Getting Ready for the New Academic Year

If you haven't activated your courses for the new academic year, visit our Moodle webpages for step by step guidance. 

If you would like to import your material from previous academic years, here is our step by step guide and blog on how you can do this. Please note: You should never import Turnitin Assignments across to your new course page. Always create new Turnitin assignments within your course. Also Announcement forums do not need to be brought across either as new Forum announcements are created in every activated course.

Once you have imported your material across, this guide will give you quick tips on ensuring your module is ready for the next semester.

With the new public bodies legislation in effect, creating accessible documents is now a legal requirement. In Moodle, Ally will give you a score on how accessible your courses and documents you have uploaded to Moodle are. Ally will then provide advice on how you can make your documents accessible. For more about Ally and how it works within Moodle, see our Ally webpages or see our inclusivity & accessibility webpages for other support and resources on how to create accessible documents.

Our Digital Accessibility Training course is designed to give you an overview of how you can create more accessible content.

If you have hidden your course while you have been updating it, remember to make the course visible to your students again. go to Course Management > Edit course settings and under ‘course visibility’ in the General section you can choose the option to ‘Hide’ the course. Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Save and display to enable these changes.

See our Creating video content from home webpages for inspiration, guides and more. 

In order to ensure that students are engaging with online content and to check understanding of concepts, quizzing activities can be added before, after or integrated into video resources in Moodle. Use quizzes alongside other interactive resources in order to create a collaborative online working environment which supports students. See our Creating Quizzes to Check Understanding webpages for more details and guides

Incorporating a range of activities into online module spaces will give students the opportunity to work on different kinds of tasks. Looking at Laurillard's six learning types concept, we can see that recorded video content normally fits into the acquisition category, while quizzes will provide students with practice-type activities. But there are clearly a number of other activity types which are important to include in order to promote active learning. See our Student Activities and Project webpages for some inspiration on the activities you could be incorporating into your online module areas.