Accessible Syllabi in Moodle

When posting your syllabus online, think about how you can make it more accessible.  One way to do this is to make it function better with screen reader software.  Students who are blind or visually impaired may use this software to read your syllabus.

Simply uploading a PDF of your syllabus may be the least accessible option.  While there are ways to make a PDF accessible, it is highly dependent on how the PDF is created.  Word files stand a better chance of being accessible.  However, their major disadvantage is that students may need to go through several steps to view your syllabus: downloading it, leaving Moodle to open Word, and finally opening your syllabus.  At best, this is an inconvenience for the students.  At worst, this may be impossible if a student doesn’t have access to Word; for example, a student may be viewing your course on a phone.

The most straightforward way to put an accessible copy of your syllabus on Moodle is to post it as an HTML file.  If you already have your syllabus in Microsoft Word, we have a tutorial for converting it into an HTML file on Moodle that preserves the content while still being accessible.  Or, you can create your syllabus from scratch in a Moodle page.  If you do, be sure to use the menu in the text editor to differentiate your headers from your text:

Moodle Gradebook End of Semester Reminders

It is a good idea at the end of the semester to look over your Moodle gradebook to make sure it is calculating grades correctly.

Here are some tips for avoiding common pitfalls before submitting final grades:

Gradebook Calculations

Check that your gradebook setup is consistent with the grading scheme for your course.  By default, the gradebook is set to "Mean of grades" and will simply average any grade items together.  In nearly all cases, additional set up is required.  For example, you may need to update the aggregation method and add categories to organize your gradebook items into groups.

See these tutorials for help setting up your gradebook:

Setting up a Moodle Gradebook: Weighted Categories

Setting up a Moodle Gradebook: Natural or "Sum" of Grades

The gradebook is complex and has many grade aggregation options.  It is a good idea to spot-check one or two student grades to make sure they are calculating the way you expect them to.   You can also view the same grade report that your students see by following the instructions in this tutorial:

Viewing Grades as a Student

Hidden Grades

You may have hidden grades in your course, such as a hidden assignment or a quiz whose scores you haven't shared.  If so, by default Moodle will hide students' course grades also.  Be sure to reveal any hidden grades or delete any unused hidden assignments if you want the course grades to be visible and accurate. Hidden grades can cause discrepancies between the calculated totals seen by you and those seen by the student. 

Empty Grades

By default, Moodle will not use "empty" grades when calculating course grades—blank cells in the gradebook will be ignored.  If students have not completed an assignment, and you expect a zero to be calculated in for that grade, you must enter zero for that item in the gradebook.  Otherwise, the missing assignment will not affect the students' course grades.

Zeros can be entered directly into the Grader Report when editing is turned on in the gradebook. You can also update all empty grades for a single assignment at once by following these steps.  

1. Go to the Grader Report and click on the pencil icon at the top of the column for the grade you want to update
2. At the top of the Override column, select All 
   
   
   
   
   
3. Scroll down.  At the bottom of the screen, click the checkbox to the left of Perform bulk insert.  Empty grades and a value of 0 will be selected by default.
   

   
   
   
   
4. Click Save.  The page will refresh and any previously empty grades will be updated to zeros.  

Overrides

Some grade cells in your gradebook may be orange rather than the normal gray or white.  This indicates that a grade has been "overridden".  Normally, grades in the gradebook are pulled in from the activity itself (e.g. the Assignment grading interface).  Override grades are entered directly in the gradebook, and replace the grade that would otherwise be there.  This is common and not normally a cause for concern.  For example, if a student receives a scores of zero for a discussion forum, the recommended solution is to enter the grade directly in the gradebook.  

One place in the gradebook where an override can cause issues is when a grade category total is overridden.  Grade categories are calculated based on the grading scheme of the category, and the grades that it contains.  If you override the grade for a category total, Moodle will, from that point forward, keep that grade as you have entered it and not continue to recalculate the category total when items within the category are updated.  In general, it is best to avoid this practice unless you have a specific reasons for preventing Moodle from calculating the category total from the items it contains. 

Quiz Grades

Some quiz grade visibility settings are controlled within the quiz itself.  If your students are not able to see a quiz or exam grade, take a look at the post "My students can't see their quiz grades.  What should I do?".

I accidentally deleted something from my Moodle class. How do I retrieve it?

If you accidentally delete a module from your Moodle class, such as a File or Assignment, you can use the Recycle bin to retrieve that item and restore it to your course site.  The Recycle bin can be accessed by clicking on the Gear menu and selecting Recycle bin. 

Items deleted from the course will remain in the Recycle bin for 7 days.  After 7 days the items will be removed completely and can no longer be retrieved.

