Mary Cooch

Hello accessiblity experts Participants in our Learn Moodle 3.11 Basics MOOC are having a good time testing their courses with the Brickfield Accessiblity toolkit but a question has been raised about the checker saying some pages have more than 500 words, whereas in fact they have far fewer than 500. ( I went into the course and looked for myself and even if you count the words in code view you still get around 300) 

Is the checker counting characters rather than words, or is there something I haven't thought of?

For anyone who already knows the basics of teaching with Moodle and wishes to extend and improve their online teaching skills, a free, self-paced MOOC is now available - Moodle Teaching Next Level.

We would love to hear what you think of the course, if anything is unclear, or you have any ideas for improvements. Please let us know by replying to this discussion.

Last week as part of the global Open Education Week initiative, members of the Moodle Education team led a webinar on “Assessment in the open-source Moodle LMS”.

Moodle Education advisor and MEC Co-ordinator Anna Krassa presented an overview of the different types of assessment supported by Moodle, and in an interactive session, participants were given access to a MoodleCloud site to explore the rating and grading opportunities in the Assignment, Forum and Glossary activities.

 The presentation and course backup will be made available on MoodleNet, but in the meantime we are happy to share them here for you in a zipped folder. The folder contains:

• A backup of the course Assessment in the Moodle LMS
• The presentation
• The Glossary entries

We hope you find them useful and aim to do more interactive sessions of this type in the future.

You might have already heard of the Moodle Educator Certification, a six-course program for educators which we launched in May. It’s based on DigCompEdu, the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators, and is designed for experienced Moodlers who’ve been teaching or training with Moodle for at least a year.

Until now, the MEC program has only been available through our  Moodle Partners, and we currently have 25 Partners worldwide who are able to offer the MEC, with a further 13 in progress. If you’re an individual interested in having an HQ-validated Moodle certification then that’s the route you should take.

However, we’re now opening the MEC program up to large schools, colleges, universities or any educational institution to run it themselves, with our support.  We (the Moodle Education team) will train your in-house Moodle expert to facilitate the courses and we’ll give you a private secure area on our dedicated MEC site to take your staff through the program. (Note the MEC is not Moodle training: our Learn Moodle site along with our Moodle Partners provide training for new Moodle users)

If running the MEC yourselves is something that you think your educational organisation might be interested in, why not find our more on our MEC page on moodle.com and get in touch with us? 😊

Our School demo site, Mount Orange, is now running Moodle 3.10 and you're welcome to log in as a student (username = student, password = moodle) or a teacher (username = teacher, password = moodle) to try the new improvements and features.

Some suggestions to try as a student:

• Download course content as a student from our Digital Literacy or Psychology in Cinema courses
• View folder images directly in the browser from the Interesting cities folder in our Celebrating Cultures course
• Enrol in the  Moodle History quiz to see the new scrolling timer, Essay question file size limit and have your attempt marked complete before your essay is graded.

Alternatively, log in as a teacher and explore the New Features of Moodle 3.10 from any course and activity settings.