Technology & Instruction for UNEX

We have two free classes for instructors, potential instructors, or anyone curious about online teaching available for registration for the Summer quarter. Instructors who will be teaching online or hybrid classes for UCR Extension during the Fall or Winter quarters are required to complete  Teaching Online with Moodle (online or hybrid format) or demonstrate equivalent experience prior to teaching their first class.  Please note that the hybrid class has two meetings in one week, which is a change from the past, and the remaining two weeks are online, so this is a change from previous classes. Both classes cover the same material but offer different experiences. You are welcome to sign up for both if you like, but it seems unnecessary. 141MSCC02  - Teaching Online with Moodle - starts  June 10th , 2014  – Hybrid, 3 weeks; Meetings at UCR Extension on June 10th and 12th 4:30 – 6 PM This class covers the basics of te...

I use Dropbox almost every day and find it to be a very useful tool for accessing files from multiple computers. I was excited to read about the Dropbox integration with Moodle, but apparently I didn't read the details very closely. I'm not sure that there ever was a reason to use the Dropbox repository feature on our site, given the limitations that it has. There are a number of steps involved in setting up the Dropbox repository, but once you've done that, you can access Dropbox from within Moodle to add files to a class. Problem number 1 is that you can only access 1 Dropbox account per site. In my case, I overlooked that limitation since it was my own Dropbox account that I was accessing. Not very useful for anyone else. The second limitation is that you can only copy files from Dropbox and you can only do it one file at a time. The dialog box that shows up when you access Dropbox give you the choice of copying the file or linking to it. Of course,  linking to it i...

We have three courses for instructors which are still available for registration. 113MSCC11 Teaching Online with Moodle : online, 4 weeks, starts January 10 – this class covers the basics of teaching online and using Moodle. Participants learn about the online environment as they participate in the class and complete assignments. Development of a detailed course syllabus is the final project. Emphasis is on the unique features of online teaching and learning, and the transition from face-to-face to online. Open to anyone who might be interested in teaching online, not just UCR Extension instructors; no previous experience required. Optional project is to produce a proposal for an online course at UCR Extension. 113MSCC10 Teaching Online with Moodle : face-to-face, 3 meetings, starts January 11th; 6-8 PM, Wednesdays at UCR Extension – same as online version listed above. 113MSCC12 Producing Media for Your Online Course: online, 3 weeks, starts February 7th . Instructors learn ...

When students are working in our installation of Moodle, there are some common ways that their work can be lost. Because Moodle doesn't save what you've written until you click Save (assignments) or Post to Forum in Forums, anything that interrupts your connection to Moodle can lead to lost work and frustration. Interruptions include computer problems or network outages or disconnections. If you are writing anything longer than a paragraph,  it's a good idea to use a text editor to do your writing and then copy and paste into Moodle so no matter what happens, you won't lose any of your work. If you combine your use of a text editor with an online backup plan, you'll have a secure backup of all of your work even after the class ends and you can no longer access it (see below). You could use a word processor like Microsoft Word, but you may need to save your work as plain text first to avoid seeing formatting errors when you copy and paste from Word into Moodle. A...

We started our most recent classes for online instructors this week. We have 5 people in the face-to-face class and 47 in the online class. The online class has been pretty active so far and I hope we'll avoid the typical dropoff after the 2nd week this time. Our next class will be online -- Producing media for your online course , 3 weeks, Course ID: 111MSCC90, starts September 13th. You can register using any of the methods below. Instructors can register online using the course ID or by contacting Student Services: Tel: (951) 827-4105 or (800) 442-4990 toll-free E-mail: register@ucx.ucr.edu (include your name, email address, phone number and the course ID)

We have two free courses for instructors set up for the summer. An additional online course, Producing Media for your Online Course, will be added later and will start in early September. I'll post the details once that is set up. 111MSCC80  Teaching Online with Moodle , online, 4 weeks, starts August 9th (was previously starting July 27th) – this class is open to anyone who might be interested in teaching online, not just UCR Extension instructors; no previous experience required and they don't need to be scheduled to teach. If you have had inquiries from people interested in teaching online, this would be a good option for them. The goal for this class is to attract more potential online instructors as well as to prepare current instructors. Final project is to produce a proposal for an online course. We had 36 people enroll in this class during the Spring although most did not complete it.  111MSCC81  Creating and Teaching Your Moodle Course , face-to-face, 3 m...

