Vienna

December 2011
Special thanks to Dieter Strobl from the IES Abroad Vienna Center for submitting these photos!

A Note from John S. Lucas

The past month, IES Abroad Moodlers around the world have been very busy. Faculty champions have completed a survey about Moodle use at their Centers in order to tell the regional educational technology specialists (RETS) and the Chicago Moodle team about current Moodle use at their Centers and about their expectations and needs for future training. In the coming weeks, the RETS will create a plan to meet the needs of the faculty members at Centers in their regions. Some RETS may host faculty champions at their own Centers, some may visit other Centers, and all of them will work with their faculty remotely to provide training and support. RETS will be contacting faculty champions with more information as their plans take shape. In November, Kattrina and Erika hosted several webinars to introduce MoodleLearn to faculty champions. Webinar participants gave positive feedback over the phone, and we hope that you have found the information helpful. In early 2012, Erika and Kattrina will host a make-up session about MoodleLearn for people who were unable to attend last month, as well as a webinar for faculty about using Gradebook and a webinar for Moodle administrators.We are also starting to implement assessment tools to measure Moodles impact. As part of this e ort, we have added six new items to the course evaluation form distributed to students at the end of each course. Some Centers will include these questions for the Fall 2011 semester, but many Centers will include them for the rst time in Spring 2012. The new items include: The instructor used Moodle as appropriate to course content. The resources provided in Moodle helped me to meet the learning outcomes for the course. The activities in Moodle enhanced my classroom experience. I used Moodle to extend my learning outside the classroom. The activities in Moodle helped me to learn more about the local community. The interactive activities in Moodle allowed me to share information and opinions with my fellow students outside the classroom.

Like other questions on the evaluation, students will respond to these items with strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree. This will only be a part of our assessment of Moodles impact at IES Abroad; over the next year, we will determine other ways to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the Moodle initiative. As a part of our partnership with Wo ord College, several IES Abroad Centers will be hosting several Wo ord faculty members over the next year. The selected faculty and the Centers they are visiting are: Dr. Beate Brunow, IES Abroad Berlin Dr. Begoa Caballero Garcia, IES Abroad Buenos Aires & IES Abroad Santiago Dr. Mark Ferguson, IES Abroad London & IES Abroad Dublin Dr. Kaye Savage, IES Abroad San Jos Dr. Cynthia Fowler, IES Abroad Cape Town

During these week-long exchanges, the visiting faculty member will present a master class or lecture on a topic related to his or her academic expertise, visit classes, provide an informal talk to students, facilitate a workshop on the use of educational technology for faculty, and engage in his or her own research or other academic activities. Finally, I am very pleased to announce that IES Abroad Chicago will begin using Moodle this Spring to share information and communicate with the U.S. study abroad administrators and faculty members who will travel to our Centers for some of the upcoming faculty seminars, familiarization trips, and program reviews. Kattrina and Erika have been working with the Program Associates and Deans in Chicago to learn basic Moodle functionality in order to begin designing these faculty development courses. I wish you a happy and safe holiday season. Happy Moodling!

Vienna

December 2011

Featured Moodle Module - Choice Activity

Unlike the Survey Activity, the Choice Activity allows you to ask any question youd like, as long as its multiple choice. Once youve set up your choice, it acts as a poll in your course. Students are able to click on the choice and select their answer. You can choose when and if students are able to view the results of the choice. You may even allow them to change their minds about a choice theyve selected. After students have answered the choice, you can view their responses. When viewing the choice results you will see a column for each response along with the students name corresponding to that response. Selected responses may be deleted, for example to delete test responses that you have entered. The choice activity can be used as a virtual sign-up sheet for eld trips or events. It can also be used to obtain feedback data from students, or as a quick poll to gauge opinions about a particular topic. Choices can encourage students to think in advance about a follow-up related activity, such as a forum discussion or an online text assignment. Choices can also be used as a starting point to encourage students to think about and articulate their knowledge and understanding of a topic.

