 with Mary Cooch and myself Helen Foster from Moodle HQ. Thanks, Mary. Thank you, Helen. So we are looking forward to teaching you about the very basics of learning Moodle. This is for complete beginners and if you're watching the live streaming in YouTube, then we do have a room, a course called Get Starting Teaching with Moodle and you can join that and come into the big blue button session. Otherwise, we also have a couple of polls in there which some people have already done. You could try them now or you could just think to yourselves, what's your answer? Is it number one, never taught with Moodle? Number two, occasionally teach? Or number three, regularly teach? All are fine but for this session, we're particularly focusing on number one and it's not only about using Moodle to teach because in these recent months with COVID, actually teachers who've never taught online have some of them been forced to change their approach and teach online. So we also have a poll that you can do in our room and if you're in this big blue button session, feel free to type your number. Number one, who's never taught online? We did see a few people who'd already said that they hadn't or occasionally teach online, perhaps not with Moodle. Perhaps you're used to something else and you're new to Moodle and if you regularly teach online, that's fine. I hope you won't be bored but we are going to focus on the absolute beginnings. To start with, no need to answer this. There are a lot of different teaching styles and strategies here and so I'd like you to look at it and think to yourselves which one of these can you do in Moodle? What is Moodle for? Which one of these, what kind of teaching could you use? So we've got things like flipped learning, gamification. Some of these in fact we're going to look in our more advanced sessions on Thursday and Friday. We've got collaborative or social constructionist. We've got postgraduate, is Moodle only meant for high schools or can you use it for in-depth PhDs in philosophies? What's it used for? I'll show you the answer and actually if you've seen any of our presentations you might be wise to the fact that sometimes the answers are well actually all of them. You can use Moodle for all of these. It's not tied to one particular aspect. It was actually made with the idea or the approach of collaborative social constructionist learning but you can use it however you want to teach with Moodle and that's what we're going to show you together today and we're going to begin at the very very beginning. Unfortunately it is important to understand a few elements of Moodle terminology as we go along and this is the only slide that has a lot of writing. Don't worry we don't like a lot of text on the slide but it's important to understand these. So the place where you are of your teaching materials in Moodle is called a course which is slightly confusing because when I started with Moodle I thought that meant something you did for a semester or a year or even just a month but actually there's no time limit. It's just a page or a place in a Moodle site where a teacher adds their materials for their students. As a regular teacher you don't normally click the buttons to set up the course. That's done by an administrator or a manager with that role and if you're that kind of person we did do a session yesterday that you can catch up beginning Moodle admin. An editing teacher is the official name of the person in the course who adds the materials and teaches the students. That's what we are going to use for our role today and there's also another role apart from the student who's the one who does the learning a non-editing teacher is a bit like a classroom assistant so they can't add materials or delete them or change anything that you've done you're in charge editing teacher but they can grade and help students in the course. Armed with those words and that knowledge we're going to go to a brand new empty course or learning space on Moodle and this is the same if it's Moodle Cloud or an organization's Moodle and the first thing to notice is that it's very empty in fact so empty our administrator who made it hasn't even given it a name it's just called New Course. If you didn't have a name for your course or if you noticed a typo you would go to where my arrow is this gear or cog icon and clicking there takes you if you like round the back of your course inside it where you can edit the settings for that course and we have the first one there says Edit Settings and if we go to Edit Settings we can for example change the full name and the short name of the course we're going to have a basic French course here as our example. The full name and short name display in different areas in your course and on the site there are other settings but we don't have time to do all of them but you might be interested to see that you can add a description in your course and lower down you can also where my number one is you can upload a course image which is displayed for example on a student's and a teacher's dashboard is like a personalized page when you log into a Moodle site where you see your enrolled courses before we go and have a look at my number two or three let's just show you what a dashboard is like if you haven't seen one so this is an example of a dashboard on a Moodle site what you have down the left all the time is called a navigation drawer this is using the standard most modern theme or background for Moodle called boost and there's our course image and there's the name of our course but if you wanted to show your descriptions or summaries because you feel they're important to you to see as an individual user you can change the view from card the images are called cards by clicking where it says card and you can instead have a summary view that shows you the description but we need to go back into our course and start adding our materials and so I wanted to point out a couple of these sections there are many things that you can just click on and explore and if you're not sure click the help icon the question mark but course format is important so if we click there to expand that topics format basically it means the layout of your course and topics simply gives you numbered sections as we have here topic one, topic two it's very customizable you just rename them for whatever subject you want alternatively