Fellow community members, I understand that a Moodle module for attendance is now in late stages of development / testing phases. I would like to take this opportunity to discuss a Moodle solution that Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) has developed.
For the past 2 academic years MMU Department of Computing and Mathematics (DoCM) has been utilising the Moodle quiz module to monitor the attendance of students known as the Student Monitoring System (SMS).
MMU staff understand the need for an attendance monitoring system in order to protect the best interests of the student; not only to ensure the best academic performance possible, but also the pastoral care of students who have for instance, recently moved away from the parental home for the first time. Attempts at MMU for paper registration systems and in-house developed electronic solutions have failed to engage staff due to the commitment required to enter data manually from the capture sheet, nor the student body as it does not offer them any added value.
The quiz module has been used in DoCM by setting 2 Moodle quizzes for each day of the academic calendar; AM and PM. The quizzes are Subnet IP restricted, so students must be within the department network range to be able to respond to a quiz. As teaching from within the department is mostly “hands-on” there is no issue of time required for a student to log onto Moodle to respond to the sessions quiz.
Students are only expected to respond to 7 quizzes per week, of the possible 10 (Monday - Friday, AM/PM) to show their commitment to the course.
In exchange for students engaging in the quizzes, within the feedback of the Moodle quiz a link to the forums is shown. Though like virtually all university courses a forum has been available for many years, since the beginning of this experiment there has been an increase in forum posts of 50 fold, creating a community spirit within each year group. Further to this, students understand the requirement for the University to monitor their attendance and when asked, most students will report that the system shows that the University care about their well being as well as their education.
While DoCM has been using the quiz module in this manner, the major negative aspect has been the overhead in creating quizzes for the entire academic calendar. The reason for this post is to encourage your views on the findings at MMU DoCM and upon a newly developed web application, known as the SMS Support Tool which can swiftly create the quizzes for the entire academic year reducing the overhead from 3 days to just 3 minutes.
The SMS Support Tool is currently hosted on the MMU website http://tiny.cc/sms363 for your evaluation. A short guide to using the tool can be found on the home page, along with details below:
- From the SMS Support Tool homepage, click “Moodle Quiz Tool”.
- Enter the required academic term dates into the relevant boxes on the form.
- The quiz question and the possible multiple choice responses set for the student each day can be customised in either plain text or HTML.
- For testing purposes it is easiest to select ‘Download Zip restore file for Moodle’ as this will remove the need to Zip the file manually.
- In your Moodle instance (or on the Moodle test site) click ‘Restore’ on the administration panel, upload the ‘Moodle.zip’ file and click restore.
- Ensure that the option to create a new course is selected so not to destroy data in your current instance.
- Once the course is restored the quizzes created should be visible and answerable by students.
- When students have responded to the quizzes, Moodle’s Gradebook can be used to view the responses showing students that have stopped attending, students that may require a course leaders attention etc.
I ask of you that along with any discussion, technical issues you may encounter or comments you have on this topic to be posted on this thread, that you could take the time to answer a short survey on the SMS Support Tool at http://tiny.cc/smssurvey
Many thanks in advance for your feedback, it will be greatly appreciated.
Alan Finlayson.