Academic Technology
How can you use technology effectively when designing and teaching courses? Here you’ll find workshop resources, tutorials and videos to help you implement best practices when using technology for teaching.
How to Choose and Assess a Learning Tool — Selecting and evaluating a learning tool requires careful consideration. This article aims to provide guidance and resources for selecting and assessing DELTA’s instructional tools, enabling you to integrate them into your courses effectively to enhance student outcomes.
Moodle
Assessing Student Learning With Core Moodle Tools — Moodle has several built-in tools you can use to assess student learning.
Best Practices for Designing Your Moodle Course – What does a well-designed course look like in Moodle? This DELTA workshop has resources and tips for designing online courses in Moodle.
Customize Learning Experiences for Students: Adaptive and Personalized Pathways – Custom learning experiences for students include personalized and adaptive course activities in which students have different learning experiences based on their choices or completion of activities at a certain level of proficiency.
Customize Learning Experiences for Students: Moodle Activity Completion and Restricting Access — Using the Moodle “Activity Completion” and “Restrict Access” features with content and activities can help students progress through a course while keeping track of their proficiency and completion at different points.
Create Custom Learning Experiences for Students: Moodle Lesson Activity — The Moodle Lesson Activity allows instructors to create branching exercises where students are presented with content and then, depending on their responses or choices, are directed to the next stage of the lesson.
Group Work in Moodle — Moodle provides technical solutions for student submission of group work, online group discussion, and peer review.
Help Students Stay Organized in Moodle – By providing clear explanations and lists to help students stay organized, instructors can help students understand expectations, prioritize tasks, and become more confident and better-prepared learners.
Make Your Course More Mobile-Friendly — By optimizing your course for mobile devices, you’ll provide a better user experience, increase engagement, and help your learners succeed.
Moodle Checklist: Help Students Get Organized and Track Progress — The Checklist activity is a tool in Moodle that can be used to help students keep track of the things they need to complete in a course, module, project, or assignment.
Moodle Gradebook: Basic Setup, Display, and Functionality — The Moodle gradebook is a tool that allows instructors to enter grades for course activities and to view a summary of their students’ grades in one place.
Moodle Gradebook: Make a More Student-Friendly Gradebook – Clear communication of grades through the Moodle gradebook greatly benefits students. In this article, we’ll suggest some ways to set up and use your Moodle gradebook for students’ maximum benefit and ease of use throughout the semester.
Moodle Roadmap — Roadmap is a Moodle activity you can build into your course to provide students with an interactive visualization of course activities and assessments.
Promoting Academic Integrity in Moodle Quizzes – How can you configure your online quizzes and exams to make them more secure? While there is no silver bullet to defeat all types of cheating, there are some settings and best practices you can consider for promoting academic integrity when using Moodle quizzes for assessment.
Stealth Activities in Moodle – Using “stealth activities” can help organize and design a Moodle course with less scrolling for students.
Tips for Organizing Your Moodle Course — How can you organize the layout of your Moodle course so that students can focus their energy on learning?
Why Gamify Your Moodle Course? — Gamification provides a fun way to help students know how to progress through a course and ensure they are viewing and completing all activities on time. Along with enhancing engagement, gamification can increase students’ self-regulation skills, which are vital when learning online
Video Resources
Best Practices and Tips for Shooting Smartphone Videos – Create great videos for your class using your smartphone.
Closed Captioning Resources – An overview of the approaches and options for captioning your live classroom videos and pre-recorded lectures. (Clicking on this link will take you to a DELTA News Article).
Cognitive Load Essentials for Effective Instructional Videos – An effective instructional video effectively communicates information and knowledge to its audience in a clear and engaging manner. There are several key elements that can make an instructional video effective, and cognitive load theory is an important element to consider.
Create Short, “Just Right” Videos for Your Course – Establish teaching presence in your online class by creating short videos.
Current Virtual Reality Best Practices for the Classroom – VR is being used increasingly in both face-to-face and online learning environments around the world. These best practices can help you better understand this burgeoning technology.
Micro-Learning with Video and Multimedia Tools – Micro-Learning involves delivering educational content in short, focused bursts that students can access anytime and anywhere. This article will explore the fundamentals of Micro-Learning and highlight some instructional tools that can help educators support their students in achieving their educational goals.
Panopto Basics — Explore this all-inclusive video management platform for creating, hosting, and delivering video content to enhance your course and learning experience for your students.
PlayPosit: Interactive Video – Make instructional video more interactive and engaging by asking questions and providing opportunities for students to interact with content and each other.
More Tools and Resources
Digital Whiteboards for Teaching and Learning – A digital whiteboard can provide opportunities for collaboration between students and for student-to-instructor and student-to-content interactions.
Engagement in Synchronous and Asynchronous Environments – Explore ways to increase student engagement in synchronous and asynchronous courses.
Finding and Teaching with Digital Library Resources in Moodle — Video streaming, article databases, digital course reserves, and more are all available to you and your students via the NC State University Libraries. There are different strategies for finding resources that work for your classes and then integrating them into Moodle to provide easy access for you and your students.
Get Your Students Talking Online — This article offers a survey of four tools or platforms through which online students can interact with each other in an asynchronous setting: Moodle Forums, Perusall, VoiceThread and Yellowdig. After a brief description of the four tools, instructors who are using these tools share their goals, insights and reflections.
Google Assignments in Moodle – With Google Assignments, you can collect assignments and give feedback by integrating Google Drive and Moodle.
Gradescope: Streamline the Grading Experience — Gradescope is grading software that is designed to make assignment submission and grading easier.
Using H5P: Interactive Content in Moodle – H5P is a tool in Moodle that allows you to create dynamic, interactive activities in your course using the “Interactive Content” activity type.
Intelliboard: Use Data to Improve Student Success – Intelliboard is a data visualization tool that gives you user-friendly reports about your students and their progress in your Moodle course
Leveraging Zoom Tools to Facilitate Engagement – Explore tools and strategies to get the most out of your synchronous class interactions.
Peer Review with Digital Tools – Feedback is a crucial part of learning but doesn’t only have to come from instructors.
Perusall: Interactive Reading Assignments – Perusall is a text-based social annotation/commenting/discussion tool that can help increase student engagement, build community among your students, motivate them to complete readings, and help them collaborate and communicate with each other.
Real-time Assessments and Check-ins – Learn how interactive tools can foster an active learning environment and enhance your students’ learning.
Turnitin: Writing Feedback, Plagiarism Checks, and Peer Review – Promote academic integrity in writing assignments.
Top Hat: Increase Student Engagement — Do you want to encourage more participation, engagement and active learning, even in large courses? Top Hat is a teaching tool that can enable you to engage students with compelling content and activities, whether online or in person.
VoiceThread: Interactive Presentations and Student Discussions — VoiceThread is an asynchronous multimedia slideshow tool that offers diverse applications, including lectures, discussions, student presentations, reviews, and more.
WolfWare WordPress: Create a Class Website – Build flexible websites to post course information, deliver instructional content, develop a blog for your class, and more.
WolfWare WordPress: Student Blogging Assignments — Blogs can provide an alternative to more formal term papers, foster a sense of learning community, and provide a platform for project-based learning.
Yellowdig: Get Your Students Talking — Yellowdig is an online discussion platform designed to build community by inviting students to initiate discussion threads in which they connect their course material to real-world experiences, prior knowledge and their own ways of thinking. Yellowdig’s platform uses gamification principles to reduce grading pressure on instructors.