Moodle

Turnitin in Moodle rolls out

Learning Technology and Innovation are pleased to announce the roll out of Turnitin originality check from within Moodle across the School from Tuesday 16th August.

Turnitin provides originality checks against webpages, library catalogues, journals and publications but also other student submitted work (within LSE and other institutions). By integrating Turnitin into Moodle, originality checking becomes more efficient, reliable and a robust solution in identifying matched text through the production of originality reports and scores (%); viewed directly within Moodle.

Learning Technology and Innovation (LTI) have trialled the integration at eleven departments across the School; liaising with ARD, GLPD, IMT, SU and TLC throughout.

We will roll out the integration across departments and are developing supporting material for teachers and students ranging from documentation, videos, FAQs etc.

If you would like LTI to demo how Turnitin in Moodle works; Book a place to our briefing or get in touch with LTI for 1-2-1 or departmental sessions.

For full details on the rollout and the resources available, please visit the Turnitin page.

June 28th, 2016|Announcements, Assessment, eAssessment News, Ed-Tech news and issues, Moodle, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

Celebrating LTI’s Moodle men!

This week two members of the LTI team were recognised for their work at the 2016 IMT awards.

Chris Fryer the LTI Systems Manager was awarded ‘unsung hero’ for his behind the scenes efforts to ensure that Moodle is always up and running and working well with other LSE systems.

He is a very deserving recipient of this award as LSE Moodle has the highest rates of ‘up time’ across the whole of the UK compared to other HE institutions. Over the last academic year it has been online 99.99% of the time, this means that the system was ‘live’ for all bar 42 minutes in 2015/16!

LSE Moodle has supported the running of 1651 active Moodle courses across all departments, the IPA, language centre, TLC, HR and LSE Enterprise (a 50% increase from the previous year and that doesn’t include those courses in the Summer School and TRIUM). Moodle courses were accessed by over 22000 unique users and facilitated over 15.5 million ‘participating actions’ (actions where students and staff click to do something on Moodle).

His work has not gone unnoticed by those in IMT with staff recognising his dedication to the job:

“Chris Fryer doesn’t seem to ever truly take a holiday. Regardless if he is hiking through Italy or looking after his kids, if there is an emergency he will take time to fix it”.

In addition, our very own ‘Moodle Man’, Milan Popovcic was awarded “Excellence in Customer Service” for his work on responding to LTI.Support@lse.ac.uk emails. Recent analysis of the LTI emails has illustrated that LTI responded to queries from every academic department, centre and institute across the school from staff and students alike. Moodle is the most common query but topics also included questions on online assessment, the use of forums and social media, how to record audio feedback and requests for training. The number of emails received has gone up year on year, with 4667 emails received for September 2015 to June 2016.

Milan is often the member of staff that responds to these calls for help and was one of the most nominated colleagues across several categories with positive comments from customers and colleagues.

“Delightful manner, patience of a saint, really cares about helping academics with their problems, not just answering their queries but also developing them to help themselves. Milan is a joy to work with”.

We are currently working on developing more resources and support to go on our new website which should be up and running before the start of Michaelmas term 2016. In the meantime if you have any queries, Moodle or otherwise please contact lti.support@lse.ac.uk

June 23rd, 2016|Announcements, Moodle, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

New features for Moodle

Moodle was upgraded to version 2.7 as part of the reset process. The changes to Moodle are minimal and can be seen below along with some features of Moodle that you may not be aware of.

Changes to Moodle

New text editor
Atto is the new default text editor in Moodle from version 2.7 onwards. Clicking the top left icon (highlighted in red below) will expand it to three rows.

The previous text editor (‘TinyMCE’ shown below) contains additional font style settings and the paste from word button. If you prefer the old editor you can select the TinyMCE as your default text editor from your profile settings.

Go to Administration > My Profile settings > Edit profile.

Then select ‘TinyMCE html editor’ from the drop down list for Text editor, then click ‘update profile’.

Improvements to Quizzes
2.7 sees the introduction of new features to quiz question banks, including question duplication, moving questions and save changes and continue editing buttons. The essay question now allows students to add an attachment with no accompanying text.

Improvements to assignments
Teachers can now comment directly on students work when they submit via online text.

Some features you may not be aware of:

Turnitin plugin

This plugin allows work to be submitted automatically to Turnitin, ( the plagiarism checking software ) directly from the assessment activity. Teachers can then mark and give feedback using the Turnin GradeMark features. If enabled students can also see their originality reports and use this information for plagiarism prevention training.

This feature is being enabled to individual courses on request. For more information about using this tool or to take part in a pilot please contact LTI.Support@lse.ac.uk or see the Moodle-Turnitin Integration Moodle page.

Activity completion

This can be set up to record the completion of various activities in your course. A check (tick) appears against the activity when the student meets the criteria you have set (e.g. viewing an activity, submitting an assignment, or passing an assignment).

Once you have set up your assessments with activity completion details you can then set up the completion details for the whole course. Go to ‘course completion’ in the administration block and, select ‘Course is complete when all conditions are met’ and then select all activities to be completed.

You can then access a quick view to see if students have completed the activities in your course by going into ‘Administration’, > ‘Reports’, > ‘Course completion’.