Moodle 2

You can read the post about week 1 here. The course Context The course I have designed is nothing Earth-shattering, but it seems to work well in the given context (MYP Technology, 12 year olds). At the end of the 11 week unit of work (could be called ‘project’), students need to hand in two deliverables: the product (usually a Scratch animation) their documentation of the process (usually a 15-30 page word processed document) In this unit of work students are to use technology to create a tutorial to teach others a dance choreography they have put together....

I announced a few weeks back that I would try and quantify the increase in engagement I have noticed when gamifying my Moodle courses. I have just started teaching two similar groups, and one has been exposed to the regular course, and the other to a gamified version of it. I will post my findings every week, and will draw a summary at the end of the experiment. This post retraces what has happened in the first week of the experiment....

What are conditional activities? Since the introduction of Moodle 2, it has been possible for users to track which activities/resources they have completed. This means that resources/activities are ‘aware’ of their completion status for each course user. This completion status awareness allows a teacher to have activities/resources show up only when certain conditions have been met, for example Resource B will only be shown to users who have completed Activity A....

I have ordered my tips in decreasing order of importance i.e. the ones that really matter are at the top. When reading the graphs, make sure you take a look at the scale, as differences can be minimal. It is important to remember that sound pedagogy and good course design are more important than a super fast server. For the impatient (spoiler) Things that impact performance Amount of blocks displayed on your course pages ‘Show one section only’ in your course settings Images in labels Amount of sections, resources & activities Activity tracking & conditional activities Forum tracking ‘Theme designer’ mode ‘Cache language strings’ option Things that don’t really impact performance Theme Course format Groups/Groupings Note: I ran a series of tests to find out what made a difference when displaying course pages on Moodle, as a student....

1. The ‘News forum’ won’t go away! So you have tried a million times to delete the ‘News forum’ at the top of your Moodle course to no avail. The thing is tougher than a cockroach and simply won’t die! Sure you could hide it from students, but that’s cheating. Problem in context: whenever you create a new Moodle course, you get a ‘News forum’ created at the top – whether you want it or not....