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The new version of Moodle brings innovations to the Forum

Moodle will be upgraded from June 23rd to 24th, 2020. During this time, Moodle is closed and cannot be logged into.

The new version 3.8 of Moodle will be launched on June 24, 2020. The update brings a number of new features, especially to the Forum activity.

Forums

The summary report provides an overview of all the participants and their activities in the forum area. You’ll find, for example, the number of discussions posted, the number of replies, the number of views, and the number of word and character count for each student. The view can be filtered for a limited time period or by groups.

Through the whole forum grading, the teacher can grade each student’s performance on the forum as a whole in addition to individual posts. The user interface is largely similar to the grading of Moodle assignment.

The new export function allows you to download the entire or more limited content of the forum in different formats.

Record audio & video

Moodle has new features that enable recording of video and audio directly in Moodle which enables, for example, an easy way of giving feedback to students and submission of assignments by students. These features are available everywhere in Moodle where the text editor is in use. Recording length has been limited to 2 minutes. The purpose of the limitation is to avoid filling up Moodle’s storage capacity and direct storing of longer recordings to dedicated services such as Unitube or OneDrive. The recorders use your device’s microphone or camera and work, for example, with a smartphone’s browser.

Emojis

In addition, you can now add emoijs to all content. The Emoji icon can be found both next to the message field and in the default Atto editor.

Contact us

  • You can ask questions and give feedback about the update at moodle@helsinki.fi
  • More Moodle guides: MoodleDocs
  • See upcoming Moodle trainings in SAP Suffeli.
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Join us in Moodle cleaning!

The storage of our Moodle server is filling up, but a new server is set to arrive in June 24th, 2020. With our course cleaning effort, we ensure that our current server remains operational and any unnecessary bits do not transfer needlessly to Moodle’s new home. Storage space is filled up mainly by courses, course backups, large file attachments and videos.

Course areas

Quickest way to do cleaning is to remove unnecessary course areas. You can inform us about unnecessary course areas at moodle@helsinki.fi. Add to your message the address of the course area, after which we will start the removal process of the course. You can get the address of your course area by going to the course front page and copying the address from your browser’s address bar.

Course backups

We recommend doing backups of your courses and storing these externally from Moodle. For example, at a password protected hard drive: instructions on how to backup. When you have successfully done a backup and saved it externally from Moodle, remove the backup so that it will not unnecessarily take space from Moodle. Instructions on how to remove backups:

  1. Click on the cogwheel (Actions menu) at the course front page.
  2. Click ‘Restore’.
  3. Go trough the ‘Course backup area’ and ‘User private backup area’.
  4. Click the button ‘Manage backup files’ under the backup area where you want to remove a backup file.
  5. Click the name of the backup file.
  6. Make sure that the file can be removed and click ‘Download’ to download the file.
  7. Click ‘Delete’.
  8. Click ‘OK’.
  9. Click ‘Save changes’.

Large file attachments

You can delete large attachments and file folders mainly directly from the front page of your course. Instructions for deleting files and folders:

  1. Make sure the edit mode is on from the course front page gear (Actions menu).
  2. Click ‘Edit’ for the item you want to delete.
  3. Select ‘Delete’.
  4. Click ‘Yes’.

You can also shrink files before importing them into Moodle. This speeds up the user experience and reduces the size of the course. For example, saving presentations in PDF format and reducing the size of large images. An easy way to reduce multiple images at once in Windows is to send the images to yourself using the Windows e-mail feature: right-click the image, select send, and then e-mail. Windows will provide you with different size options appropriate for online use.

Videos

Video files should be stored in the University of Helsinki’s own Unitube-Lataamo service (lataamo.helsinki.fi) or in another dedicated cloud environment. Videos from these services can be linked directly to Moodle or other services. Instructions for linking videos to Moodle from Unitube: Publishing Unitube videos on a Moodle course.

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Group choice: students choose their own group

Starting from January 2019, University of Helsinki Moodle and MOOC feature a new activity called “Group choice”. The Group choice activity allows students to select their own group from the groups defined by the teacher. Groups can be assigned a maximum size and students can be allowed to join more than one group. Students may also be allowed to change the group later. There are many practical applications for the Group choice activity. Below you will find three cases that teachers have already used in their courses.

How to use Group choice

First set up groups for the course. You can then add a Group choice activity by clicking the “Add an activity or resource” button and selecting Group choice from the list.

See more detailed instructions

Case 1: Exercise groups

Group choice activity can be used to let the students enrol themselves into exercise groups.

These exercise groups can be used, for example, in a group discussion by defining Separate groups in discussion forum settings.

Case 2: Scope of course

A teacher can add multiple modules to the same course area and allow students to decide how many credits they want to complete.

The student must click on the selection for the group of his choice and save the selection. In this case, the teacher has defined the groups for the course for 3 credits and 5 credits.

According to students’ choices, the course activities can be hidden or displayed with the Restrict Access setting. In this case, the teacher has defined the activity to be shown only to the group that has selected 5 credits.

Case 3: Visibility of course sections

The third example is a course where the student can choose whether to see all the sections of the course at one time or at the pace defined by the teacher.

This allows you to use a restriction set in the Restrict access setting of the section, where you can set multiple conditions for visibility.

The method described above has been used in Learn Moodle Basics MOOC courses at https://learn.moodle.net/.

As you can see from the three cases, the possibilities of using groups will increase. Above all, Group choice activity saves teachers’ time because the students can enrol to the groups themselves. The Group choice is somewhat simpler to use than enrolment key for self-enrolment and a Group choice can be added to the course even after students have registered for the course.