Instructor Support

Instructors,

As of this morning, summer 2021 student enrollments are now syncing with your Moodle courses. By default, courses are not set to automatically "show" to enrolled students and they will not have access to your course until you update the course visibility setting.

➡️ Here is a guide that will walk you through how to make your course visible to students.

Hint: To help you close out a previous course or to open an upcoming course you can follow our recommended Moodle course Start of Term and End of Term procedures.

Beginning Summer Term 2021, General Forum Defaults Are Changing From Opt-out to Opt-in Email Notifications

With the exception of News and Announcement forums, users making posts in Moodle forums will no longer receive a copy of their post or reply via email without specifically choosing to opt-in/subscribe. This includes instructor or student replies to posts, student replies in Q&A forums, open forums, and/or any general discussion forum. 

To be clear: All course participants will continue to be "force subscribed" and receive individually emailed copies of posts/messages made by instructors in a News and Announcements forum, Unread Moodle Message, or via the QuickMail block. 

I’m confident that this small but impactful reduction in “Moodle SPAM” will declutter inboxes and provide encouragement for others to make positive changes that impact student success. Additional details on how to selectively subscribe (opt-in) are provided within this post.

I greatly appreciate everyone who provided input and support to keep this initiative moving forward. If you have any questions and or concerns, please email me at mandersj@lanecc.edu. 

- Josh Manders
LMS Admin

🔖 Moodle Security Update — Effective 06/14/21
The Impersonate/Login-as feature has been permanently disabled for all users who are not dedicated LMS support personnel. This feature was often used to login-as Joe & Jane Test (remarkable students) so that instructors could ensure their courses displayed properly. 

The switch roles function will remain and allows instructors to preview courses as a student. Unfortunately switching roles is not perfect. When switching roles, you remain the same user and student views can often be specific to an individual student (i.e. activity completion, groups, overrides, conditional releases). The ATC is actively investigating solutions for instructors needing to quality check their courses via fictitious student accounts.

⚠️ Service Interruption
Our Moodle hosting provider will be applying a software upgrade (v3.10.3) on Thursday, July 8th between 12:30am-2:30am Pacific Standard Time (PST). During that time, classes.lanecc.edu will be unreachable and/or slow to respond. This is one of the most bland updates I’ve seen in years — no new major features and very few bug fixes. View the v3.10 release notes for further details.

Have You Submitted Your Summer Metacourse Request(s)?
A Metacourse allows you to combine enrollments from multiple course sections into a single Moodle shell — reducing the need to duplicate resources, activities, etc. in multiple sections. If you would like a Metacourse, use our meta course request form or contact the ATC (atc@lanecc.edu) for assistance.

⭐ Subscribing (Opt-in) to General Forums In Your Course(s)
If you (or a student) wishes to receive individual forum messages via email, you can still do so but it requires taking action (opt-in) by either ticking the “Discussion subscription” checkbox at the time a post is made or by using the subscribe options available when viewing the forum. 

The option to subscribe is available at the time of creating the forum post. This option may only appear for general Moodle forums if the student is using the “Advanced” reply option.


Subscription can also be set on a per-thread basis for general forums.

The Backstory: For years, Moodle Admin’s have heard from a variety of stakeholders wanting to reduce the quantity of unwanted and unread messages delivered to student email inboxes. Over the last 6+ months we’ve collected direct feedback through student and faculty surveys, campus communications team, email inbox case studies, independent conversations, and industry best practices — all of which clearly indicated a need to transition our Moodle general forums from a mandated opt-out model to a user opt-in preference. Simply put, users are not using email to read messages posted in general forums and prefer to read and reply to discussions directly within a Moodle course. The most efficacious way to address this issue is to disable auto-subscription for all users making posts in general forums. 

🤷  Can’t Seem to Locate Your Course in Moodle? 

We do our best to keep Moodle synced with instructor course assignments in Banner but occasionally, there may be a delay. If you don’t see your section listed, check the class schedule to ensure your department administrator has officially added you as the instructor of record. If they have, send a quick email to the ATC and we’ll ensure a course is created ASAP.

🐦  Wanting to Work on Fall 2021 Term Courses?

There's no need to wait for an official course shell to be built (no later than Aug 16th). Reach out to the ATC for assistance with development shells, course design, customized settings, course migration, Meta course requests, or you just want to say “hello” and ask us some questions.

📅 ATC’s Summer Support Hours Beginning June 21st

ATC Hours | Monday - Thursday 8am-5pm limited email support on Friday’s and weekends
Voicemail: 541-463-3377 | Email: atc@lanecc.edu

ATC Virtual Drop in Hours, Join Live Online Help (via Zoom)
Monday - Thursday 10am - 2pm: ATC Virtual Support 10am-2pm
Or join Virtual Support by Phone: Dial: +1 346 248 7799 | Enter Meeting ID: 934 628 325

If you are no longer teaching at LaneCC and wish to be removed from this News & Announcements forum, email a removal request to moodleadmin@lanecc.edu