you can have weekly format so for instance if you have a course where you have certain activities each week it will automatically display the week from the start time of your course or we have social format if you just want to use it for conversations a big message board and some people only want to use the Moodle course to hold one activity it might be a SCORN package or an H5P or a quiz then you could use single activity format we're going to stay with topics because that's quite useful and versatile so here we are in our course it's now called basic French but we can't change these boring topic names and we can't add any materials and resources until we go to turn on the editing and we've got to turn editing on button if you don't see that in your Moodle course then try clicking the cog or the gear icon and you might see it there it depends on your Moodle version when we click turn editing on that then allows us to change the wording and to add materials you could do that it's useful to notice where my big arrow says drag and drop files onto the course section so in other words the simplest way of getting materials like your presentations into your Moodle course is just dragging them in and we'll do that in a moment but we really need to change these boring topic names and to do that all you need have to do is click the pencil icon next to the one you want to change type in its name so this is a language course basic French so we're going to have each of the sections as a skill listening, reading, speaking, writing so we type it in we press enter and it automatically saves so to speed up I will just do all of them in one go and notice that as we've changed them they also change in the navigation draw so now we could add some documents into our course and if you remember we can drag and drop them because we have that message at the top and so I'm just going to make my screen a bit smaller and you will see that over on the right here and this big orange here that's my desktop I do have a Moodle orange desktop and on the desktop I've got a word document with some course rules possibly not the best way of adding your course rules but we're just beginning this is all we can do and it's really easy because we just click our cursor onto it and then we simply drag it in doesn't matter if we end up in the wrong place because you see these what we call crosshairs icons you can move things up and down to the place you want and when we let go it's there as simple as that and so that's the very first thing that you can do in Moodle we'd like to show you much more but let's have a quick recap before we move on so think these in your head and if you want to try it for real it's an example of what we call H5P it's in our room get started teaching with Moodle so a learning space in Moodle is called A and I'll reveal the answer in a minute to add materials and grade you need A and that's a particular name of role a colleague who doesn't add materials but can help you has a different named role before you can add any materials you have to this is a short phrase as is the second phrase and I'll reveal you the answers so it's a course editing teacher can add the materials you need to be an editing teacher you can't do anything until you turn on the editing and then the simplest way is to drag and drop any kinds of files in not necessarily the most effective and the most engaging way for your students though and so in order to do more interesting in my opinion things you need to click add an activity or resource in any of those sections and remember if you put it in the wrong section you can move it when you click add an activity or resource this brings up what's called activity chooser and my goodness there's a lot and this isn't even all of them so for example some of them are quite straight forward to understand assignment for instance is where students submit work forum which is a very versatile tool is where people can have various types of discussions and activity and you can see there if you click the tab you would only see activities those are ones where the students are more interactive they're typing they're discussing their submitting work and the resource is more static they're reading or watching a video if you don't see this in your Moodle site that's not a problem you probably see this this is an older version of an activity chooser and they have the activities at the top and if you scroll down you have the resources but of course the problem is with so many of these how do you know which one you want to use and remember that we saw that Moodle can support all these kinds of teaching so it's quite a minefield really and we thought that rather than just go mechanically through showing you how to set this up how to set that up we try to explain to link it with the way that you want to teach and then give you some good examples so for instance taking a step back here if you simply want to use your Moodle course to display materials for your students so that they can access because you normally teach them face to face you want to give them something online maybe you want to as we just dragged in and dropped PowerPoints Word documents or give them some videos to watch or some links to websites so they don't have to Google them these are the kinds of resources and these would be resources because this is more static that you could use so for instance you could in a page or a label this it's important to understand the terms these are just basically spaces on your site where for instance you could simply embed YouTube videos and then students can watch them without having to click and go to a link and you don't even know any difficult HTML code if you have a series of connected pages or if you just want to display information a page or a book is much better for your learners than actually uploading a Word document because it doesn't matter if they haven't got the right software and it works much better on smartphones with the Moodle app and it's always very important to remember as you're designing your new course to make sure that it works on small devices and with the Moodle app many many students use apps or even just iPads to access their sites, their Moodle courses maybe on the other hand you prefer to get your learners engaged maybe you're into collaborative learning or maybe you want them to be independent