Magic with Moodle: An all-School community page

Charlene Hill

School of Economics

Community Page (Economics) (UK) (12-13)

Image Added

Background

The lectures are routinely recorded using the Echo360 facilities available in the interactive teaching rooms. This allows the students to review lectures at their convenience with the usual benefits of lecture capture. I wanted to make recordings available in Moodle in a timely way with not too much work - prior use of audio only files was helpful to students but was a fiddle to load into the VLE via updating links on a Word document.School wanted to have a single place for information for all students in the School.  They used to have information in the Portal. (Some Schools have similar information in Workspace.) 

What did you do?

...

Created a module in Moodle that is a one-stop shop for all of our course information, including

• timetable links,
• exam office links,
• whole-school presentations
• news and announcements
• Past exam papers and feedback for every single module for the past three years (as Moodle Books)
• Term dates (a popular question in the office)
• Learning Community Forum (all of which it is planned to fully move from Workspace to Moodle in the near future) 
• RSS feeds from School's website

How did it work out?

 On clicking the Echo360 block the students see a page with links to all recordings:Students find it easy to find the past exam papers and feedback for every single module, for the last three years (as Moodle Books) It’s easy to edit and staff can see what’s missing and arrange to add it Can add answers to frequently asked questions to the page so it continues to become more useful as time goes on.

What did students think?

It's all very easy - the lectures are added automatically to the list – there's no need for the lecturer to do anything once the block is added.

Students like the access to videos – obviously if they missed the lecture (and no, attendance hasn?t fallen due to videoing either), if they were there but didn?t pick everything up or finally if they want to revise from the lecture directly. Students very positive and mentioned it in LCF as done by my colleague in Macro L11200 as a good thing.

Recommendations and tips

You don?t need to be in the video – I?m not at all as I wander around the room – so it is the screen capture and the audio that matter most. Don?t be scared to say/do things in class simply because it is being videoed. Get booked in early especially when you have your timetable set (more awkward to remember if they are ad hoc sessions but can still be done providing a little notice is given.

One place to look for everything – students prefer that this is Moodle.

The module is linked to core modules in each year so that students automatically have access to it (self-enrolment can also be made available).

Recommendations and tips

• Simple to create.
• Moodle Book works very well for our exam papers
  

Further information

• Download Handout (Word format)
• Presentation about this case study (PDF format)

...

 Video of Charlene Hill talking about the module:

<div id<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.kaltura.com/p/1355621/sp/135562100/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/13188771/partner_id/1355621"></script><object id="kaltura_player_51fb93b237712" name="kaltura_player_1375441379" style="width: 400px; height: 333px;" itemprop="video" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject">
<span itemprop="name51fb93b237712" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" allowNetworking="all" allowScriptAccess="always" height="402" width="608" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/" rel="media:video" resource="https://www.kaltura.com/index.php/kwidget/wid/1_l6tq4cqf/uiconf_id/13188771/entry_id/1_vxdyxkyk" data="https://www.kaltura.com/index.php/kwidget/wid/1_l6tq4cqf/uiconf_id/13188771/entry_id/1_vxdyxkyk"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowNetworking" value="all" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /><param name="flashVars" value="streamerType=rtmp&amp;streamerUrl=&amp;" /><param name="movie" value="https://www.kaltura.com/index.php/kwidget/wid/1_l6tq4cqf/uiconf_id/13188771/entry_id/1_vxdyxkyk" /><a href="http://corp.kaltura.com">video platform</a> <a href="http://corp.kaltura.com/technology/video_management">video management</a> <a href="http://corp.kaltura.com/solutions/overview">video solutions</a><a href="http://corp.kaltura.com/technology/video_player">video player</a> <a rel="media:thumbnail" href="https://cdnsecakmi.kaltura.com/p/1355621/sp/135562100/thumbnail/entry_id/1_vxdyxkyk/version/100001/width/120/height/90/bgcolor/000000/type/2" ></a> <span property="dc:description" content="School of Economics Community Page - Magic with Moodle"></span>
 <span itempropproperty="descriptionmedia:title" content="School of Economics Community Page - Magic with Moodle"></span>
 <span itempropproperty="durationmedia:width" content="608"></span>
 <span itempropproperty="thumbnailmedia:height" content="402"></span>
<span itemprop="width> </span><span property="media:type" content="400application/x-shockwave-flash"></span>
 <span itempropproperty="heightmedia:duration" content="33303:16"></span>
</div>
<script src="http://cdnapi.kaltura.com/p/1355621/sp/135562100/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/15613012/partner_id/1355621?autoembed=true&entry_id=1_vxdyxkyk&playerId=kaltura_player_1375441379&cache_st=1375441379&width=400&height=333"></script>

• How to add the Echo360 Block in Moodle  
• How to move or customise the location of blocks

span></object>

Example screenshots

Image Added
 
 
Image Added
 
Sections 4 and 5
 
 
Image Added
 
Sections 7, 8 and 9
 
 
Image Added.