Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning @ UoP

Author: Mike Wilson (Page 1 of 2)

Similarity scoring is a secondary consideration for online assessment…

Similarity scoring should be a secondary consideration for online assessment. Much more important factors, from my point of view, are ease of marking for academics; access to quality feedback for students; and innovative authentic assessment workflows.

Turnitin are close to monopolising the market on similarity scoring of student papers but many assessment platforms already use Turnitin and Urkund as plugin services to provide similarity scoring.

Where should we be focusing our effort at UoP?

As an institution one of our strengths lies in quiz/question-based assessments. This is particularly the case in the Science and Technology faculties. We have a mature sophisticated platform in Moodle to deliver these types of assessments and a deep level of staff expertise across the organisation, which has developed further through-out the pandemic.

The risk factors for UoP include a need to increase capacity for online exams (or diversify some of our assessment types onto an external platform at peak periods) and the ability to be able to innovate in terms of essay/file-based assessments.

From what I can see, Turntin has stagnated in terms of assessment innovations in recent years and have not yet improved service reliability at key assessment periods by migrating their platforms to a service like AWS. This has been promised repeatedly but not delivered on as yet.

This is potentially a reason why we saw growth in Moodle assignment and quiz usage during the pandemic rather than a big increase in Turnitin usage (trust in the reliability of the service and flexibility of the functionality).

So where could we focus our effort to improve the assessment tools for educators and students to gain the most benefits?

Innovative assessment workflows

Posing a long-form question to a student and easily marking the finished product should be a simple process – and it is on platforms such as Turnitin. However, we are increasingly adapting our assessments to be more authentic: assessments that more closely match how students will operate in the workplace. This often requires more sophisticated workflows and mechanisms, which should still be straightforward for academics to engage with and make sense of if they are to be successful. 

Traditional paper-based exams (potentially bring your own device)

During the pandemic staff were forced to transition away from paper-based exams. Many exams were instead delivered as coursework or window assignments (e.g. a 2hr assignment within a 24hr window) or as question-based quiz exams. When exam halls are available again staff may revert back to previous paper-based solutions. After all, we know how these work and paper doesn’t need charging or a stable wifi connection. However, we can harness this forward momentum with a platform dedicated to supporting timed essay assignments on students’ own devices or University machines. Several platforms offer functionality for students to download assignments at the start of an exam with no need to have an internet connection until it’s time to submit at the end. This could represent a robust, safe exam experience that more closely matches how students study today. Who handwrites for three hours any more? I’d be willing to bet most students don’t.

There are challenges with BYOD (bring your own device) particularly around charging and ensuring student machines are reliable. Many of these challenges can be solved with a small stock of fully charged devices, which can be swapped out to students when needed. Chromebooks are ideal online exam devices for this very reason, due to their long battery life and simple configuration. 

Assessment feedback

Workflows such as “feedback before grades” can help students better engage with their feedback, but better access to feedback for students in a variety of places is also key.

Services that offer a holistic view of assessment feedback, or the ability to extract these comments via API so we can build our own views, are increasingly valuable. This functionality will enable key staff such as personal tutors or learning support tutors to view student feedback as a whole (rather than in silos) to spot key areas to help students improve their academic work.

To round out where I started with this post, providing similarity checking is an important part of modern assessment – but it is a problem that has already been solved, multiple times.

If we make assessment more authentic, more flexible and more collaborative there will be less need for plagiarism detection because students will be demonstrating more of the attributes we want them to leave University with. I accept this is perhaps an overly idealistic viewpoint, as there are a lot of students to assess each year, but this is more reason to explore flexible assessment solutions that can make the lives of academics and students a bit easier.

Online assessment in the time of Covid

In pre-Covid times, exams delivered via Moodle were limited by the availability of suitable physical spaces. Exam rooms represented a bottleneck to the number of students taking exams concurrently.

For the last year, we’ve used Moodle (and integrated platforms) to deliver the majority of our teaching and assessment online.

A visualisation of the online assessment mix at the University of Portsmouth:

Diagram of how the Assignments and the Exams overlap during assessment period

In May 2020 many academics who had previously planned to deliver paper-based exams had to quickly adapt and deliver online assessments. In some cases, these required students to scan or take pictures of their work and upload these to assignments (Moodle or Turnitin) for marking. 

In recent months, newer platforms to handle this workflow and ease the marking burden for academics have been developed – platforms such as Turnitin Gradescope and CrowdMark. These platforms leverage the similarities in students’ answers so academics can mark many answers at once. When time allows, we hope to be able to evaluate these platforms in more detail.

