1.9 | Thomas' Work Space

How to identify graded participants in Moodle Course Activity Reports using Vlookup

2012/02/23 plagwitz Leave a comment

Having a chart of full names, Moodle id # and usernames would be useful (e.g. for debugging with the Activity Reports that in some cases do not resolve Moodle id# so Excel vlookup has to rescue the day once again…)
The Moodle “Participants” affords the instructor a convenient list, with paging, sort, filter (by role), and different detail-level views.
However, the overview does link course and student id #, but not institutional username while the detail view contain the username as part of the email, but is not truly tabular (consists of an array of tables, each containing one user; at least you can avoid the paging).
Enter grepwin to extract the emails:
and copy paste them into the Excel created from the tabular overview:
Is there an easier way?

Categories: lms, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging Tags: 1.9, activity-reports, debugging, grepwin, moodle, MS-Excel, regular-expressions, vlookup

How to do writing assignments in Moodle with deadlines, file and response file upload and MS-Word tracked changes

2012/01/20 plagwitz Leave a comment

Benefits
1. Keep the cohort in shape and focus it on studying by enforcing deadlines.
2. You can have students automatically receive reminders of the upcoming deadlines from their calendar (in NINERMAIL, no need to even look at the Moodle Calendar)
3. You can save time managing the assignment.
  1. Moodle does it for you; you will save even more time once you begin recycling your assignment across terms) and rather provide more timely feedback, and improve changes that your feedback arrives during a teachable moment.
  2. Automatic email notifications, which are available in Moodle for teachers (if you do not prefer to grade student submissions in a batch) and students to (automatic correction and grading is not ready for prime-time when it comes to essay writing; you may however consider teaching some more basic writing skills using it with close-exercises in Moodle).
4. Costs
  1. You need to TBA:create a Moodle file upload assignment for writing (once)
  2. You need to grade a Moodle file upload assignment for writing (any time you assign; depending on your preference as submissions arrive or conveniently as a batch from the gradebook past the deadline)
    1. I prefer the MS-Word reviewing features for grading writing assignments,
    2. but other tools have other affordances, e.g. like recently described here for Adobe Acrobat Professional.
  3. Moodle does not automatically add unique usernames to student submitted files like Blackboard. It also does not afford the TBA:convenience of a shared network storage that the WebDAV-based Blackboard Content system provides. However, as long as you do not need to maintain a local archive of student submissions, you can rely on the Moodle gradebook managing the archive of assignment files (student submissions and teacher response files).
  4. How? These 4 posts guide you through the entire workflow from teacher to student back to teacher to student:

Categories: assignments, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, lms, office-software, Writing Tags: 1.9, gradebook, moodle, MS-Word, reviewing, simple-file-upload

How to view all assignments per student in a Moodle course

2012/01/18 plagwitz Leave a comment

follow the screencast from the gradebook, clicking on a student name in the row headers, “ activity reports”, “complete report” (plays in Windows media player on Windows).
to get this (note the breadcrumbs on top pointing to “ Reports” / “ Complete” )):

Categories: audience-is-teachers, lms Tags: 1.9, gradebook, moodle

How a teacher creates and grades a Moodle streaming video assignment.

2011/11/02 plagwitz Leave a comment

Click button: “Turn editing on”, from the “add an activity dropdown, choose: “video”, like so:
Edit your assignment, like so:
1. using the following options (or else expect problems)
  1. Due date: not DISABLED (is the default)
  2. Prevent late submissions: YES (is not the default)
  3. Allow resubmitting: NO (is the default)
after you post your assignment and your students took it, like so,
and if you turned notifications (not recommended; rather grade the assignment well after the deadline, or else expect problems) on (if you get already enough email, remember you can turn notifications off, rather send a deadline to the assignments which the students can see in their calendar, and until they get used to it, tell them there will be more video assignments, best: make it a routine and leave 2 for extra credit could be enough to get everybody to catch), you will get an email like this:
where you click either on the link (1) to go to the assignment, then click through to the submissions (3)
or on (2) to go directly to the grade book:
where you are best advised to click on the button: “grade” to view the video submission, , or else you might run into this bug.
In the grading window, play the video, add helpful comments, if any, add final Grade and click “save and next” (but click “next” if no video submitted yet and you grade before the submission deadline. Better: do not grade before the submission deadline).
If video seems unwilling to play (frozen frame), drag the play cursor forward on the timeline underneath the video. If this does not unfreeze the video, let the timeline run to the end (both workarounds have helped with Kaltura issues we encountered here).