As the Learn Moodle 3.4 Basics MOOC draws to a close (last official day Sunday 4 Feb), participants are busy ensuring all the activity completion boxes are ticked so they can download either their completion certificate (35 activities including a peer assessment workshop) or achievement certificate (34 activities, without the workshop for those who didn’t organise themselves to meet the deadline) It’s often the manual completion boxes that get left until last and cause confusion – participants just need a quick reminder that they must tick them themselves, and they’re away! This final week also sees a flurry of participants starting new discussions multiple times in the Introduce yourself! forum to get the completion tick, sadly because they simply didn’t read the instructions.
On the other hand, it is thanks to the eagle eyes of our MOOC participants that bugs with Moodle features get noticed and fixed. Each run of our MOOC results in improvements to Moodle core and plugins for the community as a whole – an excellent benefit.
On another positive note, what has been particularly heartwarming this time has been the number of responses to participants posting their practice courses for review in the Show us your Moodle course! forum. With such a huge group of participants, it’ s difficult for everyone to get feedback, but it is encouraging that there are fewer courses with no replies. This is in part thanks to our regular MOOCers and thanks to experienced Moodlers who enrol in a lot of courses to offer suggestions. Ideally, everyone who shares their practice course should get at least one reply with feedback but we’re not there yet. I personally vow to engage more in this review activity next time.
Did I say next time? Yes! The next MOOC – Learn Moodle 3.5 Basics – will start on June 18 for four weeks until July 15. Sign up will be announced on our social media channels (and I will post on here too) nearer the time. Why not just enable sign-up now? Believe it or not, MOOC work doesn’t end when the MOOC ends 🙂 Behind the scenes, facilitators and administrators have to close down the current course and prepare for the new course. To give you an idea, here are a few of the jobs which must be done:
We have a checklist for such tasks and tick them off as we go along. In fact, ticking boxes was mentioned in one of the forum threads this week, and we’re very happy to read it:
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Hi, Mary!
I participated in Learn Moodle 3.4 Basics and enjoyed it very much. I learned a lot too. I already saved the date in my calendar for the next one.
I am wondering how can be put a course in read-only mode, as Learn Moodle is since february, 12th. I have been doing some research and can’t find anything in the documentation or in the forums. Only this 2008 post by Martin Dougiamas about creating another role with limited permissions: Re: locking classes (read-only mode?), but I suppose that 10 years later there must be some simpler way. Is there any? Is that what you did with Learn Moodle 3.4 Basics?
Comment: Alejandro Vásquez – 27. February 2018 @ 9:43 pm
Hello 🙂 Making the course ‘read only’ was indeed done manually by Helen Foster by making overrides to capabilities – no simpler way yet.
Comment: admin – 28. February 2018 @ 8:10 am