In the diagram above you can see “Assignments under exam conditions” as the meeting point between traditional essays and restricted online exams. This year we have seen a big growth in this area as academics move from paper-based written exams to time-restricted assignments. An obvious caveat here is that these haven’t been conducted under true exam conditions and so are best described as open book exams. Many digital assessment platforms now include various types of proctoring and would be able to handle remote time-restricted essays (and other assessment types) securely. There are, however, a number of ethical issues to be considered with online proctoring, and we need to proceed cautiously here. 

As a University, I feel we should also be looking to expand our capacity for online assessment as over the next decade we will probably see the end of paper-based exams in favour of typed essay papers delivered online due in part to student expectations.

Academics have had a year to adapt to exams in lockdown and many have discovered the benefits of Moodle quizzes for exams that offer automatic marking. (And note that Moodle is excellent at delivering scientific and mathematical exam questions as well as longer coursework assignment submissions.) Generally speaking the Technology and Science and Health faculties deliver the majority of our Moodle quiz based exams and the number of exams has grown significantly during the lockdown. Many academics don’t want to go back to paper.

In Technology Enhanced Learning we oversee online exams and assessments in terms of supporting and evaluating the digital tools and making sure Moodle can handle the number of exams thrown at it. The number of online exams has increased substantially over the last year, all funnelled into two exam windows. As a team we work closely with colleagues in IS to provide more capacity in Moodle and with timetabling to ensure the exams are evenly distributed to avoid terminal peaks of concurrent users, providing a stable Moodle platform for all users.

Without the bottleneck of physical exam rooms, the January 2021 exams were initially weighed in the favour of academic requests around having exams earlier in the day and only using the first week of the exam window to maximise available marking time. Unfortunately, this translated into a scenario that would have presented a significant number of terminal peaks of concurrent users on Moodle. Members of TEL worked closely with the central timetabling unit to level out these peaks and with the exception of one or two slow points, we all delivered a successful exam window in January.

In advance of the May/June exams, we have gone further and set hard parameters around how many exams (quizzes) or timed assignments (Turnitin or Moodle assignments) can be timetabled in any given time slot. We’d like to thank CTU for their tireless effort to make this happen. It wasn’t an easy job to manage all the necessary requirements but it’s given us an exam timetable that looks like the image below. This really is invaluable work to the University when assessment represents so much effort by students, academics and support staff.

A screenshot of the exams for a week, days, dates, section, then slips into assignments and exams then the total of students expected to be in Moodle during that period

Our increasing reliance on online assessment means, I think, that we should investigate new technologies to support that function. Platforms such as Gradescope or CrowdMark could help relieve the marking burden; one of the many platforms such as Wiseflow or Mettl or Inspera could provide extra exam capacity (with the functionality to proctor exams if that was something the University wanted to do). Moodle, with its advanced quiz and assignment capabilities, would continue to play a key role.

I believe we will get through this coming assessment period well, but as our reliance on online assessment grows so must our technologies to support it. 

As a University the Covid-19 pandemic has been a driver for the uptake of online learning and assessment. As a University community, we need to harness this positive momentum and diversify our offering of assessment platforms to support students and staff.

Credit Image: Photo by MayoFi on Unsplash 

Engaging students with online assessment feedback

An Exploration Project

Technology Enhanced Learning and Academic Development are leading an exploration project centered around engaging students with online assessment feedback. We’re specifically exploring an assessment platform called Edword.

It’s worth mentioning that we’re taking a more scientific approach to this project, you could almost imagine it as an education lab experiment. 

Academics and educational technologists within our team have evaluated the functionality and advanced workflows that Edword offers. We think that it offers some real tangible benefits to students and staff. The platform has been designed based on some pedagogically sound principles, that’s really what’s most exciting about it. I’ll demonstrate some examples of these in action later in this post.

It’s not enough that we’re excited about a new assessment tool though. We need to explore and test whether our students and staff actually do experience a benefit from using Edword when compared to one of our existing assessment platforms such as Turnitin or the Moodle assignment.

In order for me to explain what Edword allows us to do, I need to explain what’s missing from our existing assessment systems. 

