When getting ready for the new semester, you may find these tips, tricks, and reminders about Moodle helpful. Moodle is a great tool for sharing syllabi, readings, websites, and videos. You can also use Moodle to collect and grade assignments, as well as provide online quizzes and tests.
MUST DO: Make sure students can see your course!
When students enroll in courses via Bionic, you should see them as participants in your Moodle course. However, students will not see your Moodle course until you want them to see it. Once you have your course set up to your liking, MAKE THE COURSE VISIBLE to students.
- Select the Settings option from the menu under your course name.
- Toggle Course visibility to Show.
- Scroll down and click the Save and Display button.
Email your students
Moodle lets you email enrolled students easily. There are two ways to do this:
Option 1: Announcements
Use a special type of Moodle discussion forum, Announcements, to email all students. In addition to the emailed message, students can see announcements on your Moodle course site. Click on the Announcements link at the top of your course to create an announcement with this tool.
Option 2: Quickmail
Send mail to some or all of your students with the Quickmail tool on the right side of your course. You can see a history of the messages that you sent from Quickmail, but students only see the messages via their email.
Learn to say names correctly
Each course shell has a link where you and your students can record your names and listen to those recorded pronunciations. Look for the purple microphone icon next to the link named Record your name/Learn other names.
Match names and faces
You can see a photo roster that helps you learn your students’ names. It’s hard to find, but it’s worth looking for!
- Select the Reports menu located under your course name
- Choose Roster.
Use assessment and gradebook options
A number of tools on Moodle let you assess students and share grades or other types of feedback privately with each student. Here are a few of the more popular options available through our Moodle system.
- Gradebook
Track, calculate, and share grades privately with students. The gradebook works for most grading styles.
- Assignment
Collect and grade student work. You can use this tool for group projects too. You can also use connected tools like Gradescope, Voicethread, and Perusall for assignments.
- Quiz
You can use Moodle quizzes for pretests, homework, exams, and more. Quizzes allow use of many question types (multiple choice, short answer, matching, essay, etc.). The Quiz will automatically grade many of those question types. Question banks let you build up a robust collection of questions to select from and reuse throughout the semester or multiple courses.
Share videos via Panopto or YouTube or …
Moodle makes it easy to share videos with your students, but please DO NOT upload videos directly to Moodle. You can upload your videos to Panopto (which does not have ads and allows you to limit access to students in your class), YouTube, or another streaming platform.
Teaching a course with multiple sections? Select the right shell
Academic courses are typically named COURSEID – CourseName. However, if you teach a course with multiple sections, you should see all your sections, plus a course named something like COURSEID – CourseName (A01+A02 Combined).
If you teach a course with multiple sections, you have the option of using the individual sections, the combined course, or both. Students will only see the course(s) that you make visible. See our website for more information about combined courses.
Find/copy your old courses
Courses taught in previous semesters are available for eight years. Courses taught before Fall 2024 are on our archive servers, which you can access via the menu bar on the top of your Moodle window.
Moodle – Backup, Restore, and Import explains how to copy materials from previous semester courses into your current course shells. If you would like us to copy course materials for you, just ask.
NOTE: Contact IITS for help restoring courses over 250 MB. Use VPN for off-campus access to courses on archive servers.
Self-enrollment status: ON
By default, self-enrollment is on at the start of the semester. This allows Bryn Mawr and Haverford students to participate in Moodle activities, even if they are not yet enrolled through Bionic. These self-enrollments will expire after 14 days. We will notify you when we turn off the self-enrollment option. However, you can always set your course enrollment options differently from our defaults.
Swarthmore students?
Swarthmore College students who take classes at Haverford go through a special enrollment process, which is sometimes a bit slow or glitchy. You should see enrolled Swarthmore students listed in your Moodle roster with their Swarthmore email account. If a Swarthmore student tells you they are enrolled in your class but you don't see them in your roster, please let us know. Likewise, Swarthmore students should contact our IT Service Desk if they have trouble accessing Moodle.
Want more help?
There are a number of resources available to help you set up your course sites. You will find basic information on our What is Moodle? tutorial, including an Introduction to Moodle at Haverford video. We also have workshops throughout the year.
You can also email hc-techlearn@haverford.edu or your subject librarian with questions.