Moodle Glossary
A
- Accessibility
"Web accessibility is the inclusive practice of ensuring there are no barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, websites on the World Wide Web by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, generally all users have equal access to information and functionality." [Wikipedia]
Read our accessibility statement for Moodle.
- Activities
An 'activity' is one of the resources that you can add to the middle column of your moodle space - quiz, file, folder, lesson, book, forum, database and so on i.e. an activity is something that a student will do that interacts with other students and or the teacher. There are 14 different types of activities in the standard Moodle that can be found on the "add an activity" drop down menu.
- Announcement
The 'Announcements Forum' is automatically created for each Moodle space, all participants are enrolled by default, and it is used to instantly send a notification e-mail to all students on a course.
- Assessment
The term assessment is generally used to refer to all activities teachers use to help students learn and to gauge student progress. In Moodle, we use this to cover the use of interactive activities such as assignments, quizzes, questionnaires as well as items relating to the greadebook, scales and marking rubric.
- Assignment
The assignment activity provides a space into which students can submit work for teachers to grade and give feedback on. This saves on paper and is more efficient than email. It can also be used to remind students of 'real-world' assignments they need to complete offline, such as art work, and thus not require any digital content.
B
- Badges
Badges are a way of celebrating achievement and showing progress.They are awarded based on a variety of criteria and can be displayed on a user's profile.
- Basics
Basics simply means 'getting started' items as well as the very first tasks you are likely to need to do in order to work with your Moodle space.
- Blocks
Blocks are items which may be added to the left or right or centre column of any page in Moodle. They may also be added to the centre of the My Home (My Moodle) page. You can theme the position of blocks in the centre of pages as well.
Examples:
HTML (blank block)
Lecture Capture (Echo 360)
Reading Lists (Talis Aspire)
- Blog
The word 'blog' is a contraction of 'web log', a form of online journal used by millions of people around the world for self-expression and communicating with family and friends. Blogs are usually organized as a chronological series of postings written by one person, although some blogs can be authored by groups of people.
- Book
The 'book' module enables a teacher to create a multi-page resource in a book-like format, with chapters and subchapters. 'Books' can contain media files as well as text and are useful for displaying lengthy passages of information which can be broken down into sections.
C
- Certificate
Certificates are a custom PDF diploma that can issued to students in a course on completion of specified course elements. They are created using borders, watermarks, seals, signatures, outcomes, grades, and custom text.
- Choice
The Choice activity allows you to ask a question and set up radio buttons which learners can click to make a selection from a number of possible responses. They can choose one or more options and can update their selection if allowed. Choices can be useful as quick poll to stimulate thinking about a topic; to allow the class to vote on a direction for the course, or to gauge progress.
- Collaboration
Student interaction is a key strength of Moodle. While instructors can easily use activities in Moodle to deliver content and assess learning, Moodle also supports student-led activities and collaboration, especially in combination with using groups.
- Communication
Moodle provides many communications tools which can be used by teachers to keep students informed and support student-led activities and collaboration through forums, group, wiki, and chat features.
- Configuration
Configuration is used to describe elements and processes for setting up and structuring courses within Moodle. It covers course format, adding and removing sections and blocks, adding labels and restricting access to sections and activities.
D
- Database
The database activity module allows the teacher and/or students to build, display and search a bank of record entries about any conceivable topic. The format and structure of these entries can be almost unlimited, including images, files, URLs, numbers and text amongst other things.
E
- Echo360
The University of Warwick automated lecture recording system is powered by Echo360.
The Echo360 block in Moodle will, or can, link to recordings on the Echo360 servers for the relevant modules (or can be manually linked to ad hoc recordings).
- Engagement
This refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education.
Moodle provides a number of tools to help increase engagement such as badges and certificates, the ability to embed multimedia directly into different activity types, and collaboration and communication tools such as wikis, forums and workshops.
- Enrolment
Enrolment relates to how students and staff are added to a moodle space in order to be able to view or edit it. This can be automatically form SITS or using a webgroup, or via manual, auto and/or self-enrolment.
- Evaluation
Evaluation is concerned with assessing the effectiveness of teaching, teaching strategies, methods and techniques. It provides feedback to the teachers about their teaching and the learners about their learning.
Learning and evaluation are at the heart of what Moodle does. Evaluation tools are available for scales and grading, as well as course participation and completion reports.
- External Tools
The external tool enables participants to interact with LTI-compliant learning resources and activities on other web sites. (LTI is an IMS standard for Learning Tool Interoperability.) Examples at Warwick include Echo 360 (lecture capture) and Questionmark Perception.
F
- Feedback
The Feedback activity allows you to create and conduct surveys to collect feedback using your own (non-graded) questions, rather than a list of pre-written questions (cf Survey and Quiz).
G
- Gamification
Gamification in Moodle is an effective way to engage and motivate learners by using game mechanics and/or games. Game mechanics are common processes used to encourage competition and the desire for learners to ‘win’. These include:
- Points
- Challenges, Badges & Achievements
- Leaderboards
- Levels
- Time-based Activities
- Continual and Immediate Feedback
- Stories and Characters
- Freedom to Fail
- Glossary
The glossary activity module allows participants to create and maintain a list of definitions, like a dictionary.
- Gradebook
All the grades for each student in a course can be found in the course gradebook, or 'Grader report', accessed from the Grades link. The grader report collects items that have been graded from the various parts of Moodle that are assessed, and allows you to view and change them as well as sort them out into categories and calculate totals in various ways.
H
- H5P
H5P makes it easy to create, share and reuse HTML5 content and applications. H5P empowers everyone to create rich and interactive web experiences more efficiently. The content is responsive and mobile friendly, which means that users will experience the same rich, interactive content on computers, smartphones and tablets alike.
M
- Moodle
Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments.
At Warwick Moodle is used to deliver module materials such as lecture notes, reading lists, lecture recordings and enables assessment and innovative pedagogies.
N
Navigation within Moodle is through the use of a navigation block, dashboard and personal profile, and also encompasses course content and tags blocks.
P
- Participants
Participants are the teachers and students who are part of a course. The list of participants can be seen by clicking the Participants link in the Navigation block. Editors (Managers, Course leaders, Editing teachers) can manually enrol participants or they can be added automatically from SITS or enrolment rules using webgroups.
- Progression
Moodle provides multiple tools for tracking student progress - including grades, competency achievements, activity completion, course completion, badges, and course reports.
R
- Resources
A 'resource' is an item that you can use to support learning, such as a file or link. Resources appear as a single link with an icon in front of it that represents the type of resource.
Examples:
- Rollover
Each academic year new blank Module spaces are created on Moodle ready for teaching content and activities to be added. Moodle will not automatically copy your content from a previous academic year in to the new academic year. The Academic Year Rollover tool allows a nominated individual to enter the rollover decisions for each module in a department.
S
- SCORM
SCORM stands for “Sharable Content Object Reference Model”, and refers to creating units of online training material that can be shared across systems. SCORM defines how to create “sharable content objects” or “SCOs” that can be reused in different systems and contexts.
W
- Wiki
A wiki is a collection of collaboratively authored web documents. Basically, a wiki page is a web page everyone in a class can create together, in the browser, without needing to know HTML.
Wikis can be a powerful tool for collaborative work where an entire class can edit a document together or in groups, or each student can have their own wiki..