Current feedback workflow

Turnitin / Moodle assignment

Assessment graded, student sees grade, end of workflow

When an online assignment is handed back to a student via Moodle or Turnitin students see their grade immediately, before they’ve had a chance to read any inline or summary  feedback added by their lecturer. The grade is often seen by students as the end point within their assessment, their grade is a students entry point to the next stage of their course. What we actually want students to engage with is the meaningful and constructive feedback their academics have produced for them. This will help students improve their next piece of work. Unfortunately many students don’t read their assessment feedback and miss out on the benefits to them.

Edword has a ‘lock grade’ feature which means students can’t see their grade until after they’ve read their feedback and potentially also submitted a reflection on how they will put their feedback into practise. In this way, Edword supports the feed forward model of good academic practise.

The Edword workflow looks more like this:

Edword workflow

Assignment is graded, student reads feedback, student writes reflection on feedback, student sees grade, student improves on next assignment

We also hope the feedback provided within Edword will be more engaging. Academics can enrich inline feedback with learning objects such as videos or H5P interactive learning objects. Rather than the flat text based feedback comments within Turnitin and Moodle, feedback in Edword helps students understand the mistakes they are making along with an immediate way to re-test their knowledge. The platform supports assessment for learning concepts.

 

A h5p learning activity embedded into assessment feedback for a student

A H5P interactive learning object within feedback in Edword

Edword records how long a student spends engaging with their feedback and allows students to rate the usefulness of the feedback they receive. These metrics are presented to staff as a way to evaluate how engaged students are and which feedback comments could be improved from a student perspective. 

We will make Edword available to staff and students during teaching block two with an on-boarding event for staff happening in early February. If you would like to take part in the project or ask some questions, please get in contact:

Mike Wilson

Ext. 3194

michael.wilson@port.ac.uk

A video introduction to Edword can be found here

Great feedback is essential

Wouldn’t it be great if students could read the feedback they’ve received for their assignment, write a short reflection on what they could do to improve (perhaps also identifying what they’d like to receive feedback on next time round) and then see their grade? 

Our current online assessment tools (Turnitin and Moodle Assignment) don’t allow us to do this. Luckily we know an assignment tool that does – and it has many other modern assessment feedback mechanisms too.

I’m passionate about helping improve assessment feedback for students. It’s one of the things I’ll be working on in my new secondment as a Senior Lecturer in Digital Learning & Innovation. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays I’ll be working between the TEL and AcDev teams to help coordinate projects to better support academics, Online Course Developers and students with a focus on digital education. In particular, I’ll be working to help get a small pilot off the ground for EdWord – a fantastic new assessment tool that promises to address many of the requirements of modern assessment and feedback. If you’re interested in taking part in this pilot please let me know.

In addition, I’ll also be helping to establish an online staff community alongside the APEX programme featuring special interest groups. This will be a great place to make contact with like-minded staff from other faculties and exchange ideas.

Tom Langston and I will be creating a support mechanism for Online Course Developers who are interested in completing their CMALT portfolio and who might be interested in taking part in future elearning projects with TEL.

I’ll also be doing a bit of lecturing on the Research Informed Teaching programme, which I’m looking forward to. So this will be a busy year for me!

Please get in touch if you’ve got any ideas or projects we can help you with. Both the TEL and AcDev teams would appreciate  your feedback as we work to ensure we’re offering the services that will provide value to you and your students (you can reach me on ext. 3194).

Image credit: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paper_Plane_Vector.svg

 

Grackle for accessible Google Docs and Slides

I was chatting to an academic the other day. We were talking about the new tool in Moodle for automatically checking the accessibility of documents and providing alternative formats on-the-fly. It’s called Blackboard Ally and it’ll even give you step-by-step guidance on how to fix any accessibility issues (hint: click the meter icon for advice and guidance).

A screenshot of a Moodle site displaying the Blackboard Ally plugin and the accessibility icon next to a resource. The accessibility score is high

But wait they said, that’s fine for documents, Powerpoints and PDFs but I use Google Docs all the time, how can I improve those?

Ah, I said, you’ll need to use a bit of Grackle on that. It’s not for grouting your bathroom, it’s for fixing your Google Docs, so everyone can read them more easily.

Grackle comes in two flavours Grackle for Google Docs and Grackle for Google Slides. You just add the extensions to your Google Chrome browser and then launch Grackle from the add-ons menu as you’re creating your Google Slides or Documents.

A screenshot from Google Docs showing how to launch Grackle from the Add-ons, Grackle Slides, Launch menu item

Grackle produces a checklist of common accessibility problems and highlights any of these issues in your documents. It’s usually very straight-forward to fix them.

