What’s new in Moodle 2?

Dr Mark Glynn, Institutes of Technology of IrelandE-mail: mark@enhancingteaching.com Twitter: @glynnmark Blog: http://enhancingteaching.com

4. Quizzes

Introduction

References http://www.diigo.com/list/markglynn/moodle-2

The VLE is integral to most higher educations with HE in Ireland no exception. More than half of the higher education institutions in Ireland use the open source product

Moodle as their main Learning Management System (LMS) with the remainder using a commercial counterpart Blackboard. As Blackboard has evolved to Blackboard 9,

Moodle has moved to Moodle 2.

This evolution to Moodle 2 brings numerous changes for the lecturer and student. This poster will highlight some of the key changes for the lecturer leading with the

pedagogical benefits and not the technology niceties. This poster only illustrates the tip of the iceberg when it comes to outlining the extensive changes. The entire

navigation experience through Moodle 2 is completely changed for both the student and teacher.

For more information visit http://enhancingteaching.com/moodle-2-how-to-tutorial-guides/

 

3. Rubrics

Dramatic changes have been made to the file structure in Moodle 2. The details behind this can be discussed elsewhere. But suffice to say for a teachers point of view the interface for uploading a file to share on your moodle course has changed significantly.

A rubric is a scoring tool that explicitly

represents the performance expectations

for an assignment or piece of work. In

Moodle 1.9 Rubrics were available

through a plug-in. Rubrics are now

available as standard.

Rubrics in Moodle 2 are 100%

customizable and can be made available

as templates across a course, program or

entire college if required.. When teachers

use the rubric to assess some student's

work, they select the level describing the

student's performance best for each

criterion. Currently selected levels are

highlighted in light green.

1. Managing files 2. Conditional activities

Scan to download

poster

The new “Conditional activities” feature within moodle allows the teacher to

restrict access to a particular activity or resource i.e. Quiz or word document until

the student meets specific criteria e.g activity 2 will be released to the student

when they achieve a certain grade in activity 1. This has huge potential for

providing students with individual learning pathways. In Moodle 2.3 an entire

section can be conditionally released if required.

It is now possible to access your files stored in your

Google and dropbox accounts directly. The interface is

simplified and more intuitive.

Furthermore the dropdown menu for add a resource or

activities have been replaced with a much cleaner

interface

The flexibility associated with online

quizzes make them very attractive

for both students and teachers. The

new “override” feature in Moodle 2

increases that flexibility. Teachers

can now give extra time to

individual students for example if

they have reading difficulties. Or

you can set the same quiz to be

available for different class groups

at different times if required.

5. Seamlessly linking with other software

 IMS LTI is an IMS standard for Learning Tool Interoperability. This

means that learning tools now have a set way in which they can

seamlessly connect to each other. Moodle 2 has this capability. A

lecturer can seamlessly connect to an external tool e.g.

Wordpress or PB Wikis. and Moodle sets up user accounts for the

student on this external tool automatically. It is then possible to

Frequent quizzing reportedly maintains student study effort and promotes

course engagement (Johnson, 2006). However quizzes can be time intensive to

set up. Moodle 2 has another new feature enabling the teacher to “duplicate” a

quiz once they have designed a quiz with the diverse range of features available

through Moodle. Therefore saving the teacher significant time and effort.

6. WorkshopsWorkshop is a peer assessment

activity available as standard in

Moodle 2. Students submit their

work via an online text tool and

attachments. There are two grades

for a student: their own work and

their peer assessments of other

students' work.

The progress of the activity is

visualized in so called Workshop

planner tool. It displays all workshop

phases and highlights the current one. It also lists all the tasks the user has in

the current phase with the information of whether the task is finished or not yet

finished or even failed. The activity is much easier to use in Moodle 2.

There are numerous other changes in Moodle 2 that just could not fit on the one page, further changes to the features mentioned above and other features like

Assignments, Cohorts, Community hubs, Wikis and the Comment block. Moodle 2 is a dramatic improvement on its predecessor and with structured updates released

every six months i.e. Moodle 2.2 released in January 2012 and Moodle 2.3 released in July 2012, the evolution of Moodle 2 will continue to result in further benefits to

both the student and teacher.

transfer any grades or feedback that the student receives and import it directly into

the Moodle gradebook.

An alternative benefit of this functionality is that a student, while studying the

majority of their modules in “college A” can study one module from “college B”

accessing the VLE in college B using their own username and password from

college A. The potential uses of this are amazing

Conclusions