Making the Most of Moodle Table of Contents Page 1 Table of Contents Table of Contents...1 Introduction...5 Moodle Basics...7 Creating your profile...7 Course Editing Icons...12 HTML Editor...13 Getting Around Your Moodle Course...19 Switching Roles...20 Blocks...21 Administration...21 Turn editing on/off...21 Settings...21 Assign Roles...25 Grades...26 Outcomes...26 Backup...34 Restore...36 Import...37 Reset...38 Reports...39 Questions...42 Files...46 Unenroll...46 Profile...47 Course/Site Description...47 Calendar and Upcoming Events...49 Activities...54 Search Forums...55
Page 2 Table of Contents Making the Most of Moodle Latest News...56 My courses...56 Remote RSS Feeds...56 HTML...57 Participants...59 Online Users...61 Blog Menu...62 Using Blocks in Activities...62 The Center or Course Section...63 Course Introduction...63 News Forum...65 Posting to the News Forum...69 Topics...70 Resources...73 Insert a label...73 Compose a text page...74 Compose a Web Page...78 Link to a file or web site...82 Link to a file...84 Linking to a web site...87 Display a directory...88 Display a directory...89 IMS Content Package...90 Activities...91 Assignments...91 Upload a single file...97 Advanced uploading of files...98 Online text... 102 Offline activity... 105 Chat... 106
Making the Most of Moodle Table of Contents Page 3 Choice... 110 Database... 114 Templates... 121 Export... 122 Adding an entry... 122 Rating and adding comments... 124 Forum... 125 Standard forum for general use... 125 A single simple discussion... 126 Grade... 128 Glossary... 134 Lesson... 143 Add a Branch Table... 149 Add a question page... 151 Clusters... 160 Configuring Jumps... 160 Quiz... 162 Create categories... 167 Adding a Description... 171 Adding an Essay Question... 172 Matching Question... 174 Multiple Choice Question... 176 True/False Question... 179 Short-Answer Question... 181 Embedded Answers (cloze) Question... 193 Survey... 206 Wiki... 209 Additional Activities...217 SCORM/AICC... 217 Workshop... 217 Gradebook...218 Grade categories... 218
Page 4 Table of Contents Making the Most of Moodle Adding a Manual Grade Item... 224 Scales... 226 Letters... 227 Course Settings for the Gradebook... 228 Grader Report Settings... 230 Viewing Gradebook Reports... 233 Grade Export... 237 Moodle Tips...239 Getting Started in Moodle...241
making the most of moodle The following pages contain a sample chapter section from the book.
Page 218 Gradebook Making the Most of Moodle Gradebook The gradebook can be one of the more daunting features of a Moodle course. The following information will help you to navigate the gradebook and set it up to your preferences. Remember: Grades are scores a student receives on a given activity. The gradebook is where these grades are held for you to review. Grades are usually first displayed as the raw marks or points that the student receives on any given activity. Teachers can access the gradebook by clicking on Grades in the Administration block. You will see the Grader report view when you first access the gradebook. The activities that carry a grade have been added to the gradebook in the order that they were created. This is probably not the way you want to view them. Teachers can organize their gradebook by adding categories. Grade categories To access the grade categories click on Choose an action from the dropdown menu in the upper left of the gradebook page. Choose Simple view under Categories and items in the dropdown menu. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Add category. One way to add categories and organize your gradebook is to create a category for each topic. The following settings are specific to adding a new category. General Category name: You must supply a name for your category. If you are adding categories for each topic, use the name of the topic for your category.