The most common issues are images without alternative text (descriptive titles of the images), poor contrast between text and background colours and lack of document structure / headings. These are easily fixed and Grackle will show you exactly where these problems appear in your documents.

A screenshot from Google Slides showing the Grackle accessibility advice panel.

Take a look at this website to find out more about the handy features of Grackle.

Disclaimer: Parts of this conversation may have been embellished for entertainment value…

Image Credits: Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Jason Leung 

Online Exams in Moodle

We’ll start to see a lot of online Moodle exams from Monday 29th April.

At this time of year a lot of time is dedicated to preparing for the formal exam weeks to begin. Academics and Online Course Developers are creating questions and testing exam quizzes. The TEL team are testing the Moodle infrastructure and exam reporting, and working with IS to ensure we have enough server resources at key times during the exam period. This year the formal examination weeks will run from Monday 13th May 2019 through to Friday 7th June 2019. It’s worth making a note in your diary about these dates but as I’ll highlight in this blog post, you’ll probably want to set these dates to start from Monday 29th April.

What constitutes an online Moodle exam?

We encourage staff to tag Moodle-based exams with the ‘exam-official’ tag and set appropriate dates. This information, along with data provided by Online Courses Developers, helps us build a picture of the when exams are happening. It means we can spot ‘pinch points’, times where we expect a lot of concurrent exam attempts, which could represent a need for more server resources to be made available. In short if you don’t tag your assessments we’ll find it difficult to guarantee a seamless exam experience for your students.

Tagging also means you can run your online exams in one of our supported secure exam browser environments (Safe Exam Browser, FAQs available here or Chromebooks in secure exam mode). This means students can’t easily access other websites during their exam and makes invigilation a lot easier.

How many online exam attempts were there last year?

During the official exam period last year (13.05.2018–07.06.2018) there were 5426 exams attempts that we all helped support. However, this figure isn’t the full picture. In the two week preceding the exam period 2737 official online exam attempts took place. That’s quite a staggering number of exam attempts happening outside of the time-frame that staff are focussed on supporting and something we should all be mindful of this year. Monday April 29th is the start date for your diaries.

Exams change freeze

IS and TEL enforce a number of Moodle change freezes throughout the academic year. These are periods when no updates can be made to Moodle. We have one in place during the exam period to ensure changes don’t inadvertently interrupt exams. The exam change freeze this year will run from Monday 29th April through to Friday 7th June (inclusive).

How do we monitor exams are going well?

The TEL team gather data from a number of sources to help monitor what’s happening through the exam period. We combine it into a real-time dashboard of where exams are happening and how Moodle is performing. You can see a picture below from last year.

Exam Analytics Dashboard

We rely on support from a number of sources to produce this dashboard. Lead Online Course Developers have their finger on the pulse of when exams will happen and any last minute amendments. In the very near future we’ll be asking again for your help to populate a spreadsheet with the exams you know about. We combine this information with data from student records, which is thorough but lacks local knowledge. We also use Google Analytics, Moodle database and server infrastructure reporting to keep an eye on how our systems our performing. This combined data is extremely useful at spotting pinch points and monitoring how things are running but it’s not as effective as people in faculties such as exam invigilators and online course developers ensuring all is running well and reporting to elearn@port.ac.uk any issues that are encountered.

A new exam theme for Moodle

It’s worth mentioning at this point that we’re close to final testing of an updated version of the Moodle exam theme. This is a stripped down version of our theme intended for use in exams. We’ll provide more information on this in the next few weeks. It will look very similar to the existing exam theme but will be a bit closer to our regular theme in terms of question layout and styles.

Thank You

We just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone involved in making sure the exam period goes well. It’s very much a big team effort and all the work we put in ensures students get as stress-free an experience as possible. I’m sure they appreciate it, I know that the team in TEL certainly do.

If you have any questions about online exams, please get in touch at elearn@port.ac.uk

 

Thank You Image

Image credits: Photo by Lip on Unsplash

Moodle Baseline – A new standardised template for all Moodle modules

In recent student surveys it’s become clear that students want more consistency to the layout of their Moodle modules. Students want it to be easier to find key information such as what the module is about, what they will learn and how they will be assessed.

It’s increasingly important that we present content for students in an accessible way so everyone can engage with content easily.