A label serves as a spacer on a Moodle course page. It can be used to add text, images, multimedia or code in between other resources in the di erent sections. It is a very versatile resource and can help to improve the appearance of a course if used thoughtfully. Banners or descriptions may be added to labels to distinguish between and highlight di erent areas. To create a label for a topic or section: Click the Turn editing on button. Go to any week/topic. Click the Add a resource drop-down. Select Insert a label. Click the Insert Table button to create a one row, one column label. You can add text, background colors and border designs to your label.

Add Labels to Help Organize Your Moodle Course

New Modules/Blocks
Journal Module: This module is a very important re ective activity. The teacher asks the student to re ect on a particular topic, and the student can edit and re ne his/her answer over time. This answer is private and can only be seen by the teacher, who can o er feedback and/or give a grade on each journal entry. It's usually a good idea to have about one Journal activity per week. Forum Module: The Forum Module can be the most important - it is here that most discussion takes place. Forums can be structured in di erent ways, and can include peer rating of each posting. The postings can be viewed in a variety for formats, and can include attachments. By subscribing to a forum, participants receive copies of each new posting in their email. The faculty can require all students to subscribe to the forum.

This newsletter was sent to provide the latest information for IES Abroad Moodle. IES Abroad Chicago 33 N. LaSalle Street, Chicago, IL 60602-2602 Phone: 1.800.995.2300

Faculty Access for IES MoodleLearn Site

The IES MoodleLearn site is an excellent informational resource and training site for all IES Centers. MoodleLearn contains video tutorials and how-to reference guides for Moodle activities and modules, practice courses and information about upcoming Moodle events and conferences. The IES Center Directors can request access to the IES MoodleLearn site for their faculty via the IES Helpdesk Ticketing System: https://helpdesk.iesabroad.org/ IES Center Directors can request access to the IES MoodleLearn site for their faculty members by submitting a Helpdesk ticket to helpdesk@iesabroad.org. In the helpdesk ticket, include the rst and last names of the faculty members and their email addresses.

Moodle Course Backups

All IES Moodle courses are con gured to automatically create back-ups every Saturday at 12pm (your centers time zone). Please note that Moodle may be slower on weekends due to course back-ups. The back-up reports can be viewed from your centers Moodle home page under Site Administration > Reports > Backups. Back-ups that complete successfully appear in green. The back-up status appears at the end of the row and the status legend is listed below: 1. OK the back-up completed successfully 2. Error The back-up procedure has found an error and has not completed successfully. These are controlled errors, and in this case the scheduled back-up continues to the next course. This error happens mainly when a course le is too large (over 50 MB) or when data is uploading or downloading to/from a course, which causes the back-up to stop. 3. Unfinished The back-up procedure expires without a known reason. 4. Skipped The course is unavailable to students and has not been changed in the last 31 days. This is not an error situation, but instead a feature that saves process time for sites with many unavailable old courses. IES Abroad instructors should regularly back-up their courses to a ash drive or hard drive in order to safeguard against the loss of student and faculty data. Back-up and restore features are available for every source, and faculty members have access to this feature in Moodle. For your convenience, a copy of the Back-up and Restore guide can be found on the MoodleLearn site under Faculty Resources.

More Moodle Webinars Coming Soon!

Moodle Webinars on Gradebook and on Moodle Administration for IES Center Admins are coming soon! Dates will be emailed to the RETS, Faculty Champions and Center Admins for scheduling.

Need Help With Moodle Gradebook? Its Now On MoodleLearn!

Faculty can use the Moodle Gradebook for calculating grades and recording scores. Students can check their grades any time and compare themselves to the class average. Weve added lessons outlining four new examples which explains the methods faculty can set-up and begin using the gradebook to meet their needs. Four ways the gradebook can be calculated are: Simple Weighted Mean of Grades Weighted Mean of Grades Mean of Grades Sum of Grades

Each gradebook example on MoodleLearn has detailed information about how each grading method is calculated. Sample assignments, and downloadable grading worksheets are included as well. If you have any questions about gradebook, please email your IES Moodle Administrators.