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Moodle Teachers – Use Masonry Course format to create beautiful courses

By
Jaswinder Singh
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Moodle Teachers - Use Masonry Course format to create beautiful courses
Moodle Teachers - Use Masonry Course format to create beautiful courses

Moodle LMS is the most powerful and customizable open source Learning Management System in the world. The Moodle plugins allows you to customize the functionality in all possible areas. At present there are more than 2035 Moodle plugins in the official database contributed by the community developers. One such fantastic plugin is Masonry Course Format and in this post we will be looking at the same.

The Masonry Course Format Moodle plugin allows you to build a brick wall type course format. This can help you to displays all sections like a masonry build brick wall. Every section can have a different background and is dynamically placed into a fluent style page. This could be a great way to break away from standard course formatting to provide students with something that is visually exciting and fun.

You can download the latest version of the Masonry Course format from the Moodle plugins database here. The plugin is recently updated to the latest Moodle version i.e. Moodle 4.0. In case you are new to Moodle plugins, you can follow this guide to understand how to install a Moodle plugin.

Once installed you can start using the Course format plugin straight away. You can define the background color for each section. It will automatically arrange the topics by size and adjusts to the screen area. The plugin has been maintained quite well over last few years by Renaat Debleu for all Major Moodle versions.

I am pretty impressed with the Masonry Course Format Moodle plugin and the opportunity it provides especially for young learners. What are the other course formats you are using in your Moodle? Please share with us in the comments section below.

Dynamic Pixel becomes a Certified Moodle Partner in India

By
Jaswinder Singh
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Dynamic Pixel becomes a Certified Moodle Partner in India
Dynamic Pixel becomes a Certified Moodle Partner in India

Dynamic Pixel – the leading elearning organization from India has joined hands with Moodle HQ as a certified Moodle Partner in India. Dynamic Pixel – founded in 2010 provides services from installation to customisation of Moodle LMS. They also develops comprehensive and gamified eLearning courses, allowing educators and enterprises to provide a quality learning experience.

Dynamic Pixel has developed more than 5000 hours of eLearning content, delivering high quality, customised and timely projects to meet the individual needs of the clients. They have created custom eLearning content for clients such as the World Health Organisation, Tanishq, Safexpress, Brilloca Limited, and Vibgyor Schools.

On the occasion of becoming a certified Moodle Partner, Udit Khandelwal – CEO of Dynamic Pixel Multimedia Solutions said:

“The more we have explored Moodle, the more admiration we have for this open source LMS. Dynamic Pixel strives to find innovative and technologically driven solutions to their client’s eLearning needs. Moodle’s secure and scalable platform, plugins, and flexibility to suit the client’s requirements are greatly aligned with this mission. Becoming a Certified Moodle Partner is very rewarding for us.”

“There is a high demand for gamified and interactive eLearning content to increase learner engagement. This does not only apply to educational institutions; enterprises are also looking to gamify their learning management system.”

“We are excited to continue our work with Moodle. We have already been providing Moodle services and have received many opportunities thanks to this. Becoming a Certified Moodle Partner motivates us to keep our standards as high as Moodle’s. We are also inspired by Moodle’s mission and becoming a Certified Moodle Partner means that we can contribute towards that success journey.” Udit added further.

What is Safe Exam Browser? How you can use it?

By
Jaswinder Singh
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What is Safe Exam Browser? How you can use it?
What is Safe Exam Browser? How you can use it?

Safe Exam Browser (SEB) is a web browser to carry out e-assessments safely. With the ongoing popularity of online exams the chances of students cheating during the exams has gone higher. Safe Exam Browser can turn any device into a safe working station and carry out the assessment exams easily. In this post, we will see what the SEB can do for you as an educator.

Safe Exam Browser can control access to device resources like system functions, other websites and applications and prevents unauthorized resources being used during an exam. The restrictions can prevent the students from cheating during the exams.

The SEB allows you to conduct online assessment with students carrying their own devices. This way you can run the online assessment without any huge infrastructure requirements. Student use their own laptop (before exam, he should install SEB). Instructors can configure Safe Exam Browser to behave differently for each exam.

