New Moodle Update- September 2018

As you may have seen, for a number of reasons outlined previously, a new Moodle Platform has been rolled out for the 2018/19 academic year,  This has been a substantial undertaking, but ‘New’ 18-19 Moodle is now up, with migrated courses and student enrolments available ready for the start of term!

While there are still some ongoing issues and small updates to be made, we would like to share the progress made so far, and thank everyone for their patience and involvement in getting to this point.

What has changed?

While New Moodle has a new look and feel and some new functionality, it is still Moodle – so much of it will be familiar. Here are some highlights:

• New landing page:  Allowing access to either Legacy or New Moodle 2018/19
• New Course Overview: Upon login, you’ll see courses you’re enrolled on listed under In progress, Future and Past. Courses appear under each of these tabs based on the start and end dates within settings for each course in Moodle, so do check under each of these.
• Layout and view options: Hide blocks (temporarily) or switch to ‘Full screen’ view so you can focus on the main content area.
• Navigation: There are now new menu tabs – such as ‘My courses’ and ‘This course’ – at the top of each Moodle page, which give you quick link access to your other active courses, or Participants, grades and activities for the course you’re in.

You can find out more about New Moodle Features and some of the Known issues we are working to resolve as soon as possible.

Content migration and Courses

The Project team have liaised with Departmental Moodle Migration Coordinators (MMCs) to map courses from Legacy Moodle to New Moodle, with a Student migration team working through requests to complete the actual migration of content.  Over 6400 courses have now been migrated from Legacy to New Moodle, but if you think something has not been migrated, please confirm with your MMC in the first instance. See the list of MMCs here to find who this is for your department (UCL login required).

Courses should now be available to update, and we’ve created a New Moodle Checklist of key things to do/check to ensure that your course works well in the New Moodle and is ready for the start of term.

Portico and Category level enrolments

Student enrolments via Portico are now available. The new Portico enrolment block was released on 30^th August. Staff will now be able to use the tool to enrol students on their Moodle courses at Department, Route and Module Delivery levels.  The process of mapping modules and enrolling students using the block is much the same as before and guidance is available.

Staff category level enrolments have now mostly been carried across from Legacy to New Moodle, based on confirmation from MMCs. If you had access to all courses in a category in Legacy Moodle, you should have similar access in New Moodle, though the listing of categories may be slightly different due to changes in SITS. Note that you may need to search for a course and enrol yourself on it for it to show in your Course Overview when you log in.

Training, support and guidance

New Moodle demo and drop sessions will continue to be run by Digital Education until the end of September, so please do attend to find out more and ensure your Moodle courses are ready for the start of teaching.

Thank you to everyone who’s attended sessions so far and fed back to us – we’ve tried to add your questions to the FAQs page. We’ll be communicating further plans for updates as we continue to enhance and refine New Moodle, but we do hope you’ll find the new system improved for the coming academic year.

If you have any questions or concerns, please see the New Moodle Information pages or email digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk

from Digital Education team blog https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2018/08/31/new-moodle-update-september-2018/
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What we are watching on Lynda.com: a deeper dive

Having provided a broad overview of Lynda.com usage in my last blog post, I’ll now look in more detail at the top 100 courses and then at the highest-ranking non-technical courses.

The highest ranking course alone had nearly 500 individuals who viewed this course.  If I tell you that this course was Programming Foundations: Fundamentals it will probably come as no surprise, given the popularity of Developer courses at UCL.  Python and R featured most prominently amongst the wide range of programming languages and associated technology in the top 100.  In fact, Learning Python was the second most popular course.   Java, C, C++ and Git were also popular.  Courses on data science in general featured very prominently amongst high-ranking courses with many viewers interested in data analysis and data visualisation.

Web development courses that featured in the top 100 included several on learning HTML and CSS and how to use tools such as Bootstrap as well as courses on broader web design techniques and development principles.  Front-end web tools such as WordPress and Google Analytics were less popular but also featured.

On the creative side, game development technology, CAD software and film editing software (such as Premier Pro) were the most popular.  One course on Photography also made it into the top 100.  Other courses relating to technical  areas were courses in Bitcoin, Blockchain, Artifical Intelligence and GIS to name but a few.

In terms of Microsoft tools, Excel was the most popular, closely followed by SharePoint and Office 365 training.  Other notable topics were Business Intelligence reporting and Adobe products, mainly Illustrator and InDesign.

But what about the non-technical courses?  These were more popular with staff, reflecting overall trends, and included topics such as Management and Marketing and also some specific methodologies such as ITIL, Prince2, Agile and SCRUM.  Giving presentations and interviews were also popular topics.  Several courses on project management also featured in the top 100.

Other non-technical areas covered included personal development courses (either for work or study or just general life skills). These included time management, productivity and writing and reading skills.