and you want to use Moodle for them to go off and do some studying themselves as self-regulated learners here are a few examples if you want them to work together you could explore and we're just giving you some ideas to go and find out about here you could explore forums in actual fact forums are not just answering questions they're not just for a vague discussion they have lots of different uses which we actually explore in our sessions on Thursday and Friday now Wiki is a collaborative document a bit like on Wikipedia where anyone can edit maybe you want to give them a sense of power so they feel that they can feedback to you on their progress or their views on how your course is doing you could give them a simple poll this is called Choicing Moodle and we have examples of them in our room or feedback is actually a customizable survey very important in modern learning is the idea that learners should reflect on how they're progressing again you could do this with a choice or with a forum Moodle has a blog it's attached to individual profiles so it's not really in a course but they can blog privately or they can share their blog and others can comment on it however I haven't said one thing yet which many people want to use Moodle for and that of course is assessing and you want learners to do something that will give them a grade you can use a quiz or you can use H5P which is very versatile to set them activities which will be automatically graded as long as you tell Moodle what the answers are and then the grades appear in the grade book alternatively you can use an assignment tool and they can submit work in any type and you can manually grade it either with a simple percentage or with a more detailed rubric so you see there are a lot of different ways in which you can use Moodle in different depending on your teaching style so we thought rather than explain each of these to you which might be a bit boring Helen is going to talk to you about some examples but we think you might like to try to encourage you to teach with Moodle so I'm going to pass over to Helen Thanks Mary so before I get started talking about a few different activities I thought we'll just have a quick look at the questions we've received so far remember as we go through the presentation if you have any question you don't need to wait until the end you can just type it either in the big blue button chat if you're here with us or if you're watching the live stream you're very welcome to post in the forum and we'll check that regularly as well so so far we have two questions one from Natalie who asks did they change the names of the roles I think it used to be course creator and now it's called the editing teacher do you want to answer that Mary or shall I I'll answer that one because I think the next one is about languages and I know you're very involved in language packs in Moodle we do have a role called course creator but it's not one that we generally use or sometimes even recommend to use there's always been a role called an editing teacher course creator is a quite a limited role actually okay so then the next question was from Thunder who asks how can we add more phonetic symbols for Thai Chinese and Japanese I can find phonetic symbols for German and French well I would suggest the first thing with your Moodle site is to make sure that you have these other languages installed in your site that you've got Thai or Chinese or Japanese available and then I would have thought in the interface you would be able to see those symbols otherwise it's a bit more of a complicated question so if that doesn't help then I suggest you post in the forum with a few more details there was actually one question in the forum already actually from Dimitrios who is asking is there a Moodle use a manual available okay I can just briefly answer that we do have some comprehensive Moodle documentation and I think someone can possibly posted a link to the front page of that what we also have that might be interesting for beginners is we have some quick start pages and those are useful because they basically just have the bare minimum which is what we're giving you today for teaching and what we gave you yesterday and we're aiming to write some more of these quick start pages to get people started quickly so I would suggest you take a look there Thanks Mary I think that's all the questions so far so let's carry on so what activities to add to your course we may have noticed in Mary's earlier slide that with a brand new course you start off with an announcements forum it's created for you automatically you can delete it if you don't want it but I recommend keeping it because it's really great for communicating important things with your class maybe deadlines or particular work they need to have done and it's special because only you as a teacher can post in it as your students can't and another special thing about it is that it's got what's called forced subscription which means all of your students are subscribed and receive notifications when you're posting it another feature of the announcements forum if you like is a latest announcements block which you can put in your course page in your course space and this is for displaying the latest posts that you added to your announcements forum but the forums are not just good for announcements they're great for getting your students to interact and work collaboratively if you have a course that's completely online and your students don't get to meet each other how about having an introduce yourself forum like we have in our Learn Little Basics course where students can post with information about themselves and maybe pictures to introduce themselves another forum that we have in our Learn Little Basics course that works really well is an Any Questions forum this forum is great because as well as students having their questions answered some students end up answering the questions of other students and that's really great it means less work for you as a teacher and as we know as teachers very often if you have to do something to somebody else it means you understand it better yourself so two nice uses there for forums let's have a look at another activity you might like to add to your course well this is what we call a resource a book resource which is a series of connected pages this example is also from