Safe Exam Browser enables secure exams on unmanaged computers like students’ own laptops and tablets as well as in managed environments on all three platforms Windows, macOS and iOS.. Safe Exam Browser is available for Windows 8.1, 10 and 11, macOS 12, 11, 10.15, 10.14, 10.13, 10.12, 10.11. This is currently not available on Android.

You can download the SEB for your device from the official website here. It can also detect if the student is running the SEB in Virtual Machine. It has built-in connection to web based LMS like Moodle, ILIAS, OpenOLAT, Inspera Assessment and others, can be used with basically any web-based examination system.

In addition you can also use the SEB Verificator Tool which is a stand-alone tool to verify the integrity of a Safe Exam Browser installation. Once installed you can configure your online assessment in your Learning Management system. You can configure if students can only attempt the quiz if they are using SEB on their devices.

What are the other tools which you are using to make your online assessments more secure and robust. Have you ever used the Safe Exam Browser for online assessment? Please share with us in the comments section below.

Use Moodle without Internet on a Raspberry Pi device using MoodleBox

By
Jaswinder Singh
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Use Moodle without Internet on a Raspberry Pi device using MoodleBox
Use Moodle without Internet on a Raspberry Pi device using MoodleBox

Moodle LMS is used globally to improve the online education across 240+ countries and 330 million users. MoodleBox is a standalone full featured Moodle server on a small and cheap mobile device working without Internet. It is used throughout the world to support education through unusual ways with students getting learning material on Raspberry Pi devices.

MoodleBox is made by Nicolas Martignoni as a free and open source project developed on a voluntary and non-profit basis. It offers the complete Moodle capabilities with an affordable and powerful e-learning platform in internet-independent environment.

Majority of learners now comes with their own devices like Tablets, Smartphones, or computers. With MoodleBox you can save your infrastructure cost by running Moodle on Raspberry Pi devices. It offers small groups (about 20-30 participants) the opportunity to work in a learning environment without the need for heavy setup.

The Idea behind the project began in the French community forum discussion about the construction of a Moodle platform on a local computer, to provide an LMS in regions without any network infrastructure. The idea quickly moved towards building it with Raspberry Pi and make it accessible via Wi-Fi.

MoodleBox Hardware Requirements?

MoodleBox is recently upgraded to run the latest Moodle version i.e. Moodle 4.0 and it is maintained very well in past years to support all major Moodle versions. You will need the following hardware to run your own MoodleBox:

MoodleBox offers excellent documentation should you need it. There is a Moodle plugin also available which provides the GUI to some settings and management of a MoodleBox.

It provides a perfect way to enhance online learning and teaching by providing learning activities offline, without Internet access. This is very helpful for the developing countries where infrastructure is non-existent or inadequate.

You can check out the complete details about the project here. Are you interested in using MoodleBox? Check out these setup instructions for using it – https://moodlebox.net/en/using/.

Moodle Educators – How to allow students to add ratings and reviews to the courses?

By
Jaswinder Singh
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Moodle Educators - How to allow students to add ratings and reviews to the courses?
Moodle Educators - How to allow students to add ratings and reviews to the courses?

Moodle is one of the most popular learning management system in the world with a reach over 340 million users. Moodle LMS Is used across all industries, schools, universities as well as corporate compliance training. With a variety of course formats available, it is pretty easy to make a perfect course in Moodle. In this post, we will have a look at how you can allow the students to add ratings and reviews to your Moodle courses.

Course Ratings Moodle plugin – developed by Marina Glancy of Moodle HQ team, allows you to add the capability to add course rating and reviews. The Course Ratings plugin allows any students enrolled in the course to leave a rating. It can be configured that only students who completed the course can do it. There is also an option to allow to enable or disable course ratings for individual courses.

You can download the Course Rating Moodle plugin from the official Moodle plugin directory here. If you are complete novice to Moodle Plugins installation, please follow this guide to understand the process.

The plugin is pretty straight forward to use after installation. It will display the course rating in all course listing areas like All Courses page and Home Page etc. As the Moodle Administrator you can configure when the students can rate the course, Color of stars and ratings etc.

This plugin seems to be very handy for the educators who wants to have their own online learning portal with Moodle and sell courses through it. What are the other useful Moodle plugins which you would like to recommend to other Moodle users? Please share in the comments section below.

