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Yearly Archives: 2013

Easy-to-use integration of a library reading list system into Moodle

The library uses a system which allows tutors to create lists of reading resources which simultaneously inform the students what they should be reading and the library of what books and articles they need to purchase. The system is called Talis Aspire and is a market leader in UK University libraries. The system allows flexibility in the […]

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Making Moodle more engaging by rethinking the display of content

As many of our regular readers will know, a common theme in this blog has been how it is hard to create Moodle pages that look like the rest of the internet. Many Moodle pages look lists. When we are developing we often ask the question “What would Facebook do?” – or more generally “What […]

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New names for the Moodle label and page mods

When you create a Moodle course you can add two generic types of learning material. One provides non-interactive content, and the other provides tools for student interaction. Moodle calls these two material types: “resources” and “activities”. Tutors create the material types through Moodle modules/mods, the names of which reflect what they do – so the […]

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Grademark and Turnitin integration with Moodle

We have been using Turnitin for formative use for some time. This allows students, researchers and tutors to make textual comparisons between their own work and texts found on the Turnitin database. They can use this to establish that they have cited and referenced their work correctly. We currently do not have an academic policy […]

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Making the Moodle assignment module easy to use

Over the last year we have made a few changes to the assignment tool in Moodle to improve the student and tutors’ experience. We tried to simplify assignments by removing the confusing (or never intentionally used) options and adding in a few features our tutors did need including a ‘release the feedback’ button. For tutors […]

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Fun with oEmbed for youtube and vimeo in moodle

Like most people running a large cms on the web we always have an interesting time with video from youtube and vimeo. Embedding code standards change over time, the different urls are always fun, http/https is not intuitive to most users, videos can get taken down quite frequently and that classic 20 embedded videos in […]

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E-learning team presentation at Moodle Moot Dublin 2013

In case our Moodlemoot Dublin abstract has left you salivating but you have found that our presentation wasn’t recorded, we thought we’d give a quick overview. Sussex University is a research-led Higher Education institution using a customised Moodle install called Study Direct. We have 1,500 editing tutors, 15,000 students, 2,099 2012/13 Moodle courses  and 13,500 unique hits per […]

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Turnitin user group meeting, 15 February 2013 part 1 – support, resources and product releases

This Turnitin user group meeting came at an important time for the Learning systems team, as we think about how best to support the goals of our institution and our users with tools for managing assessments. A lot was covered in the discussions, but I’m just going to pick out the areas that were particularly […]

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Improving Moodle import. Part 3: The application

We have developed a new import tool for importing materials from one course to another. The advantages over the Moodle import are: it is easy to use it is reliable it is fast it only imports questions used in the quiz while maintaining question category structures that are used it shares many similarities with our […]

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Brighton UX conference 2012

I am relatively new to user experience. My colleague, Stuart, is a keen advocate and a lot of what he says makes undeniable sense. I have therefore started to dip my toe into this new world. I began by reading The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett. His name made him sound like […]

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