What's New - Spring / Summer 2022
UR Courses was updated to Moodle 3.11.6+ on May 1, 2022.
New features
Student Activity Completion Improvements
If you have completion tracking enabled within your course settings, Moodle 3.11 brings new features associated with activity completion.
Activity dates and Activity completion conditions may be shown on the course page.
Activity dates and Activity completion conditions are now shown at the top of the activity page.
Students can now mark an activity as complete from within the activity itself.
New settings allow teachers to hide or show activity dates and completion conditions on the course page.
Instructors can view overrides and students can view pass grades directly on the Quiz page.
Changes from the default settings of a question type are retained for the next time an instructor creates a question.
A minimum and maximum word limit can be specified for Essay questions.
Turnitin can now be enabled within a Quiz, and will generate a report for answers submitted with the Essay question type.
The activity completion report may be filtered by activity and activity order.
For more information, please review our page on activity completion for an overview and additional documentation.
Learning Analytics
The Learning analytics functionality available within Moodle will be enabled in UR Courses as of May 1, 2022.
Once enabled, you may notice Insight notifications in the UR Courses toolbar as predictions are made for one or more of your courses.
Learning analytics are typically used to identify students who appear less likely to succeed academically, and to facilitate targeted interventions to help them achieve better outcomes.
The data used to formulate these predictions comes from UR Courses itself, and includes items such as:
- login information;
- rates of participation in specific activities;
- time students spend interacting with the course;
- and grades received.
Role renaming
The naming convention used for roles within UR Courses has been updated to better suit the privileges they represent within a course.
| Old name | New name | |
|---|---|---|
| Teacher | → | Teaching |
| Instructional Designer | → | Course editing |
| Non-editing Teacher | → | Non-editing Instructor |
| Lab Instructor | → | Lab Instructor |
| - | → | Teaching Assistant (new role) |
| Student | → | Student |
For further information on the capabilities associated with each role, see Assigning Roles & Adding TA’s.
Categories
In order to assist with organization and administration, when you associate a course with enrolment, the course will now be moved to the corresponding faculty/department and term folder.
If you have not selected a theme for your course and it is moved into a category that does have a default theme applied, you may notice a change in your course appearance. The theme selected at the course level will override the category default, so it can always be changed if the category default behaviour is not desired.
An example of the new structure is as follows:
Faculty > Department > Winter 2022
Faculty > Department > Spring/Summer 2022
Faculty > Department > Fall 2022
More Information
Previously...
UR Courses was last upgraded to Moodle 3.10 for the Winter 2022 term.
Where can I get help?
The Service Desk is your best point of contact for questions and assistance regarding UR Courses. They can be reached at 306-585-4685 or by email to Service.Desk@uregina.ca.
What's next?
UR Courses will be upgraded to Moodle 4.1 just prior to the Spring / Summer 2023 term. For additional information, please see What's Next for UR Courses.
Additional Resources
Additional UR Courses manuals and guides are available on the Technology Training & Support (TTS) website.