Moodle Educators – use Mass Actions Block to perform repeated actions easily

By
Jaswinder Singh
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Moodle Educators - use Mass Actions Block to perform repeated actions easily
Moodle Educators - use Mass Actions Block to perform repeated actions easily

Moodle – the world’s most popular open source learning management system is used by more than 340 million users across the world. The ease of extending Moodle features through the use of plugins makes it so much popular and successful LMS. In this post, we will show you how you can use the Mass Actions block to perform repeated actions in Moodle.

The Mass Actions Block plugin allows educators to perform actions upon multiple resources or activities, rather than having to perform repeated actions on individual items. It is now maintained by Matthew Davidson and is maintained for all major Moodle versions.

The Mass Actions block helps the educators with mass selection, indentation, deletion, hiding, showing, making available, duplicating, and moving. The block can be very handy if you have to do multiple actions for many course activities/resources involving similar action.

You can download the Mass Actions block plugin from the official directory here. Since it is a block type plugin, you need to install it in Moodle/Blocks directory. If you want to learn how to install a Moodle plugin, please check out this guide for beginners.

Once installed, you can start using this plugin directly without any configuration. However, you need to ensure that Javascript is enabled in your browser, and you are in Editing Mode. To select items to perform actions on, simply click the checkbox next to the activity or resource or use select functionality from the block. Then click the action you would like to perform in the block.

What are the other popular Moodle plugins which you are using on your Moodle site? Please share your favorite Moodle plugins with us in the comments section below.

Moodle Educators – How to use the activity completion settings

By
Jaswinder Singh
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Moodle Educators - How to use the activity completion settings
Moodle Educators - How to use the activity completion settings

Moodle offers you the most customizable and enriched learning management system. You can use Moodle to create your own individualized learning portal. As a teacher you might be struggling to track the progress of your students. In this post, we will let you know how you can use the Moodle’s inbuilt activity completion settings to handle this.

Activity completion can be helpful for students to be able to track their progress in a course. They will have an easy checklist to understand the requirements and what they have achieved so far. In Moodle 4.0, the side course index also shows a nice green icon for the activities which are completed by the learners.

For all unversed, Moodle allows the teacher to set completion criteria in a specific activity’s settings which are required to be met by students. The criterion might be viewing, receiving a certain score or a student marking it as complete.

Depending on the activity type, there are different activity completion settings. For example, for a Page resource, the students only need to spend some defined time. In quiz, they might be required to get a minimum passing grade and in Forums, they might need to post a reply/thread.

In this post, we will see how you can set the Minimum passing grade on applicable graded activities in Moodle course. Just make sure that the administrator has enabled the Activity completion in Site administration > Advanced features. And you have also enabled in your course settings under ” Show activity completion conditions “.

Use Minimum Passing Grade as Activity Completion criteria

For example, you are having a quiz and you want the students to have a passing grade in order to mark the quiz as complete. In Moodle 4.0, there is a new condition included which allows you to define a passing grade to mark the completion of a graded activity. This condition is used together with the Require grade requirement.

Under the quiz settings, you need to set the minimum passing grade under the Grade section:

Moodle Educators - How to use the activity completion settings
Specify the grade to pass

Then under the activity completion settings you need to tick the box for ‘Student must receive a passing grade to complete this activity.

Moodle Educators - How to use the activity completion settings
Use the Grade to Pass checkbox

Similarly there are many other activity completion settings which you can use to make your online learning portal effectively. Check out this page to learn more about the activity completion in Moodle.

Moodle Educators – Use Formulas question type for STEM exam in Moodle

By
Jaswinder Singh
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Moodle Educators - Use Formulas question type for STEM exam in Moodle
Moodle Educators - Use Formulas question type for STEM exam in Moodle

Moodle – world’s most popular open source allows you to customize it to cater for all industry requirements. Moodlers around the world uses Moodle for schools, universities and corporate sector online learning platform. Similarly to teach specialized subjects Moodle is having its own tools and plugins e.g. for mathematics we have the Formulas Question type plugin.

