Moodle tips

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

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.
  

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.

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: .

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

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.

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.

We post announcements of our upcoming online courses on the site news forum. You can subscribe to this forum to receive email alerts whenever we make posts. To subscribe,

• Make sure you are logged into INASP Moodle with your user account. 

• Click the Log in link at the top if you're not logged in. If you don't have an account yet, you can create a new account on the login page.

• After you are logged in, visit the site news forum and click the link called 'Subscribe to this forum' in the menu on the left.

After you take this quiz, please click inside the solid box next to the title of the quiz above so that you see a check mark. You must do this to receive credit for this quiz activity.

• Read the posts made in the announcements forum.

• If your question is about an activity, read the instructions given for the activity.

• See the calendar block on the course homepage to note important deadlines. We do not offer deadline extensions, as explained in the learning agreement (you can find this in the course induction section).

• If you'd like to leave the course, see this: Unenrolling from the course
  

If your doubt or query persists after you've done the above, please make a post on the technical queries forum.

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!

• 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
  

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

1. Submission phase: This is the phase in which you have to prepare and submit your work.

2. Assessment phase: The system will randomly allocate some of your course colleagues' submissions to you, and you have to evaluate these using an assessment form.

3. Closure: Once the above two phases are completed, the course moderator will close the activity. You can then view the assessments you have received from your course colleagues.

Related: Completion credit for a peer assessment activity

If you use the Moodle Mobile app on your mobile device to access a course, you may see a percentage completion figure under your course on the app homepage (after you've logged in). This figure may be inaccurate in some cases -- this is a shortcoming of the Moodle app and not something we at INASP can control. Please do not use this figure to determine your progress in the course. You may as well ignore it. What is important is to check the completion criteria for the course and any other information given in the course on how to track your progress.