Tuesday, 30 April 2024, 2:45 AM
Site: learn@inasp
Course: General (General)
Glossary: Moodle tips
ENROLMENT STAGE

Having trouble enrolling in a course?

If you receive enrollment instructions for a particular course, you'll need to follow the instructions carefully. Don't rush through this process. In particular, you have to locate the right course (and the right batch number, if relevant) and enter the enrollment key exactly as given in the instructions. It's a good idea to copy the key from the instructions and paste it in the box where you have to enter it.

After entering the enrollment key, you can "unhide" it to see if it matches the key given to you. Make sure there are no extra spaces or other inessential characters.

If you can't join your course AND you're absolutely sure that you have tried enrolling in the right course with the right enrollment key, you may email the course facilitator to seek help. Please mention in your email the full name of the course you tried to join and the enrollment key you used.

Related: Enrollment deadline

GENERAL TIPS

[Anonymisation of survey responses]

We may combine or correlate the responses in the feedback survey with the responses in the pre-course survey to understand the influence of different factors on course participation. However, in doing any such analysis, we will be using anonymised numeric identifiers and not real names. Further, for reporting purposes we may use anonymised data or quotes from this survey. (You can also look at our privacy policy to learn how we use the data we collect.) While we ask you to complete this survey to meet the completion criteria for the course, your actual responses will not have any bearing on your course completion status.

Acknowledging AuthorAID courses in your publications

If you would like to give credit to an AuthorAID online course in any of your manuscripts (eg, in the "acknowledgements section"), we suggest this wording: "<your name> gained useful knowledge on research writing from an AuthorAID online course run by INASP". Please note the correct way to write AuthorAID with "AID" capitalised (it is not "AuthorAid"), and please make sure you mention INASP too because this is AuthorAID's parent organisation. Thank you :)

ALERT: Upcoming events block is not yet activated

After you complete the pre assessment quiz, the course material will become available to you and therefore the upcoming events block will be activated. If you haven't yet completed the pre assessment quiz, whatever message you see in the upcoming events block (eg, "no deadlines in the next 10 days") may not be correct. So please complete this quiz as soon as possible!

Automatically generated certificates

For many courses on INASP Moodle we award certificates that are generated automatically based on the relevant course completion criteria. If you're eligible for such a certificate, you'll be notified when your certificate is ready for downloading. Please note the following:

  1. You can download your certificate anytime after the certificate is ready (even months later, as long as you've not unenrolled yourself or the course hasn't been deleted). You just need to log into INASP Moodle and visit the course homepage. You'll then see a link or section to download your certificate, if you've completed the course. If you've forgotten your password for INASP Moodle, you can reset it by clicking the 'Lost password' link on the homepage.
  2. If you would like your name to appear differently on your certificate, just change your name in your user profile after logging in. See check/edit your profile. Then download your certificate again.
  3. If you've changed the interface language on INASP Moodle from English to some other language and you find that there are odd characters in your certificate, please change the interface language back to English. Then download your certificate again. Some languages are not supported fully in the certificate plugin.
  4. Please do not request any changes in the wording or formatting of the certificate, as these are standardized.
  5. We do not send out hard copies of certificates to online course participants as this would be very expensive! But feel free to print your certificate yourself.

Related tip: Verification code on the certificate

Checking or editing your own entry in a database activity

Once you have added an entry, you can check or edit it if you'd like to. To do this, you have to first search for your entry by putting your name in the search box in the database. You should then be able to see your entry. To edit your entry, click the icon that looks like this:

Completion check mark for lessons

Once you see all the pages in a lesson, you will see a check mark inside the box next to the lesson name on the homepage, indicating that you have completed this lesson. If you think you've gone through a lesson but you don't see the check mark, it means you may have skipped one or more pages in between.

Confidentiality statement: INASP Moodle

The information you provide in the background information survey and your activity metrics in the course will be held in confidentiality by INASP. If you are taking an online course as part of a sponsored group, we may share this information with the sponsoring organisation. Otherwise, only overall data, such as the number of course completers, are shared in the public domain.

Deadline reminders in upcoming events or calendar block

If there's an upcoming events block or calendar block on your course homepage, you can see upcoming deadlines in this block. By default, deadlines occurring in the next 10 days are shown. When you complete an activity, the deadline message related to this activity may persist on the upcoming events or calendar block. It won't disappear until the deadline has passed. Please don't be concerned by this. To check whether you have completed an activity, go to the activity page to check if your work has been submitted or see whether a completion check mark has appeared against that activity. (For peer assessment activities, see this: Phases of a peer assessment activity)

Email copies of forum posts

Posts made on forums within a course are sent as email copies to people who have subscribed to those forums. You may be subscribed by default to the forums in the courses you are participating in.

