An easy way to help your students start the semester is by adding a “Start Here!” block in your course side menu. This start here block can contain a syllabus, welcome video and a screencast guided tour as well as links to other resources. The videos below and the graphic elements will help you create your first start here block.
How to add a “Start Here” Block
How to Download and Save Graphic Elements
Start Here Graphic
Horizontal Rule For Header
Horizontal Rule
In this TED video Salman Kahn explains why Khan Academy works. Here is a quote from a recent Stanford Graduate School of Business lecture:
“Our total invested capital to date is less than $3 million, and we’re pushing about 5 million unique students per month,” Khan said proudly. “That’s six to seven times the number of students that Harvard has served since 1636.”
Think about the return on investment that we are seeing here.
It seems that many think that all you need to do to have an online course is to upload a syllabus and a few Word documents. Online learning environments are much more dynamic work spaces that require design, planning and attention to detail.
As an example, I would like to highlight the Penn State World Campus who has just won two Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) awards for online teaching and learning.
The awards were for Excellence in Institution-Wide Online Education and Outstanding Achievement in Online Education. The one thing we have in common with the World Campus is that we also subscribe to Quality Matters and are applying these design and quality principles to our own courses.
Larry Ragan, Director of Faculty Development for the World Campus, has developed a series of videos outlining techniques for successful teaching online.
Learning manage management systems like Moodle require that test questions have special formatting to work correctly. Test questions are like little individual programs and are written in a programming language. For example when you use the quiz question editor in Moodle the code that is required to make the question work is being written for you by Moodle.
The problem is what happens when you want to write a lot of test questions outside of Moodle and then upload them. You have two choices.
Option 1:
You can learn the question formatting language then write your questions using that format and then upload them.
Option 2:
You can use a program like Respondus that allows you to write test questions in simple text format. Respodus will then convert these simple text documents to the correct programming format and upload the test questions for you.
Step 1:
You will need to write you test questions in the correct “Respondus” format and save it as a .TXT file.
Respondus Standard Question Format
Step 2:
Using your copy of Respondus you will configure your system to access Moodle to allow you to convert and upload your questions.
How to upload test questions to Moodle using Respondus
Respondus / Moodle configuration cheat sheet
When starting a new term teaching materials need to be moved into the current semester courses.
There are two ways to do this:
Please see the video below if some of your materials did not copy for example such things as course banners and week/topic headers.
One final note you need to set the correct start date and format for your course. If you don’t do this your weeks will show the wrong dates and the calendar will not match with the weekly headings.
A new online proctoring service is now available for instructors who want to offer proctored test online. This service is provided by Kryterion and is called Proctor 101. The process is simple you first setup your exam in Moodle and apply a password for access.
Then you go to the Proctor 101 site and setup your test to be proctored using the password you set to control access. Proctor 101 will send you an mail that you will publish in your course where students will go to sign-up to have their test proctored online.
Your students will need to have a web-camera and microphone which will allow them to communicate and be monitored by the test proctor. The students will also need a PayPal account to pay the test proctoring fee which is listed below. Technical support is provided by Kryterion.
One-hour exam: $14.00
Two-hour exam: $19.00
Three-hour exam: $23.00
Four-hour exam: $25.00
Links:
The Moodle gradebook is really simple once you understand how it works. In this blog posting using some simple screencasts I will show you how to do the following:
The Moodle “Sum of Grades” Gradebook
The Moodle “Weighted Mean of Grades” Gradebook
How to Setup a Non-Graded Item
Here is the latest Moodle 2.0 book by William Rice – Moodle 2.0 E-Learning Course Development and Conquering the Content both are must reads.
The next group of books are a what I consider design and application books. How to design and develop courses for a specific delivery mode for example online synchronous. There was also a book about a specific teaching discipline, Teaching Lab Science Courses Online.
Over the years I have heard the same thing over and over again. You can’t do bandwidth intensive courses because all our students are on Dial Up Internet access. The people who say this don’t have any real data when asked how do they know this to be true.
I wanted to see some real data that was much closer to home and more relevant to our student population. To do this I ran a simple Survey Monkey survey asking how our students accessed the Internet. I had 433 students complete the survey which is a more than 15% of the total online student population. What I found matched the Connect Nevada data and that most of our students use Cable or DSL to access the internet.
Here is the final data:
What the the data shows us is that 91 % of our students are using Cable, DSL or Satelite access, 6.5 % are using mobile access and only 2.3 % are still using a dail-up connection.
Our installation of Moodle allows instructors to create Turnitin assignments right inside of their online courses. If you are not familiar with Turnitin it has become the industry standard for the Plagiarism checking of student submitted online writing.
One word of advice before you begin using Turnitin. Setup a test activity and use Turnitin to submit a writing assignment. Make sure you understand how to use Turnitin before you ask your students to use it.