On the Recycle bin screen, any items deleted from the course in the past 7 days will be listed.  Please note that there may be a delay of several minutes between when an item is deleted and when it appears in the Recycle bin. To restore an item to the course, click on the arrow icon to the right of that item. 

After restoring an item, the item will no longer display in the Recycle bin and a message will appear indicating that the item has been restored to the course. On the course page, the item will appear at the bottom of the section that it was deleted from.  If this is not where the item was previously located, you can drag it back to its original location. 

My students can't see their quiz grades. What should I do?

Quizzes have some additional visibility controls not found within other modules.  Usually an issue with these settings is what prevents students from seeing their quiz grades. To access the specific visibility settings for a quiz, turn editing on and to the right of the quiz select Edit and then Edit settings from the dropdown menu.  Scroll down to Review Options.  This section allows you to control what students see and when:

Points, refers to students scores.  Depending on your language settings, it may be labeled as Marks. If you uncheck this option for a particular time period, students will not be able to see their score at that time.  For example, if Points is unchecked in the second column, then students will not be able to see their score immediately upon completion of the quiz.  If Points is checked in the third column, students are able to go back to the quiz after they have exited the quiz and view their score as long as the closing time for the quiz has not been reached.  

If you have set a close time for the quiz, the last column will be any time after that time has passed.  If you don't have a close time then this column is disabled. 

How can I shuffle the order of my quiz questions?

 If you want to shuffle all the questions in your quiz, so that each students gets the same questions but in a different order:

• From your main course page, click the name of the quiz.  When you're on the landing page for the quiz, click the gear menu and choose Edit quiz
  
  
  
  
  
• On the Edit quiz screen, just check the Shuffle box
  
  
  

You can also divide your quiz into sections.  Shuffling questions is done on a per-section basis.  For example, you can choose to have a section of warmup questions whose order are shuffled, followed by a section of advanced questions that are shuffled.  Doing so prevents advanced questions from appearing too early in the quiz.  Alternatively, you can have sections of questions that are shuffled and other sections that aren't shuffled:

• At the beginning of any page, click the Add menu and choose a new section heading
  
  
  
  
  
• This will add a Shuffle box at the top of the new section that you can click to shuffle the questions in that section.  If you want to give your section a title, click the pencil icon (seen next to "New heading" below), enter your title, and hit the Enter key when finished.
  
  
  
  
  

How can I update all of the due dates for my course quickly?

You can use the Dates Report to set multiple due dates at once.

To set due dates for individual assignments follow these steps:

• Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of screen

• Select More from the list of options

• Under Reports click Dates

• Using the Activity type dropdown menu, select Assignments

• Click Expand All

• Choose a due date for each assignment. If the due dates for an assignment are grayed out, you will need to click on Enable to the right of the due date to enable this option. Be aware that if you copied the assignment from a previous offering of the class, the year may need to be updated in addition to the month and day.

• The Allow submissions from and Cut-off date may remain disabled

• Click Save changes

You can use the Activity type dropdown to select and update dates for other module types such as quizzes and Turnitin Assignments also.

How can I view my Moodle course as a student?

There are times when you may find it helpful to see your Moodle course the way it looks to your students.  To activate student view, click on your profile picture in the upper right and from the dropdown menu select Switch role to...

From the list of options, select Student.  Depending on your role in the course, you may see different options than the ones displayed below. 

You may now view and interact with your course much like a student would.  In the upper right corner above your name you will notice that the word Student appears while you are in this mode. 

Once you are done viewing the course as a student, click on your profile picture again and from the dropdown menu select Return to my normal role.  You will not be able to view and interact with Moodle the way you normally do. 

How can I check to see if a student has logged into Moodle or viewed a particular resource that I have posted?

There are a variety of ways that you can check student activity in Moodle to get a better sense of student engagement with the posted content. 

Last access to course

If you are interested in finding out when students last accessed the course's Moodle site, you can see this information on the Participants page.  

Using the left navigation menu, select Participants

To the right of each student's name, under Last access to course it will indicate how long it has been since the student last viewed the course (e.g. 3 days 5 hours)

Activity Logs

Activity logs will provide you with timestamped records of when students accessed specific items within the Moodle course. 

1. From the main course page, click the gear icon and select More 
2. Select Reports>Logs.  From here, the logs can be narrowed down by student, activity, and/or date. 

Activity Completion Report

This report will tell you who has completed each item based on its completion settings (set on the Edit settings page for that item)

1. From the main course page, click the gear icon and select More 
2. Select Reports>Activity Completion

I am trying to upload a large file to Moodle and it won't let me! What should I do?

