Moodle tips

Once a course comes to an end, you will have access to the course materials for at least one month after the end date. While our courses are usually not deleted from this site, we cannot guarantee that our courses will be indefinitely available. We strongly recommend that you save the course materials once the course you have taken comes to an end. Instructions are given below.

• For learning resources such as lessons, guided readings, or tutorials, you will find instructions in the course on how to save or download these resources.

• For quizzes and peer assessment activities, see this: Printing/saving quiz reviews and peer assessments

• For saving a forum discussion, use the print or save feature in your web browser.

• If you have received a certificate for the course, remember where you have saved it on your computer!

If you've submitted your work as part of a peer assessment activity, visit the activity page after the assessment phase to read the assessments you've received. When you visit the activity page, you can view your assessments by clicking the link to your submission. This link appears before the links to the assessments you have given to others. Once you click the link to your submission, you will see a page with a list of all the assessments you have received. Make sure you read all your assessments closely, and make notes on how you can improve your work.

To convert a time from a different time zone to your time zone, use a converter such as this one: https://time.is/compare/. Also, make note of any live session on your digital calendar (e.g., Google Calendar) so that you receive a notification before the session starts.

The default time zone on this site is West Africa Time (WAT). In your online course, there may be events that are time-based (such as live sessions) and activities that have deadlines (such as writing activities). For such events and activities, your Dashboard on this site and the time alerts on activity pages show times in WAT by default.

To see mentions of times in your local time zone, edit your profile and change the time zone in the Timezone field. We also suggest you add reminders in your calendar about upcoming events and deadlines. If you would like to compare WAT with your local time, use this link.

If you complete an online course on INASP Moodle, you may receive a digital badge. To download this badge, login to INASP Moodle (http://moodle.inasp.info) and visit the "My badges" page: http://moodle.inasp.info/badges/mybadges.php

Click the badge to view the full details. You can copy the link to this web page from the address bar of your web browser and share the link in your CV or any online profile.

You can also display this digital badge on a badge portfolio. To do this, follow the steps given in this tutorial.

Finally, read this Wikipedia page if you'd like to learn more about digital badges.

If the submission is in DOC or DOCX format, please use Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer to open the document. LibreOffice is free and open source software, so it's a good choice if you don't have Word. If you are not able to open a submitted document with such software, or if you open the document and find it to be blank, please do the following: (1) complete a dummy assessment for this submission (eg, write 'could not open document' in each aspect of the assessment form), and (2) report the issue on the Technical Support / Technical Queries Forum.

You can see the profiles of your fellow course participants by clicking on their names in the forums, in the participants list, the online users block, etc. So write something about yourself in your profile so others can get to know you  When you edit your profile, you can set your email address to be visible to your course colleagues, to everyone on INASP Moodle, or to no-one. We recommend that you use the first setting so that your course colleagues can get in touch with you to discuss collaboration or interesting opportunities.

The basic smiley is arguably the most popular emoticon, but emoticons can also be useful to convey other feelings. You can make an emoticon just by typing the relevant characters in your text editor. No special formatting is needed! For example if you type a colon : followed by the symbol ) you won't immediately see a smiley but when you save your post you'll see it has appeared on the page like this: .

To receive email copies of posts made on this forum, click on 'Subscribe to this forum' in the 'Forum administration' menu (the gear icon on the right side). You can unsubscribe at any time. Alternatively, you can subscribe to specific discussion topics within a forum.

There's a small chance that none of the people who have been allocated your work completed the assessment. This is an unfortunate outcome (but hopefully rare). If you don't see a "grade for submission" when in fact you have submitted your work, we will award you credit for the activity as long as you have assessed the submissions allocated to you. We will be looking at the course logs to determine who has done what. So don't worry!

An activity that involves peer assessment has a number of sequential phases. Immediately after the deadline for the submission phase, the submissions are randomly allocated by the system for assessment. It's not possible to plug in a late submission after the activity enters the assessment phase. Then, right after the assessment phase, the activity is closed and everyone can view their assessments. Again, it's not possible to plug in late assessments once the activity is closed. Because of the way this activity works, we cannot extend the deadline for either the submission or assessment phase. So please do not ask for extensions!

Related tip: phases of a peer assessment activity

In a large online course such as this one, it's not feasible for a small group of teachers or facilitators to provide personalised feedback on each participant's work. Peer assessment is the only practical way to provide participants with feedback on their work.

A survey of participants who took part in a peer assessment activity in one of our previous courses indicated that...

• Most participants found the different aspects of the peer assessment activity to be a useful learning experience.
  
• Some participants were happy with the feedback they got from their peer assessors, but some were disappointed.
• Getting overly brief assessments without useful or practical suggestions was the most common cause for disappointment.