Instructors,
We were going to silently make a few Moodle improvements but they are too good to go unnoticed!
Three new changes/features will be rolled out early Friday morning, January 25th (with zero downtime required).
Significant Visual Improvements (Thanks to Tom Burton!)
- The site theme has been modified to use a slightly larger font size and darker blue color. This improves both contrast and text readability (especially in the menus). In other words, everything appears to "pop" more.
- Calendar category icons are now different shapes to help delineate categories for those people who have difficulty differentiating between colors.
*New* Global Search Feature - Global search lets you search everywhere on the Moodle site that you have access to. For now, you can search for your courses, activities information and some activities contents like forum posts, book chapters, glossary entries or collaborative wikis pages. We plan on gradually rolling out additional search areas as we gather feedback on what else would be useful.
- How does it work? - Click the search icon by the user menu and type a search term into the box that appears. On the next screen, you can simply click the search button to search everywhere, or expand the Filter to search in specific areas (i.e. labels, assignments, quizzes, forum posts, titles...ect)
- Example: A student could search their courses for particular lecture notes, or a teacher could search for subject-related activities. This is a great feature to help locate materials and content between classes.
Ally - Try Out The New Accessibility Plugin - Over the last few months we've been piloting a plugin called "Ally" which automatically provides specific instructor feedback and guidance on how to improve the accessibility of content and files within Moodle courses. Ally Demo Videos: Student Experience | Instructor Experience. This plugin is now available to all instructors! Just ask the ATC to email you instructions on how to turn this plugin on/off if your interested in trying it out.
Spring 2019 EARLY Meta & Development (Dev) Course Reminder
If you would like a Meta course for the spring or a new development (DEV) course please start sending your requests. A Meta course allows you to combine multiple sections into one Moodle shell. If you teach multiple courses of the same section a Meta course allows you to streamline your work and reduce the need to post duplicate resources, activities, etc. into multiple shells.
As always, if you need any assistance with course design, settings, course migration, meta course requests, or just want to give us feedback, please contact us in the ATC (atc@lanecc.edu).
-Josh Manders
LMS Admin