Finally, I’ve included a list below of all the non-technical courses in the top 500 to give you a flavour of the kind of things people are looking at.  I think it reflects the wide diversity of interests at UCL and also the amazing range of non-technical courses on offer at Lynda.com.  Why not dip in and try some of them out for yourself?  Just visit our lynda.com page to log in using your UCL credentials and then type the course name below into the search box:

Non-technical courses in the top 500

Business and the workplace

Entrepreneurship Foundations

Leading Productive Meetings

Creating a Business Plan

Business Foundations

Business Analysis Foundations

Small Business Secrets

Interviewing Techniques

Hire, Retain, and Grow Top Millennial Talent

Management

Management Tips Weekly

New Manager Foundations

Managing Teams

Career and job searching

Writing a Resume

Mastering Common Interview Questions

Acing Your Interview

Writing and communication

Writing in Plain English

Communication Tips Weekly

Communication

Communication Foundations

GDPR Compliance: Essential Training

Design

Universal Principles of Design

Learning Design Research

Drawing Foundations: Fundamentals

Introduction to Graphic Design

Designing a Book Cover

Designing a Poster

Designing a Book

Logo Design: Techniques

Finance and Accounting

Finance Foundations

Accounting Foundations

Grant Writing for Education

Managing Your Personal Investments

Making Investment Decisions

Personal Finance Tips Weekly

Accounting Foundations: Managerial Accounting

Finance and Accounting Tips Weekly

Interpersonal skills

Customer Service Foundations

Effective Listening

Having Difficult Conversations

Influencing Others

Marketing and Social Media

Marketing Foundations

Facebook Marketing: Advertising

Marketing Tips Weekly

Learning Content Marketing

Facebook for Business

Music

Music Theory for Songwriters: The Fundamentals

Singing Lessons: 1 Fundamentals

Photography

Introduction to Photography

Photography: First Steps

The Practicing Photographer

Photography 101

Photography Foundations: Composition

Presentation and speaking skills

Creating and Giving Business Presentations

Designing a Presentation

Public Speaking Foundations

Productivity and organisation

Overcoming Procrastination

Time Management Fundamentals

Getting Things Done

Time Management Tips Weekly

Monday Productivity Pointers

Managing Your Time

Efficient Time Management

Project Management Foundations

Project Management Simplified

Learning PRINCE2

Self-development

Improving Your Memory

Learning to Be Assertive

Critical Thinking

Personal Effectiveness Tips

Building Self-Confidence

The Neuroscience of Learning

Improving Your Focus

Developing Your Emotional Intelligence

Happiness Tips Weekly

Research and study skills

Learning Speed Reading

Learning Study Skills

College Prep: Writing a Strong Essay

Writing a Research Paper

Information Literacy

Writing

Learning to Write for the Web

Grammar Foundations

Learning Typing

Note-Taking for Business Professionals

Advanced Grammar

Technical Writing: Reports

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from Digital Education team blog https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2018/08/16/what-we-are-watching-on-lynda-com-a-deeper-dive/
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What we are watching on Lynda.com – an overview

Lynda.com has over 40,000 courses, but what are UCL staff and students actually watching?  I took a look at the usage figures over the last 12 months to try and answer this question.

First of all, a quick overview.  Lynda.com at UCL has nearly 12, 00o current users.  In the past year there have been:

• over 4, 000 course completions*
• over 25, 000 hours viewed
• over 5, 000 distinct courses accessed

*This is where a user has watched every single video in a course.  A certificate can be generated which can be attached to your profile in LinkedIn.

Course popularity by category

Lynda.com courses are in three broad areas – Business, Technical and Creative – but these break down further into about twelve different categories.  Looking at all users, the most popular category by total hours viewed was Developer with nearly 30% of courses in this area.  The Developer category includes courses on programming or coding, app and game development and other similar courses.  The next biggest category was Business which includes courses for personal development but also courses in desktop applications used predominantly in an office environment, such as Microsoft Office.  Business courses accounted for about 20% of viewing.  The next two most substantial categories were IT and Web with 12% and 10% respectively.

If you look at staff and students separately the picture is a little different, with courses in the Business category featuring higher in the staff results at 30%, whereas for students the Business area only accounted for 15%.  UCL students are clearly more interested in technical courses than staff with Developer courses making up 33% of hours viewed by students, compared to just 21% of staff viewing.  Looking at Developer, IT and Web together, these accounted for well over half of all courses viewed by students.

Looking at the more ‘creative’ side, CAD (Computer Aided Design) featured much more strongly in the student results – 9% of viewing amongst students was in this area compared to only around 1% of staff figures.  3D and Animation showed a similar trend.  This reflects a strong interest in this area in some key departments, notably Computer Science, Bartlett, CASA, CEGE and the Slade although there was also some usage outside of these areas.

The remaining categories were generally less popular with both staff and students and these were Design, Photography, Video, Education and Elearning, Marketing, and Audio and Music which in total accounted for only about 17% of viewing.  Design courses were mostly popular with the the Department of Information Studies.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Education and Elearning courses were most popular in IOE.  The Bartlett and the Anthropology department were most interested in Photography and Video.

Below are some pie charts showing the percentages for each category for those who like something more visual.  You will need to click on the image to see it full size.

In my next blog post I’ll look in more detail at which specific courses are most popular with UCL people.  Some of the results might surprise you….

from Digital Education team blog https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2018/08/01/what-we-are-watching-on-lynda-com-an-overview/
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