As our academic year and spring term come to a close, please note these reminders and opportunities for end-of-term use of academic technologies, summer updates, and getting ready for the next academic year.
End of Term and Final Exams
Academic Technologists will keep the 2 – 4 pm Drop-In hours for the last few days of the term, through Wednesday, May 31, for quick questions or for you to stop by and double-check that your Moodle final exams are set up as you intended.
We will be available throughout final exams and submission of final grades by appointment.
Even if you do not choose to connect with us, for Moodle quizzes, please consider these two points:
- In the Introduction to your quiz, please remind students to SUBMIT the quiz at the very end (or it won’t record their effort).
- Immediately after you know students are done with their final exam, please take a moment to go into Moodle to verify that all students submitted their quiz.
Don’t wait — there’s a short time limit on our ability to retrieve and submit any unfinished exams.
If you are missing any exam submissions, contact Wiebke Kuhn at 507-222-4916 with details on the course (e.g. engl100-04-w22), student name, exam or quiz.
Managing Access to Course Content after Final Exams
By default, Moodle courses remain accessible for students who were enrolled in a particular course. If you want additional security for the materials (quizzes, assignments, lecture notes) of a concluded course, please check out Moodle: Options for restricting student access with suggestions for hiding your Moodle course or making specific parts of your Moodle course invisible for your past students.
Getting Ready for the New Academic Year
July 15: Deadline for changes/additions to software in classrooms and computer labs. Please submit a Helpdesk ticket before July 15. Any requests that come in after July 15 may need to be delayed until Winter term, especially if the request requires purchasing and/or extensive testing for new software applications. You do not need to submit a request for existing software.
August 1st: Deletion of the oldest courses from the Moodle server, from the 2017-18 Academic Year. If you would like to save a copy of your course materials, we recommend that you create a backup file of your course and download that to your favorite file storage location. Instructions for how to create a backup file are available in this short video or this Knowledge Base article.
We also suggest you use your browser’s print function to save a visual copy of your page as PDF so that you can quickly see how your Moodle course was organized.
First Week of August: Upgrade of Moodle to 4.1. The exact date will be announced well ahead of time. Some of the improvements include:
- New visual theme
- Timed Assignments
- Improved notifications to students
- Customized language setting for specific activities
- New Grade Summary report in Gradebook
- Better integration with textbook websites and other external tools
Ally for Moodle: Teachers in Moodle will be able to turn on Ally without a request to Academic Technology. Ally checks Moodle content, including individual files, for their level of accessibility. Please check out our blog post Ally for Moodle.
Summer Break and Planning Fall Courses
The AT team will remain available via emails and through the ITS ticketing system throughout the break. PEPS will offer support by appointment only; send an email to peps@carleton.edu.
If you want to have longer conversations around the pedagogical strategies of your 2023-24 classes, please consider reaching out to Jennifer Ross-Wolff, Director of the LTC, or Wiebke Kuhn, Director of Academic Technology.
Teaching and learning tools and ideas about teaching and learning have been coming at us faster than in previous years — which of these lessons do you want to keep using?
- Zoom office hours?
- Online resources in Moodle to provide asynchronous learning opportunities?
- More equitable grading using Gradescope?
- More interactive reading using Hypothes.is?
- More collaboration using Google docs and other tools in the Google suite?
For additional flexibility, please also consider our web-based content: Moodle documentation pages, Teaching and Learning Service Catalog, and our Moodle Micro-Skills course (self enrollment). The LTC pages also have valuable information.
Stay tuned for more opportunities in July for some workshops sponsored by the LTC and for announcements in August when everyone is starting to think about what technologies may be useful for fall term. This will include more opportunities to learn and practice with classroom technology.
If you are interested in a classroom technology refresher, please reach out to Michael Decker or Wiebke Kuhn.
Please note: ITS will be making updates this summer to computers at some instructor stations and in some computer labs. The full list will be posted on the Classroom Technology Support page.
Remember that not all classrooms have an instructor computer, so check out your rooms in late August.