Large files, such as video files, cannot be uploaded to Moodle directly.  Instead, they should be stored in Google Drive and then added to Moodle as a URL link or embedded within a Moodle Page.

Directions for uploading files to Google and linking to these files in your Moodle course can be found in these tutorials:

Uploading and Sharing a Video in Google Drive (can be adapted for other file types)

Embedding Videos and Other Content into Moodle

How can I allow a student to take a quiz at a different time than it is scheduled?

To add an override, follow these instructions:

1. Enter the Moodle course site
2. Click on the quiz you want to add an override for
3. Click the gear menu in the upper-right corner and select User overrides
4. Click Add user override
5. In the Override user field, click on the arrow and select the student’s name from the list of course participants
6. Beside Open the quiz select the desired alternate start time for the quiz
7. Beside Close the quiz select the desired alternate end time for the quiz

User overrides can also be used to modify the following for individual students:

• The length of time that students have to complete the quiz
• The number of attempts a student is allowed to take a quiz

Creating A Quiz From An Aiken File

Importing questions with an Aiken file may be the easiest way to make a multiple-choice quiz in Moodle.  To set up your file in Aiken format, just list your questions, possible answers, and correct answer like so:

What is the correct answer to this question?
A. Not this one
B. Not this one, either
C. Must be this one!
ANSWER: C

Which LMS has the most quiz import formats?
A) Moodle
B) ATutor
C) Claroline
D) Blackboard
ANSWER: A

Our tutorial on creating quizzes using Aiken-format files will guide you through the process of creating these files, importing them into Moodle, and quickly creating quizzes containing these files.

Embedding Videos and Other Content into Moodle

Embedding content into Moodle allows you to find external resources like videos and have them appear in your Moodle course, rather than sending students to some external site.  Not only does this reduce the possibility of students being distracted by other content on those sites, but it also reinforces that the resources you've chosen for your course form a cohesive whole.

Embedding requires that you find an embed code for that content. Much like a URL (e.g., www.manhattan.edu) tells you where to find content on the web (e.g., the Manhattan College website), an embed code tells Moodle where to find the content that you want embedded. Once you have the embed code for the content you want to embed, you need only copy that code and paste it into the appropriate place on Moodle to embed the content.

Take a look at our tutorial on embedding in Moodle for more information.  You'll find detailed information on the embedding process, specific instructions on embedding YouTube and Google Drive videos, and advice on embedding other content like podcast episodes from the web and mind maps from Coggle.

Using Groups in Moodle

Assigning students to work in teams is a great way to increase student engagement.  Student groups can also be implemented in Moodle.  One of the most common uses for this is to allow students to submit assignments in groups.  This can significantly streamline your grading process if you're already using Moodle to collect assignments.  When set up, scores and feedback for each group assignment need to be entered only once, and Moodle will give that score and feedback to each member of the group.

Another popular use is to give group members a private forum on Moodle in which to communicate with each other.  Even if you don't have students submitting their assignments in Moodle, giving groups a space of their own in which to communicate can help them collaborate more effectively.

See this tutorial on the Moodle Training Course for more information on how to create student groups on Moodle, and how to set up group assignments and private forums.  See the video below for a brief overview:

Collecting Anonymous Feedback in Moodle

See the video below to learn how to survey your students anonymously using Moodle.

Exporting and Importing Grade Spreadsheets in Moodle

Moodle's gradebook is very flexible and can be set up for most of the common configurations instructors describe in their syllabi.  Moreover, if you ever need help setting up your gradebook, the instructional designers are happy to help.

That said, in some situations, the easiest solution is to use Excel or another spreadsheet program to calculate grades. Doing so offers several advantages:

• Fully-offline grading
• Use of a familiar application for grading
• Complex calculations that are not straightforward to implement in Moodle may be easier to enter in Excel

To use this method, you can take advantage of Moodle's capability to import and export a gradebook.  First, you'll need to first export your existing gradebook from Moodle into a spreadsheet.  After entering grades, you'll upload the revised spreadsheet.  You and your students will be able to then view the grades in the Moodle gradebook, just as if they'd been entered into Moodle directly.  See this tutorial on the Moodle Training Course for details on how to implement this method.

Reusing Turnitin Assignments

To avoid issues reusing Turnitin assignments when copying (importing) courses in Moodle, you must reset the Turnitin assignments in the newly copied class.  To do this, follow these steps immediately after the course has been copied:

1. For each course, login to the course, click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of the main course screen, and select Reset
2. Scroll down and click on the Turnitin Assignments tab
3. Select "Copy Turnitin Assignments"
4. Click Reset Course
5. A new page will display, confirming that the reset has been performed.
6. Click Continue

Once the reset is complete, your Turnitin assignments can be updated and are then ready to be used by students. 

