Academic Technology

Prepare Your Moodle Course for the Start of the Semester

Getting a course ready to re-teach in Moodle during a new semester involves a variety of housekeeping tasks to ensure that your semester runs smoothly for you and your students. This page lists the recommended tasks with some tips, and we have provided a convenient checklist for you to use each time you are teaching a course again in Moodle.

Assessment and Evaluation of Group Work in Moodle

Group work can produce anxiety for students, and much of that anxiety comes from not knowing how much their grade will be affected by other...

Micro-Learning with Videos and Multimedia

Over the past few years, teaching practices and pedagogy have undergone significant changes, giving rise to various innovative approaches. As these shifts have altered how...

Step-by-Step Online Course Space Creation Guide

This guide conveys our recommended approach to setting up a basic course in Moodle at NC State. These suggestions and resources will help you incorporate...

How To Choose and Assess a Learning Tool

Selecting and evaluating a learning tool requires careful consideration. It involves various steps, such as choosing instructional tools that align with your goals for student...

Make Your Course More Mobile-Friendly

With more students using smartphones and tablets to access their courses through the NC State Moodle mobile app, it’s crucial to design your content with...

Make A More Student-Friendly Gradebook

Students monitor their performance based on feedback in order to reflect and grow, a process that is part self-regulated learning (Pintrich, 2004). As the Moodle...

Student Blogging Assignments

Workshop Links When we think of blogs, memories of early internet diaries may come to mind. However, the evolution of this writing genre has given...

Why Gamify Your Moodle Course?

Gamification is the practice of introducing principles and design concepts from games into non-game environments to increase participation, engagement, and performance. The Gamification Plugin for...

Group Work in Moodle: Introduction and Examples

This article discusses the benefits of group work, gives guidance on what sorts of assignments and activities work well for group work, and offers some...

Assessing Student Learning with Core Moodle Tools

Assessment and feedback are critical to teaching and learning. Low-stakes assessments can be “formative,” meaning they administered before or during the learning process to guide...

Get Your Students Talking with Yellowdig

Yellowdig is an online discussion platform that puts students in the driver’s seat. It’s designed according to the Community of Inquiry framework, which highlights the...

Help Students Stay Organized in Moodle

How can you help reduce student frustration and stress in your Moodle course? By providing clear explanations and lists to help students stay organized, instructors...

Using Intelliboard Data to Improve Student Success

Overview Intelliboard is a powerful data visualization tool that gives you user-friendly reports about Moodle data. Intelliboard takes information about your online courses from Moodle...

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...

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...

Finding and Teaching with Digital Library Resources in Moodle

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.

Customize 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.

Gradescope: Streamline the Grading Experience

Gradescope is grading software that is designed to make assignment submission and grading easier. It allows instructors to create variable-length assignments (problem sets & projects)...

Perusall: Interactive Reading Assignments

Workshop Links If no workshops are available, you can contact learntech@ncsu.edu to request a consultation about using Perusall in your courses. Perusall is a text-based...

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 Course Roadmap Overview

Roadmap is a Moodle activity you can build into your course to provide students with an interactive visualization of course activities and assessments.

Create a Class Website with WolfWare WordPress

Workshop Links Are you interested in making a public homepage for your course or using a website for delivering instructional content? WordPress is available as...

Using Top Hat for Student Engagement

Do your students struggle to stay engaged during class? Do you want to encourage more participation, engagement and active learning, even in large courses? Top...

Digital Whiteboards for Teaching and Learning

Whiteboarding is a well-established active learning practice used in many classrooms. Students and instructors can use in-classroom whiteboards to brainstorm, create connections between ideas, draw...

Turnitin: Writing Feedback, Plagiarism Checks, and Peer Review

Turnitin is software accessed through Moodle that compares submitted written work with other sources (determined by the instructor) to look for similarities. Turnitin can also...

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?

Create Short “Just Right” Videos for Your Course

When teaching online, it is essential to establish a teaching presence. This has been correlated with increased affect and motivation, a sense of classroom community,...

Peer Review With Digital Tools

Interactions are a key component of student learning in online and face-to-face settings including student-instructor interactions, student-content interactions, and student-student interactions. Peer review is one...

Panopto Basics

Overview Are you looking to create videos to enhance your course and improve the learning experience for your students?  Panopto is an all-inclusive video management...

PlayPosit: Interactive Video

PlayPosit is a multimedia tool that allows you to create “bulbs” (video lessons) by combining interactivity and video content from YouTube, Panopto, or Vimeo. Using...

Engagement in Synchronous and Asynchronous Environments

Students must engage in their courses in order to learn. But what, exactly, do we mean by “student engagement?” And what teaching practices and strategies...

Google Assignments in Moodle

With Google Assignments, you can collect assignments and give feedback by integrating Google Drive and Moodle. What does this mean? You can harness Google’s rich...

Using H5P Interactive Content in Moodle

H5P allows you to create a variety of tasks to provide interactive content delivery and quick knowledge checks alongside your course content within Moodle.

Using Breakout Rooms in Zoom

When teaching online and synchronously in Zoom, hosts and co-hosts can use the Breakout Room tool to split students into separate Zoom meeting spaces where...

Leveraging Zoom Tools to Facilitate Engagement

How can you promote active learning and help keep your students engaged during your course meeting in Zoom? What tools are available? How do you...

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...

Step-by-Step Online Course Creation Guide

This guide conveys our recommended approach to setting up a basic course in Moodle at NC State. These suggestions and resources will help you incorporate...

Real-time Assessments and Check-ins

Workshop Links If there are no workshops available, you may request an instructional consultation about this topic. Great teachers understand that learning is a conversation,...

Current Virtual Reality Best Practices for the Classroom

Virtual Reality (VR) allows students to experience a world that does not have a physical form (Sapp, 2015b). This technology provides numerous learning benefits, including...

Best Practices and Tips for Shooting Smartphone Videos

Smartphones with a great camera and the ability to record high-definition video are no longer difficult to find. In fact, they are everywhere. Professional video...

Group Work With Digital Tools

Group work is one way to facilitate interaction between students, but it is often challenging for instructors. Group work can be made easier with digital...