TEL and AcDev have led a feedback exercise with staff from all University faculties, along with a pilot with academics and students on Nursing Degrees delivered by Science. These exercises have helped us establish what the key requirements would be for a standardised approach to the layout of Moodle modules and the development of the Moodle Baseline template.

The Moodle Baseline represents the basic building blocks for starting to build a Moodle module. Here’s a summary of main tabs available within the template.

The Welcome tab allows staff to add a welcome message to students in html format (this could include a welcome video or perhaps link to a discussion forum).

Welcome tab of Moodle Baseline

The Module Overview tab allows a plain text description of the module to be added.

Module Overview of Moodle Baseline

A list of Learning Outcomes can be added to the third tab.

Learning Outcomes tab of Moodle Baseline

The Assessment Summary tab allows for a description of the assessments that a student will be required to complete. There is also a table to keep track of submissions. Students will be able to see the status of their assessment submissions and upcoming important dates. Staff will see progress bars representing how many submissions have been made along with an indicator of how many assignments require marking.

Assessment Summary tab in Moodle Baseline

All new and rolled-over Moodle modules will have the Moodle Baseline template added automatically from March 1st 2019, giving staff time to add content in advance of September 2019.

When the Moodle Baseline launches on March 1st we will also release a web-based resource for guidance on how to complete the template along with useful best practise advice for populating your Moodle module including topics such as marking online and giving effective feedback.

We hope you find the Moodle Baseline a useful tool for creating rich and engaging Moodle modules. If you have any questions please get in contact at elearn@port.ac.uk

New Moodle theme

Over the past academic year members of TEL have been talking to people across the University about what Moodle should look like and what it should do.

We’ve conducted focus groups and had meetings with students, academics, support staff, “powers users”, IS, Marketing and Department of Student and Academic Administration (DSAA). This has allowed us to produce a requirements list of what Moodle users need in terms of the interface.

Drum roll please… we’re very pleased to announce that early adopters can now switch to the new theme for their Moodle units. This will enable academics and Online Course Developers to start developing content in time for September. Units will be automatically switched to the new theme when they are rolled over this summer.

(click image to enlarge)

To switch to the new theme manually press Course administration > Editing Settings > Appearance > UoP Boost

You can also view a demo course featuring the new theme by visiting this link.

We’d very much welcome your feedback on the new theme. Please complete this form if you have any ideas for us.

Keeping everyone happy – tricky but not impossible

Anonymous or blind marking is an important part of the assessment and feedback process. For a student it ensures work is marked fairly without bias. However, there is an equally valuable requirement for academics and support staff to be able to identify students who have yet to submit their assignment and may be in need of additional support.

In the paper-based past, this was a relatively easy task. Students submitted assignments with cover sheets which could be easily removed my administrators. Assignments were tracked and handed to academics for blind marking.

Online assessment technology such as Turnitin and the Moodle assignment match-up quite closely to the workflow of paper-based assessment but with a few extra tools to help academics. There is no longer a need for students to identify themselves within their assignments as we know who they are when they log into Moodle. In fact, by the letter of the law, a student can be penalised for adding their name to an assignment. In reality, though, some departments still require students to provide a cover sheet in their assignment which invalidates the the blind marking setting in their Moodle or Turnitin assignment. My guess at the motivation for identifying students would be one of trying to help students and make ensure they don’t miss their deadlines. I’d be genuinely interested to hear the reasons for the need for cover sheets in the comments below.

What if there was a way for all the assessment stakeholders to get what they need and still preserve anonymity? Well luckily there now is a way to do this in Moodle.

On each UoP Moodle unit you will find a new report under Course Administration > Reports > Course Submissions.

When an assignment is live, course administrators and Online Course Developers can see a submission status, Turnitin paper id (or Moodle participant number), provisional grade and identifying information for each student in a cohort or group. This is all the information they will need to keep an eye on the process and transfer grading information to student records later on. With a bit of extra magic lecturers get to see a subset of this information including the identifying student information and a submission status even when an assignment is anonymised. For academics there is no link between the submission status and a specific submission, this is released to the academic after the post date. Coupled with a release threshold, which prevents anyone guessing who’s who, the report attempts to keep everyone happy.

Here’s an idea of what the report looks like in practice.

Click image for full size version

In the near future we plan to allow staff to download the data from the course submissions report to a spreadsheet making it easier to transfer to student records.