Our Spring Moodle courses for instructors ended today. The experiment with Twitter was a partial success and it turned out that LinkedIn was a better resource for finding potential online instructors. We had a huge increase in enrollments -- 36 in our Teaching Online with Moodle and 28 in Producing Media for your Online Course. In the past when these courses were only open to people already teaching at UCR Extension, we had enrollments between 2-5 each quarter and in some quarters we had no students at all.  As might be expected, actual participation in our free courses was not as high as our enrollments. Probably half of those who enrolled actually participated at all, and a smaller number were active throughout the course. We had a small number of people who were already teaching at UCR Extension, and the benefit for them was the vast experience shared by many of our other participants. Several of them have been teaching online for many years and had not used Moodle in the pas...

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been tweeting about our training courses for online instructors. I can't say the response has been overwhelming, but I have gotten a few clicks and at least one student so far. I'm sticking with it, but here's the information about our classes -- all of them are free: Our Spring quarter Moodle classes for instructors are now available: 104MSCC79 - Creating and Teaching Your Moodle Course, face-to-face, 3 meetings, starts April 12; 6-8 PM – covers everything needed by an online instructor to get their course ready for the first time. 104MSCC80 - Creating and Teaching Your Moodle Course, online, 3 weeks, starts April 13 – same as above, but online. 104MSCC77 - Teaching Online with Moodle, online, 4 weeks, starts May 5 – this class is open to anyone who might be interested in teaching online, not just UCR Extension instructors; no previous experience required and you don't need to be scheduled to teach. The goal for this class...

If I had an iPad, I would give mTouch+ a try. It's a Moodle app for students and it looks like it has enough features that you can do pretty much all your work in most courses using an iPad. $2.99

I've always found the quiz feature in Moodle to be a little complicated, but if you create your quiz in the right format outside of Moodle using a text editor, it's very easy to import it and get everything set up pretty quickly. The key is to use one of the quiz formats that Moodle can read and to save that file in the UTF-8 file format. Many text editors will allow you to save in UTF-8. Once you've done this, you can import the quiz and everything will be added with no copying and pasting required. I like the Aiken file format. I don't believe that it was developed by Clay Aiken, the singer from American Idol, but who knows. The Moodle help pages explain the Aiken format in enough detail to get going: You just need to make each question in your quiz look like one of these two and everything will go smoothly. What is the correct answer to this question? A. Is it this one? B. Maybe this answer? C. Possibly this one? D. Must be this one! ANSWER: D Which LMS has ...

We recently added the Elluminate plugin to our Moodle installation at UCR Extension. This makes it easy to schedule a live session in Elluminate inside your Moodle course with the benefit that your students don't have to login again once they click the link to go to Elluminate. Step by step instructions on using the Elluminate plugin (PDF) .

Moodle's blocks are a great feature. They allow you to customize the look and functionality of your course home page. There are also times when you may not want blocks on your course page. These step by step instructions (PDF) explain how to add, delete and move blocks in Moodle.

PDF file showing the layout of part of a typical Moodle course with various items labeled.

Tracking is a feature in Moodle forums which will highlight unread forum messages so you can easily see what is new to you. You can turn tracking on and off for individual forums, but in order to use it, you must first turn it on in your profile. Instructors have the option of turning tracking on or off or making it optional for each forum they create in a course. This means if your instructor turns off tracking, you won't be able to track posts in a forum. The default setting is optional, so each student can decide whether or not to track posts. If you turn on tracking for a forum and you are also subscribed to that forum (receiving copies of posts via email), you will notice that posts you've been emailed will be marked as read once you return to the forum in Moodle. There is no communication between the email message and Moodle –– as long as you are sent the post via email, Moodle will mark it as read. If you aren't going to read forum posts via email, you may want to tu...

I was listening to the BBC's Digital Planet podcast this morning and they had an interesting segment about how a university in Brazil was making use of the resources from the OpenLearn project at the Open University in England. The project is similar to the Open CourseWare effort at MIT and elsewhere. In both cases, university courses are made available online and many include audio and video segments as well as the syllabus, assignments and so on. The big challenge is how to make use of these excellent materials. A persistent student might make their way through a cours e as a self-study, but I think they are more suited for modification by instructors who are teaching something similar. Maybe only a particular unit would fit into someone's course, but since these materials are offered under a Creative Commons  license, they can be modified and re-used as you like. The big step (in my mind) with the OpenLearn materials is that many of them are available as Moodle courses. ...