Making the Most of Moodle Gradebook Page 219 Aggregation: This is the strategy that the gradebook will use to calculate each student s overall grade for the category. All grades for individual activities are first converted to a percentage value including any scaled scores. There are nine choices for aggregation. Mean of grades: This is the sum of all the grades in the category divided by the total number of grades. Example: (0.75 + 0.75 + 0.9)/3 = 0.80 or 80/100 Weighted mean of grades: In this choice you can choose to give a grade item a weight. The score for each item will be multiplied by the weight it was given. These items will be divided by the sum of the weights for the category total. For example, this category has three grade items each with a different weight. Example: (0.75*5 + 0.75*4 + 0.9*3)/12 = 0.7875 = 78.75/100 Simple weighted mean of grades: The difference from weighted mean of grades is that the weight is calculated as the maximum grade minus the minimum grade for each item. (0.75*100 + 0.75*80 + 0.9*10)/190 = 0.7578 = 75.78/100 Mean of grades (with extra credits): This is now an unsupported aggregation strategy using an arithmetic mean with a twist. It is available only for backward compatibility for courses developed in previous versions of Moodle. Median of grades: In this option the grades are ranked in order of size and you use the middle grade. In the case where there are two grades in the middle you take the mean of these two grades. The advantage is that the category grade is not affected by grades that are exceptionally far from the mean. Example: 0.75 + 0.75 + 0.90 would be 0.75 or 75/100 Lowest grade: This option is usually used when you choose to aggregate only non-empty grades. It is the lowest grade after normalization. Example: min(0.75 + 0.75 + 0.90) = 0.75 or 75/100 Highest grade: This is the highest grade after normalization. Example: max(0.75 + 0.75 + 0.90) = 0.90 or 90/100 Mode of grades: The mode is the grade that arises the most frequently. It is most often used for non-numerical grades. The advantage over the mean of grades is that it is not affected by grades that are exceptionally far from the mean. It will lose its significance once
Page 220 Gradebook Making the Most of Moodle there is more than one most frequently arising grade because only one is kept or when all the grades are different. The student received these grades: 75 out of 100, 60 out of 80, 35 out of 50, 3 out of 4 and 9 out of 10 with a Example: mode(0.75; 0.75; 0.70; 0.75; 0.90) = 0.75 or 75/100 When using the Sum of grades strategy: For this option all of the scale grades will be ignored. It is the sum of all grade values. This is the only option that does not convert the grades to percentages. The maximum grade of the category is calculated automatically as the sum of all the maximums of the aggregated items. The student received these grades: 75 out of 100, 60 out of 80, and 9 out of 10. Example: 75 + 60 + 9 = 144/190 When using this strategy, a grade item in the category can be designated as extra credit for that category. This means that the extra credit item s maximum grade will not be added to the category s maximum grade, but the item s grade will. Category A has two grade items Grade item 1 is graded 0 100 Grade item 2 is graded 0 80 Item 1 is designated as extra credit by checking the Extra credit checkbox. Item 2 is not an extra credit item. Category A s total will be graded 0 80 A student receives a grade of 75 on Item 1 and a grade of 60 on Item 2. The student s total for Category A will be 80/80 because the maximum was reached when adding 75 and 60. You can t exceed the maximum grade. Clicking on Show Advanced gives you some additional options. Aggregate only non-empty grades: If you check this box, empty grades are not included in the aggregation. If this box is left unchecked, missing grades will be treated as a zero. Carefully consider how to use this because there can be reasons other than the student chose not to complete the assignment. For example, it could mean that the teacher hasn t graded the item yet. Include outcomes in aggregation: Using outcomes may not give you the desired category total so you have the option to leave them out, if you use them. Aggregate including subcategories: If you include a category within your category (subcategory) you have the option to include them or leave them out. Drop the lowest: If you choose a number for this option, that will be the number of lowest grades to be dropped. You can choose up to 20 lowest grades to drop.
Making the Most of Moodle Gradebook Page 221 Only fill in the Grade category options and then scroll to the bottom and click on Save changes. Repeat this for every category that you want to have in your gradebook. You can add a subcategory after you have added at least one category. By default, Moodle assumes that the parent category for a new category is the course parent category. After adding one category at the bottom of the add a category page you will see a Parent category dropdown menu. You can choose to add your new category to an existing category by choosing it from the dropdown menu. After you add all of your categories to your gradebook you will notice that were added to the bottom of your gradebook. You can move them into the desired place by using the double arrows under the Actions column. After clicking on the double arrow you will see an arrow pointing to a box. Click in the box where you would like the category to appear. The item you are moving will have the word move in parentheses next to it. Actions