If you don't wish to receive the email copies, you can unsubscribe from any or all the forums. Just click the "unsubscribe from this forum" or "unsubscribe from all forums" link in any email copy of a forum post. You can also visit the forum and click "unsubscribe from this forum" in the "forum administration" block on the left.

If you unsubscribe from the forums, please make sure you visit your course regularly to check the forum posts, for there might be a lot of great discussions going on!

If there is a "news forum" in your course, you might not be able to unsubscribe from this forum because important announcements are made here by the course facilitator.

Forum etiquette - Don'ts

You should NOT:

  • Display any kind of bias towards course participants based on their gender, ethnicity, nationality, or anything else
  • Write in a harsh or insulting manner to anyone in the course
  • Share the contact information of other participants without permission
  • Discuss things unrelated to the topic of the course (unless you use a special social forum for informal/off-topic discussion);
  • Advertise anything without providing context. This includes posting calls for papers from journals, conferences and other events. You can however provide a link to anything online if it is relevant to an ongoing discussion in the course
  • Provide links to websites that may have illegal content, such as pirated software, scanned books, and copyrighted journal articles that are not meant to be shared openly. Uploading any such content directly on the forums is also forbidden.
  • Create an excessive number of separate threads on the same topic
If you are in doubt, check with your course moderator.

Forum etiquette - Dos

  • Check the forums regularly to see what others have posted
  • Make sure your posts are relevant
  • Post your contributions at appropriate times or within deadlines (if any)
  • Check what you have written before posting it, especially when expressing a disagreement

How pre/post assessment data helps us

Your score in the pre and post assessment quizzes will help us learn what impact the workshop has had on your knowledge of the key concepts. And you have something to gain as well: after you take the post assessment quiz, you can see the answer key and thus validate your knowledge of the key concepts.

How to bookmark a webpage

We recommend that you bookmark INASP Moodle or your active learning spaces on INASP Moodle. In most web browsers, you can quickly bookmark a webpage by pressing the Control and D keys together when you're on that webpage. When you do this, you'll see a small dialog box asking you to confirm. In the Google Chrome browser, bookmarks are normally added to the bookmarks bar by default, which is right under the address bar. So you can always see your bookmarked pages. In Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, you can make a webpage appear in the bookmarks bar. Just change the bookmark location after pressing Control and D.

How to edit an entry you have added in a database

To see or edit your own entry in an activity that is set up as a database, you have to first search for your entry, for example, you can put your name in the search box and click search. You should then be able to see your entry. Then click the gear-shaped icon alongside your entry.

How to reset your password

  1. Go to the login page: https://learn.inasp.info/login/index.php
  2. Click on the link titled 'Forgotten your username or password?'
  3. Under 'Search by email address', put in the email address you used when you created your user account, and click 'Search'. Alternatively, if you remember your username, put that under 'Search by username', and click the 'Search link' next to this box.

You will then receive an email with instructions to reset your password.

How to save your own blog entries

If you have written blog entries as part of a course, you may want to keep a record of all your entries to read them later on (for example, when you wish to remind yourself of what you learnt in the course). You can look at your own blog entries by going to your profile and clicking Blog entries (under the Miscellaneous heading). Then use the save or print feature in your web browser to save a copy of the page that you see. This page shows a maximum of 10 entries. If you have written more than 10 entries, you will see links to access the other pages with your entries and you can save/print all the pages one by one.

How to search forums

When you visit any forum, you'll see a "search forums" box at the top of the forum. Enter one or more keywords and do a search. Go through the results and click the "advanced search" link under the "search forums" box if you wish to refine your search. If your keywords don't show any results, you'll see a form to do an advanced search. In general, start with one or two simple keywords and then refine your search if you get too many results.

Managing forum subscriptions

If your course has discussion forums, you may be subscribed to them initially -- or you may not be. If you are subscribed to a forum, it means you'll receive an email with any new post made on that forum. This way, you can keep in touch with the forum discussions without actually logging into INASP Moodle. If you are not subscribed, you will not receive email copies of posts. But you're still part of the forum and you can engage in discussions. To check your subscription status for a forum, visit that forum and look at the "forum administration" menu (usually on the left hand side). If you see "subscribe to this forum", it means you are not currently subscribed. You can click this link to subscribe. If you see "unsubscribe from this forum", it means you are subscribed and you can click this link if you wish to not receive email copies of posts made on that particular forum. If a course has many forums, you'll need to subscribe to or unsubscribe from each forum individually.

See also: Subscription to the news forum

Message on homepage about quizzes that are due

On your homepage on this site, you may see a message such as "you have quizzes that are due" if there are quizzes in the course you are taking. This message will appear if there's any quiz that has a deadline sometime before the end of the course. It could well be that the quiz is not yet available for you to attempt, but the message will still appear on your homepage. In this case you can ignore the message. Just focus on completing the lessons and activities for the current week or unit of the course you are taking.