here if you have say a quiz question that has four possible answers you're looking for two correct answers I'll specify that the two incorrect ones need a penalty of 25% each and that just stops learners from going tick tick tick tick to try and get their 100% give them an incentive to actually figure it out remember to use the lesson tool really cool tool couple of things there to think of you can actually turn off that menu that you're seeing there and treat it like a real scenario or a game you can have a great blend of content and activities within this one and it has a nice little progress bar so revisit it if you haven't looked at it for a while if you're doing a lesson tool the one tip I would give you in the back end of things is have meaningful names for each of the pages two reasons for that number one those titles come up in the lesson menu and secondly when you're trying to link if you don't have meaningful names you can now outsmart yourself again you'll be there forever some of the other tools that you might want to leverage H5P so the column tool totally recommend that nice little sequence of activities and content that you can have great for scrolling on smaller screens you can include video self-marking questions check out the SA question type it's super handy you can put in flash cards and different questions and content from really worth playing with the H5P column we'll skip that more questions on it course presentation tool so if you're still stuck in the world of Scorm poor thing jump into H5P get stuck into either column or course presentation because both of those tools allow you to leverage a whole range of H5P activities and content types and put them together however works best for you really powerful and a rapid authoring tool the SA question type in H5P let's say you've got an activity sheet where you usually hand it out in class and get students to write some answers there's probably some model answers you're looking for or some key words you can set that up using the SA question type and you can have a series of them and then moodle warm up things for you so it's definitely worth having a look at drag and drop who doesn't love a good drag and drop my two tips here think about the size of your images now it's not just physical size but that's how many kilobytes they're going to be so think about compressing them and don't have too many options for them to drag and drop because it can become overwhelming particularly as a screen size gets smaller also with drag and drop you can set it up so that more than one item can go into more than one spot but always test things out for yourself first because when you do that that item so if I had all of these could live in multiple bins every time I drag it it still sits down the bottom and then I can't remember which ones I've actually done so always think it through and test it out before you give it to your poor students well as long as you like them that is hotspots also worth checking out another interactive tool you can specify multiple places that you want them to click on so for instance down on the bottom left nursing looking at where can you or should you stab someone effectively with a needle and the learner needs to click on that and you can have feedback and tell them how many spots they're looking for etc it's a really cool tool can be used for content as well so here it's used in the column tool clicking on things information pops up series of questions appears after that and quick and simple to create good old flashcards do I just flip the card and see the potential answers removes the issue of them typing the wrong things spelling it wrong or down the bottom there you maybe do want the terminology to be right and you do want them to type in just that one correct answer and then check the answer it's a great alternative to doing lots of quizzes now this is my final thought for tonight it is super important at this time during the zombie apocalypse so I hope you're going to have a terrific moodle moot and happy moodling and this is how you can get hold of me thank you okay so Rowan has gone to the bar so I'm going to have a look to see if there's any questions let's have a look I'm just looking in the chat here to see if there's any questions here he is Rowan's coming back brought his bourbon here he is I've found fantastic stuff Michelle we could listen to your talk for hours and hours if only we had more time we do have a couple of questions in the forum we'll just get to one because we've got Michael coming up very very soon this one's from Matthew Taylor and he was wondering how you gather your learner's feedback on their experience of your courses how do you find out what works and what doesn't work so probably a couple of levels with that I mean obviously you've got a good old moodle feedback survey tool that you can pop in there and that depends on your organisation the one downside probably of the feedback survey is if you've got multiple moodle courses it's hard to aggregate that so the organisation I work with use a separate tool called loop to get that sort of feedback but I actually find the teachers themselves are a great source of that overview of how the learners are dealing with the moodle courses and any frustrations that they're actually observing either online or in the face to face sessions fantastic look thanks again Michelle we encourage you to jump onto the forum there and answer some of those questions and contribute Michelle's contact details on screen getting contact with Michelle she's a fountain of knowledge fantastic stuff we'll take a quick break and we'll be back with Michael from TNG Consulting very soon thanks Michelle no worries thanks everyone