our Learn Little Basics information about the course with an overview and details of how the course works again if your course is fully online you might like to have a page meet the facilitators where you have a little video introducing yourself maybe also you like to have a page if you have badges for your course or a certificate now as Mary mentioned one thing for sure you like to do in your Moodle course is some assessment and assignments the easiest way to do that here we can easily communicate homework tasks we can collect the work in and provide grades and feedback and avoid any problems with students claiming they sent you an email and you never received anything everything is recorded in Moodle and here's what the teacher sees they can see the assignment and if they want they can add comments and give it a grade there's lots of options for assignments here we've got the assignment settings and we can specify what submissions we want the students to make whether it's a particular file online text if we want to have a word limit and even choose particular file types maybe we just want them to submit videos and similarly as a teacher we can decide what kind of feedback we want to be able to give them do we want their document to be converted to PDF so that we can annotate it for example lots of different possibilities there with an assignment another nice activity for assessing students is a quiz in this example we ask the students to watch a video and if you've ever had it where you want the students to watch a video and you're not sure whether they watched it or not a great tip is to ask them a question which they can only know the answer to if they've watched the video to the end so one nice thing about Moodle is when you have quiz questions like multiple choice but Moodle can mark them automatically for the students saving you as a teacher lots of time and there's lots of different question types to choose from here we've got multiple choice so have matching or short answer questions use the teacher can decide whether you want the answers to be displayed to the students immediately after the attempt or later after the quiz is closed and whether you want to give feedback or not so if you're wondering about how this quiz was made with the video then to see behind the scenes if you edit that quiz question then it was just a YouTube and I just copied and pasted the address the URL of the video into the question text and then Moodle makes it displayed nicely so nice and easy there okay let's go for another activity the glossary now the glossary is great if you want to get your students contributing say a glossary of common terms for your subject or maybe a list of definitions in our teaching with Moodle basics we had a terms used in teaching glossary that students contributed to and one of the features of a glossary is auto-linking and what we mean there is here I've got just a bit of a forum post and the word book is in orange because it's a link and if you click on it then the glossary definition for book opens up so like with other activities we've got lots of options with glossary if you wanted to display it with the author the student that added the entry or without the author even if there's a question format as well and there's also a nice random glossary entry block that you can have displayed on your course page your course space and every time you look at the page a different glossary entry is added another nice activity that Mary mentioned is a choice activity here we have the chance to ask a question to your students and offer a selection of possible responses so it's a nice way of asking a quick opinion poll or maybe you want to enable your class to vote on the direction of the course and you can choose whether the results are displayed after the students answer after a certain date when the poll is closed or not at all maybe and you can also choose whether the results show the student names or whether it's an anonymous choice Slightly more complicated than a choice is a feedback activity and we've used a feedback in our Learn Little Basics it's a customizable survey and it has a variety of question types you can have multiple choice or yes or no or a space for students to enter some text and it's really great if you want to have a course evaluation and get your students to give feedback to help improve the course for future participants and with the text input box you can include a question like that then you can specify how big you want the box to be as a suggestion to the students as to how much text they want to write so there's quite a few different activities there that hopefully I'll give you some ideas of things you like to include in your course but another feature which is not an activity is activity completion now again Mary mentioned this briefly earlier and activity completion is what creates those tick boxes or check boxes on the right hand side of your course page and these enable the student to see easily the activities that they've completed and what they still have left to do now if you look carefully that you'll see that the first tick box has got a solid border that means the student themselves can ticket themselves manually to say that they've completed when they've read through in this case it's a book and the other two boxes have got a dotted border and these are what's called automatic completion the student needs to do something in the activity and then it's automatically marked as complete and what they do in the activity depends on the activity so looking at say here we have the settings for a choice we can choose to set the activity completion to show as complete when the user makes a choice if we have say here the activity completion settings for a quiz you can choose to that to mark it complete when the student receives a grade or maybe a passing grade a particular grade that they need to achieve so lots of options there now maybe you're feeling a bit overwhelmed with all of this information so I just like to mention a couple of things that might help you first of all when you're logged into your Moodle site as a teacher or as an administrator any page in Moodle if you scroll to the bottom of the page you'll find a link that says Moodle docs for this page that is a link to our documentation our online documentation and it takes you to exactly the documentation