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Prepping Your Moodle Course for Fall 2013

The following post will walk you through resetting a Moodle course for a new semester (in other words - you'd like to re-use the course you created/taught last semester or previously).

FIRST: create a backup of the course. This is just a 'snapshot' of the course contents, students and student contributions in its current state.

Admin panel

1. On the course homepage, under the Administration panel, click "Backup"
2. Uncheck anything you don't want in the back up 
3. This third page (Schema Settings) will tell you everything, down to the document, that will be included in your back up. The right-hand side lists the contents of the course, and on the left is a check box for user data associated with that content. If you know you don't really need every document or every assignment, streamline and un-check the items you don't need. 
4. You'll now get a confirmation of everything that will be included in your back up. When you click "Perform Backup" on this screen, the actual backup file will get generated. Depending upon the size of your course, this step could take a while. You'll get a message that says "The backup file was successfully created."
5. Now you'll see a page with a list of all the backup files for this course (Moodle automatically generates a backup file every few days, and saves a couple of versions in your course file directory.) Click "Download" to the right of the top file (it will have today's date. You can change the file name when you save it to your own computer drive.

NEXT: Reset the course. By resetting you'll have the option to remove the current students and all of the data associated with the current students (grades, blog posts, etc). It's true, you could just go into the user section and delete each person individually, but occasionally this presents some issues: first, your Moodle course retains the student data in files, which increases the size of the course each year. Additionally, if you have a student that starts your course one semester, then drops and decides to enroll in a future semester, Moodle will think that student has already completed some of the course!

Here's a short video on resetting:

Video Embedding

Why do I think this is a good video?

ReMoodling: Getting Ready for the New Semester

Spring semester hasn't officially begun, but the preparations are in full swing. Today's 2 Minute Tech will show you how to put your Fall term Moodle course 'to bed' and how to reset it for Spring term.

Inserting Images into Moodle

Sometimes you see a cartoon or image on a website and you've just got to share it with your class. You can easily add the image to your course Moodle site.

This video highlights two ways to insert the image. NOTE: neither option includes copy & paste. While the copy & paste function works to insert an online image into a Word Doc or even a PowerPoint (although this is not an ideal practice) copy and pasting into Moodle will NOT work. Most images will bring along pages worth of code. Instead of actually seeing your picture or cartoon on your Moodle page, you'll either see gobbledygook or nothing (but the code will take over your text box and you'll find it's no longer editable).

Printing Webpages (or saving them for later)

Like all good green-blooded citizens, I try to refrain from unnecessary printing; especially printing of webpages. Invariably, the three paragraph article I've intended to print spits out seven pages of additional and unwanted text from my printer.

No more. Joliprint to the rescue. Joliprint will take a web article, remove the unwanted sidebar info (links, advertisements) and save the copy as a PDF. You can then easily print the PDF, or you can save it for electronic reading later. The PDF can be saved directly to your Google Docs, downloaded, emailed, viewed online, or posted to Facebook or Twitter for sharing.

There are two options for using Joliprint: 1) download the add-on application. You'll have a button on your browser toolbar. Click the button to make the PDF. Or 2) just use the webpage interface. Bookmark joliprint.com and anytime you want to preserve or print a webpage, simply copy and paste the URL into the big blank on joliprint.com.

Quick View of Forums in Moodle

This time of the semester always seems to drag a bit: we're still too far out to get excited about the Thanksgiving break, fall break has been forgotten and the work just keeps coming.

If you're finding yourself wondering 'why did I assign so many forum postings? I can't possibly get to them all?' then I have the short cut for you.

You can view ALL forum postings by a student on one page. You can scroll quickly through the postings, make sure your student have hit the mark, and then go on to the next student without clicking in and out of postings at the forum site.

To view all postings by a single student:

1. From within your course page, click "Participants" in the upper left-hand side
2. Choose a student by clicking his/her name from your participant list
3. From the tabs shown above that students' profile info, click "Forum posts" (see image below)
4. You are now looking at all the forums posted by this student. The "See this post in context" link at the bottom of each post writing will take you back to the original forum location.

Happy reading!