The Formulas Question type allows you to create Moodle quiz questions to cater the requirements for Mathematics, Physics and other STEM exams. You can create questions involving various answer structures such as coordinate, polynomial, matrix, etc. Other features such as unit checking and multiple parts are also available.

The formulas question type also allows you to set random values in the question which means each student can receive questions with unique values and wording. It can also handle the units using a built-in conversion rule.

You can download the formulas question type from the Moodle plugins directory here. If you want to understand how to install a Moodle plugin, please follow this beginners guide. Once installed you can start using it without any major configuration steps.

Please watch this video to get started with the Formulas Question type Moodle plugin:

The plugin is supported for all major Moodle versions. The answer fields can be placed anywhere in the question so that we can create questions involving various answer structures such as coordinate, polynomial and matrix.

What are other Moodle plugins which you are using for STEM teaching? Please share with us in the comments section below.

Moodle Teachers – How to create page with Moodle blocks using Poster plugin

By
Jaswinder Singh
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Moodle Teachers - How to create page with Moodle blocks using Poster plugin
Moodle Teachers - How to create page with Moodle blocks using Poster plugin

Moodle – world’s most popular open source Learning Management System is one of the most customizable LMS. Moodle Blocks are the items which may be added to the side inside the block drawer of any page in Moodle. There are many blocks supported in Moodle core while many others are there in the Moodle Plugins directory. In this post, we will see how you can use the Moodle blocks to create a page.

For example, let us say you want to keep your course page neat and clean without anything in the sidebars. So, you can disable the blocks on the course page and use the Poster Moodle plugin. The Poster plugin allows you to create a web page consisting of Moodle blocks.

The poster plugin can be used for example for keeping the following blocks on a single page:

  • Course wall/dashboard (contact teachers, detailed outline of the course, latest news, comments, …).
  • Project dashboard (project goals, calendar, comments, people, …)
  • Research report (goals, methods, results, comments, …)

The Poster Moodle plugin is contributed by David Mudrak and is maintained consistently for all Moodle versions since its release.

Moodle Teachers - How to create page with Moodle blocks using Poster plugin
Poster Moodle Plugin

You can download the Poster Moodle plugin from the official directory here. Please follow this guide if you want to learn about how to install Moodle plugins.

Once installed the Poster plugin is ready to use. You can add the Poster resource on any course page and then add the blocks which you would like to appear on this page.

I personally feel that this plugin is very useful for teachers who are looking to provide a neat and clean course page to their learners. This will also help you to combine all similar blocks onto a single page which will keep learners focused.

What are the other handy Moodle plugins which you are using on your Moodle site? Please share with us in the comments section below.

Moodle Educators – Now restrict course access based on enrolment method

By
Jaswinder Singh
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Moodle Educators - Now restrict course access based on enrolment method
Moodle Educators - Now restrict course access based on enrolment method

Moodle LMS is one of the most popular open source Learning Management System in the world. Moodle plugins is one of the main reasons behind its huge success as it allows you to add additional functionality to Moodle core. There are more than 2000 plugins contributed by Moodle community members over the years. Recently a new plugin is contributed to the Moodle plugins directory which allows you to restrict course activities based on the enrolment method.

Moodle core allows you to restrict course activities based on multiple criteria including Activity completion, date, grade, the group or grouping the students are in or even user profile fields. There are many other plugins like restrictions by section completion which allows you to restrict sections unless previous sections are completed.

The new Moodle plugin – ‘Restriction by enrolment method’ allows you to restrict access to course activities/resources based on enrolment method. Let’s say if a student belongs to Manual Enrolment, and another student to Paypal, then you can restrict the student from manual enrolment unless they pay and get enrolled through Paypal.

The new plugin developed by Jorge C is compatible with Moodle 3.11 onwards. You can download it from the Moodle plugins directory here. Since it is an enrolment type plugin so you need to install it into folder /availability/condition/enrolmentmethod. You can also follow this guide to learn how to install a new plugin.

After installation there is no configuration required. As a teacher you need to simply add the “Enrolment method” availability condition to activities / resources / sections in your courses. You need to mention the enrolment method which the student should have to access the course section/activity/resource.

What are the other useful Moodle plugins which you are using for your learning portal? Please share with us in the comments section below.

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