Grade Aggregation Methods in Moodle

The Moodle gradebook keeps track of your students' scores on all assignments in your course.  But the gradebook can also calculate students' grades for the course or for categories of assignments.  To set up your gradebook to do this, you'll need to understand aggregation methods.

Simply put, an aggregation method is a particular way in which Moodle can calculate a grade, given a set of scored assignments.  For example, you'd use one method to ensure that students' final projects were worth 25% of their grades, and another so that Moodle would add up a student's scores on four 5-point quizzes and add that many points to his or her course total.

Moodle offers four different aggregation methods available for classes and categories of graded items:

1. Mean of grades
2. Weighted mean of grades
3. Simple weighted mean of grades
4. Natural

See the Mean-based Aggregation Methods and Using Natural as Sum of Grades tutorials on the Moodle Training Course for a complete description of all the aggregation methods Moodle has to offer.

Student Collaboration and Interaction with the Student Folder Plugin in Moodle

We've recently installed several new plugins for Moodle in order to make it easier to use and to extend its capabilities.  In this post we'll highlight Student Folder, a plugin that allows your students to share files with one another.

Moodle already allows you to create folder for your students containing documents and other resources.  Using Student Folder, you also create a folder that your students can access.  However, when setting up the folder, you can choose for it to be populated in one of two ways:

• Students can upload files to it, and other students can then access those files.  You have the option to serve as a moderator to vet student submissions.
• The folder is linked to an assignment, and you choose which student submissions are also made available via the folder.  Optionally, students can give their permission for assignments to be made available to their peers.

Use the Student Folder as part of a peer review activity, to facilitate team-based learning, or as a way for students to share resources they've found online.  For full instructions on using the Student Folder plugin, see this guide on the Moodle Training Course.

Edit Moodle Courses More Efficiently with Sharing Cart and Mass Actions Blocks

We've recently installed several new plugins for Moodle in order to make it easier to use and to extend its capabilities.  In this post we'll highlight two plugins that will help streamline the process of preparing courses for the upcoming semester, as well as making the maintenance of those courses easier: the Sharing Cart and Mass Actions blocks.

You may already be familiar with course importing in Moodle, which allows you to easily copy all the contents of one course into another course.  However, if you just need to copy a few items into a new course, or copy items from multiple classes, Sharing Cart makes this
process much more straightforward.  It allows you to copy individual assignments, quizzes, documents, and other resources from one course to another.

After adding the Sharing Cart block, copying items is easy:

• Click "Add to Sharing Cart" in the item's edit menu
• Navigate to the destination course
• Click "Copy to Course"

See this guide in the Moodle Training Course for more details, including full instructions on installing Sharing Cart and how to organize your Cart to use it efficiently.


When setting up a Moodle course, some tasks can be repetitive, such as moving items to the correct section and setting visibility.  With the Mass Actions block, you can choose multiple items and perform actions on all of them at once, including:

• Moving items from one section to another
• Showing and hiding items
• Deleting items
• Indenting and outdenting items

For more information on installing and using the Mass Actions block, see this guide in the Moodle Training Course.

Using Overrides to Grant Extended Time or Provide Alternative Testing Windows for Moodle Quizzes

If you are using Moodle to provide online tests to students, it is still possible to provide extended time or have students take a course at an alternative time.  As with normal quizzes and tests, students should be granted extended time as indicated on that student's form provided by the SRC.  Extended time can be granted to students on any Moodle quiz, regardless of whether lockdown or video proctoring controls have been applied to the quiz. 

To grant extended time for a Moodle Quiz, follow these instructions:

1. Enter the Moodle course site
2. Click on the quiz you want to add an override for
3. Click the gear menu in the upper-right corner and select User overrides
4. Click Add user override
5. In the Override user field, select the student’s name from the list of course participants
6. Under Time limit, enter the appropriate amount of time required
7. Click Save

User overrides can also be used to modify the following for individual students:

• The window of time in which the student can take the quiz
• The number of attempts a student is allowed to take a quiz

Some quizzes are facilitated using the Moodle Assignment module.  To allow extended time for a test that is facilitated through the Assignment module, follow these instructions:

1. Enter the Moodle course site
2. Click on the assignment you want to add an override for
3. Click the gear menu in the upper-right corner and select User overrides
4. Click Add user override
5. In the Override user field, select the student’s name from the list of course participants
6. For Due date, modify the due date to allow for the appropriate amount of time
7. Click Save