Google Calendar Appointment Slots - Perfect for Office Hours and Advising Appointment Sign-ups

Google Calendar's Appointment Slots makes it easy to create an online appointment sign-up sheet. Simply select days/times on your calendar you want to make available on your sign-up sheet and click Appointment Slots. Fill in details such as the length of each individual slot to create your own public appointment calendar. Email or post the link to your calendar appointment page and students can start booking appointments by clicking on available appointment.

For step-by-step instructions, see Google Help  Don't use Google Calendar? You might want to give the Moodle Scheduler activity a try.  

Updates to EdTech Training Offerings and Resources

Curricular EdTech Workshops page

Interested scheduling a digital skills workshop for your class? Educational Technology has compiled a list of curricular EdTech workshops we have offered in the past. Whether you are interested in one of those listed, or have a nother subject in mind, use our contact form to give us the details. We will do our best to work with you to design a workshop that meets your class needs!

We have also added a shortlink for our Moodle Resources page at go.lclark.edu/moodlehelp. This page covers issues most commonly encountered by Moodle users in the L&C community. A general Moodle help resource is also available onine at docs.moodle.org. If you haven't checked them out before, we also have resource pages for general IT topics as well as a dedicated page for G-Suite-related topics.

New Moodle Filtered Course List Block

With last Summer's Moodle 3.3 upgrade came changes to the Course Overview block. Some of our users have expressed these changes made it more difficult to identify and locate current courses in-progress. This is partly due to the new Course Overview area using course start and end dates to classify courses.

To address this issue we have installed a new "Filtered Course List" block, which users may optionally enable on their end. Within the block, you will see two filtered categories. The first category, expanded by default, displays current term and list your current classes. The second category, Other Courses, contains past Moodle courses in reverse chronological order. Keep in mind that past courses will only be visible if you are the instructor or if the courses is made available to you by the instructor.

To activate the plugin:

1) From your dashboard (moodle.lclark.edu/my/) click the orange Customize this page button in the corner

2)  Scroll to the bottom and select "Filtered Course List" from the Add a Block drop-down.

If you have any feedback regarding the plugin or run into any difficulty installing it, feel free to let us know at edtech@lclark.edu.

Theme Quirks in Moodle 3.3

With a new software upgrade comes new features and functionality as well as unforeseen issues. We know many Moodle users prefer to use alternate themes (Administration > Edit Settings > Appearance > Force Theme) to customize the look and feel of their courses. Unfortunately, some of our non-responsive themes are not playing nice with upgrades.

For example, users have reported when adding users in Moodle 3.3 using the Nonzero theme, the “Enroll Users” window appears transparent.

While it may be difficult to see, the “Enroll users” function still works as normal. Be advised, however, that these design quirks may appear in other aspects of the theme, as well as in other older themes.

While ignoring some of these visual quirks is one option, you may also consider trying a different theme. The new “Boost” Theme features a clean design that maximizes screen space and includes dynamic navigation tools such as a left sidebar that may be toggled on or off.

Moodle 3.3 - New Location for Switch Role & Grades

Moodle 3.3 has new locations for Switch Roles and Grades 

Switch Roles is now located in the user menu which is located in the top right of the screen in most themes. This menu is not supported by older themes.














To view grades for the current course, use the Grades link in the Navigation menu. To see a list of all enrolled course gradebooks, use the Grades link in the User Menu.

Grades link in new Boost theme

Grades link in default Moodle theme

Moodle Upgraded for 2017-18 Academic Year

Moodle will run 3.3 for the 2017-18 academic year. Below we've highlighted major changes and new features.

For all users

• Dashboard includes a redesigned Course Overview block.  
• Completed courses or those whose end date have passed appear in the ‘Past’ section.
• Courses appear in the ‘In Progress’ section if the course start date is in the past and the current date is before the end date OR there is no end date. Keep in mind you may see several courses in this section as migrated courses initially will not have end dates - this is a new setting.
• For courses to appear in the 'Future' section, the student must be enrolled in them even though the course start date is in the future.
• Some of the new timeline tracking features will require teachers to set activity deadlines, expected completion dates, or “remind me to grade by” dates.
• New messaging and notification options. Messages now support media filters for embedding images and video.
• Improved support for Moodle Mobile app. See Moodle Mobile Features for complete details. Teachers may want to view tips for creating mobile friendly courses.

Teachers

• Course Settings:
• Courses can now have end dates. This is used to indicate when a course should appear in the ‘Past’ section of the Course Overview block.
• The number of course sections can no longer be set in course settings. Add or delete sections directly from the course page. Weekly format includes an option to automatically add sections based on the start and end date of your course. This will prevent the orphaning of course content.
• Assignments
• Restrict assignment submissions to specific file types such as a Word (docx).
• Expansion of individual or group overrides to assignments. Easily change or “override” deadlines or other assignment settings for individuals or groups.
• Set ‘grade by’ reminder in assignments. Turn this on to see alerts on assignments to grade in the new course overview block.
• Negative scores for rubrics.
• Bulk edit activity completion settings in your courses and change default settings for new activities. Watch the activity completion enhancements screencast for a walkthrough.
• Media player improvements including new default player, VideoJS. The Media players screencast describes new options for managing files including displaying thumbnails and adding captions. Drag and drop media files directly to course page or as a file resource.
• New stealth mode allows teachers to make hidden content available. This is useful if you want to link to content or activities that don’t appear to students in the main page.
• New theme option, Boost, is available for early adopters. It takes advantage of new icons and has an updated navigation scheme. We will work on updating the default theme to Boost over the 2017-18 academic year.
• Lock discussion forums automatically after a period of inactivity.
• Select for students in the choice activity.
• Improvements to report charts.

See the following release notes for a complete list:

New Features for Moodle 3.2

New Features for Moodle 3.3