so for example say you're trying to set up an assignment and you're a bit confused about all the different assignment settings if you click on that Moodle docs for this page link then it takes you into the documentation on assignment settings so let's say you read through the documentation and you're still a little bit confused you still have some questions then another tip I'd like to give you is to go along to our community support site Moodle.org and on Moodle.org we have lots of community forums in different languages where you can ask for help and the Moodle community which is very active all around the clock in different time zones they can come and unsee your question so that's all from me I'm going to pass over to Mary and see if we have any more questions oh I forgot one thing I forgot the last one in English there's a special forum teaching with Moodle which Mary's the moderator and this is a great forum for if you're just starting out with Moodle and you think oh my question is really simple well there's no such thing as too simple question come to the teaching with Moodle forum and ask it. Thank you Helen and another thing that we just mentioned which is that twice a year we do run a MOOC and we have three beginners on the site learn.moodle.org I think we've put the link in our get started teaching with Moodle room and the next one is on October the 5th but you can sign up for it now and we might have something else as well but you'll just have to watch social media but anyway learn.moodle.org Thank you Helen so we don't have at the moment forums but we have two or three here in the chat so I'll read out the first one about H5P then I think there's one about glossary so Clara is asking about H5P saying that Clara's heard a lot about H5P today it is a very popular subject for presentations in Moodle MOOCs I understand that when we install Moodle this list will appear and we would be able to choose well I'll just talk briefly about H5P H5P is a separate thing from Moodle it's free and open source and it allows you to make interesting activities like quizzes, like presentations self grading things and just recently in the most recent version of Moodle it's become a part of standard Moodle so if you have Moodle 3.9 Moodle cloud site you'll be able to get that very soon in a few weeks then yes there is a place where you can add H5P activities as part of your course and I did mention H5P when I was going through some of the activities now in terms of installing it and how you get them and so on that's more for administrators and we're just in the teaching side but as a teacher you should be able to expect if you have the Moodle 3.9 to be able to add H5P or some earlier versions ask your administrator nicely if you have it because it can be a separate plugin but that's as much as we can talk about in terms of teaching with Moodle and H5P Thanks Mary so I see that Sue is asking whether a glossary can be used with groups we have more than one glossary now visible to specific groups now we haven't actually mentioned groups in our presentation but you're welcome to read the documentation and if you want to divide the students in your course up into groups then you'll find in the glossary settings there's a restrict access setting where you can restrict the glossary to a particular group so if you want a different glossary for each group you'll need to set up however many glossaries you've got groups and just go and restrict each one Yes restrict access is another more advanced setting but it is a very useful one to allow you to show activities to different students or different groups in your course we do also have a question about Moodle integration something I'm sorry I haven't heard of but actually this session is just about teaching with Moodle so we're unable to answer it but feel free to ask in the technology forum there are people there who will be able to help you with that so I'm just going to check the forums to see if we have some questions there otherwise if you want to post them in this chat we'll read them out and try to answer them so everyone can have an input Just to add what Mary said about Moodle integration Moodle does indeed integrate with a lot of different systems it's designed to easily integrate and we haven't heard of all the different things it integrates with but there's a special place on Moodle.org the plugins directory I'll post a link in a minute where you can easily search for whatever you want to integrate with and hopefully come up with a possible plugin that enables that integration but you do need to have a Moodle site where you can install integration so it's not not quite so simple and if you have a Moodle cloud site or a Moodle for school site that already does have some useful plugins but you're not able to install extra ones yourself I just wanted to actually promote or give a plug if you like for some other sessions that we are doing we're doing an advanced session on Thursday and Friday so if you'd like to come even if you're a beginner it would give you an idea of the kinds of things you can do once you've got more experienced with Moodle so we're doing one on how to get your students engaged on Thursday and then different ways you can teach in Moodle you've gamification flipped learning and tomorrow with Anna Kraser there is one on a certification Moodle Educator certification but in order to take that you need to have been doing Moodle actively with students for about a year but we'll see if there are any more questions before we finish Thanks Anna for contributing more to the integration question I can see it's really great when different people can contribute to the answer so Anna's suggesting that maybe using a local LTI provider plugging could help and a reminder I'm looking at the forums there aren't any questions in the forum but do please if you think of something at the end of this session as it always happens to me go into the forum and ask your question there and someone if not Helen or I or Anna even Otherwise if we don't have any more questions then we could maybe think of wrapping up this session a minute or too early to get into our next session in time. Yes, thank you everyone, thank you for your thank yous everyone. Yeah thank you very much for everyone who has joined us in this big blue button room it's really great to have you with us