#18 - Use your Moodle Module Space homepage to guarantee accurate, effective info for students
- Students can sometimes struggle to find precise, clearly stated, canonical information about what they can expect from a module, and what they need to do to complete it successfully.
- This can cause great anxiety and disenchantment.
- Moodle Module Space offers a simple means through which we can provide students with a common, well-known, canonical location to find out what they need to know.
Category: Design and develop teaching Communicate module design and requirements and plans to students
Enhancement goals addressed: Constructive alignment | Student confidence and self-efficacy
Tools and how to get support: Moodle Module Space
Solution overview
Every module has an automatically-created home page in Moodle. A link to the module is automatically added to the students' dashboard. Talis Aspire reading lists and Echo 360 lecture recordings are automatically included, meaning that students will regularly return to the page. Use this as an opportunity to clearly state your intended learning outcomes, methods, assessment tasks, module timetable etc. All of this information is copied into a new version of your Moodle Module Space, when it is created as part of the annual roll-over process.
Process
- By September each year your Moodle Module Space for the following year will have been created, and the convenor assigned as Course Leader. If you are not nominated as convenor, the convenor (or a department admin) may need to add you as an Editing Teacher.
- If your module ran in the previous academic year, a new version will have been created based on the previous version (this is called the Roll-over Process).
- Check with your department to see if they have a format for displaying key information and content such as lecture capture. Follow this template if necessary.
- Look at your Moodle Module Space from the perspective of a student (or better still, get students to look at it and tell you what they think). Is it clear? Simple? Comprehensive? Not overwhelming? Perhaps you should create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section to contain more extensive essential information. You don't have to tell the students everything! Just make sure they aren't confused or unclear.