I’d be interested to hear if this makes online assessment a little easier. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments box at the bottom of this page. If you find the report useful you may find the new assessment course format helps you out too. A short introduction video is available here:

Attributions
“Anonymous” image courtesy of Luciano Castello CC: www.flickr.com/photos/luccast85/6250260580

A plan for the visual revamp of Moodle

Moodle is based on open source technology which along with it’s thriving support community is one of the big reasons it’s so successful. It’s relatively straight-forward to mould Moodle to fit the organisation delivering it. In our case Moodle is branded inline with the University style guide but we go further than that and include usability customisations and features to improve the overall user experience and accessibility of the site, with the aim of making it a useful tool for all.

Our Moodle site is due a visual revamp. The University is currently in the middle of a re-brand consultation which will produce a new logo and visual identity to our websites. Moodle HQ are also re-working the user interface to make it more modern and user friendly. The TEL team are working with IS to migrate Moodle to a new POSTGRES database system to keep pace with increased usage of our site. We’d also like to include some handy new features in our Moodle theme (the theme is where we customise the look and feel of our Moodle site).

We’re taking a staggered approach to the visual revamp of Moodle, here’s our rough road map.

  • June 2017 – Moodle 3.3 environment available to staff with helpful new features
  • August 2017 – New UoP logo is incorporated into the UoP Bootstrap theme design along with re-worked unit header
  • September 2017 – Work starts on our new Boost based Moodle theme
  • January 2018 – Student and staff usability testing of the new UoP Boost theme
  • April 2018 – Advance preview of the UoP Boost theme is available to staff
  • June 2018 – UoP boost theme in Moodle available to staff for 2018/19 

So what are these handy new unit features for 2017/18 and how will they help students and staff?

Re-worked unit header

Online Course Developers in UoP Faculties have come up with some great ideas to give Moodle units a common look and feel for each department and provide easy access to individual topics. We’d like to make this process easier and lessen the need for customisation on a unit-by-unit basis which can be very time consuming. The new unit header will allow staff to upload a cover image quickly and easily. There will be a ‘jump to’ box allowing users to skip straight to a topic further down the page and a filter box to help track down an activity hidden amongst the unit content. We’re also going to make accessibility options more visible and improve editing features for staff with a simple editing on/off switch.

At the top of this post you’ll see a mock-up of what we’re working on. It’s worth mentioning that the new header layout will only be invoked if a member of staff uploads a cover image, if not the existing unit header layout will remain, meaning customisations created by OCDs will be left intact.

Bootstrap elements front and centre

Degree Apprenticeship programmes are on the way. They will mean a lot more of our learning content is delivered online and students will likely be studying units from multiple University faculties at once. It’s important that these units have a unified look and feel along with common sign-posting. A quick an efficient way to achieve this is to make a library of common element templates available within the Moodle text editor. A member of staff will be able to add a styled text box to highlight further reading, an assessment brief or an accordion of categorised content which is styled in a way which makes it easy to spot whichever unit a student is on. Tom Cripps in TEL is hard at work putting together the library of common elements which should prove to be a really useful tool.

My Home (Dashboard)

Moodle 3.3 features a new ‘My Overview’ block which was developed to give students and staff a better view of their upcoming activities, and course progress and completion. We’re currently investigation whether the new block will be useful as a central part of the My Home page alongside or as a replacement for the current ‘My Sites’ block.

Inspiration from Snap

I was really lucky to be able to attend Moodle Moot UK in London in April. One session that really inspired me was on the Snap theme. Snap has some great ideas for modernising the Moodle interface. It’s probably fair to say that some of the features are too much of a departure from the existing user experience but we’ll certainly be looking at some of the clever features in Snap as inspiration for our own theme.

Big stuff for summer 2018

The navigation within Moodle is changing, blocks are being limited to dashboard and unit pages and the Moodle interface is generally moving closer to the Moodle mobile app. A nav draw on the left of the site will be introduced with only the most important navigation elements of units displayed. The course administration block is becoming a cog with drop-down menu, freeing-up screen real-estate and standardising where you go to make changes to units or resources. In summer 2018 Moodle should ship with a much improved dashboard (My Home page) which focusses on activity, course and assessment completion. This should become a useful tool for helping students and staff keep on track.

We hope this gives you a flavour of what’s to come in Moodle from an interface point of view (we’ll blog again with new Moodle 3.3 features coming to our Moodle site this summer). As always we’re all ears if you have ideas about how Moodle can be improved (feel free to leave a comment below or give us a call). We’ll also be looking for staff and student volunteers for theme usability testing early next year so if you’d like to be involved please get in touch.

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