Screen School – 22/23 Moodle Checklist

This year, the Screen School has adopted a new template for it’s Moodle course and unit sites. The templates are already in place and staff can view them through the sites on their Moodle Dashboard, but they are not complete yet.

To ensure your site is ready for teaching, complete the 5 items on the checklist below before the start of classes.

1. Check your materials are where they need to be

Some courses chose to have their 21/22 Moodle content imported into the new template. If your course chose this option then our ArtTemp students will have re-organised your materials into the template’s topic areas. Anything they could not re-organise they left in a section called Unassigned. 

You might find some of your resources in the wrong place, in the wrong order, or with the wrong title. Please review each topic area to make sure everything is as it should be.

Watch our short video demonstrating how to move and rename items:

2. Update your topic area titles

The template has generic topic titles, particularly the weekly topic areas. If 15 weekly topic areas feels excessive, try consolidating multiple weeks into a single topic area, for example Weeks 1-4: Preproduction (26/09 – 17/10).

Update your topics with unique titles. Unique names make it easier to locate resources and help students understand what a topic area contains.

Watch our short video demonstrating how to rename an item or topic area:

3. Hide or unhide sections and materials

Much of the content on your sites is currently hidden from students. This is to give you time to prepare your materials, edit topic titles, and choose which elements of the template you’d like to use and share.

Hidden items will have the words ‘Hidden from student’ highlighted in yellow next to their name.

You can hide or unhide items by activating ‘edit content’, finding the hidden item, selecting the edit button next to its name, and then selecting the “hide” or “show” button. Watch our short video where we demonstate how to hide and unhide Moodle content:

4. Edit your Moodle Groups

Your site contains five generic groups: Group A, B, C, D, and E.

Having students in groups can be very useful. It enables you to send targeted Quickmail messages and announcements, enable group submissions for assignments, and set group access restrictions. This is particularly handy for Collaborative units or managing tutorial groups.

Watch our video playlist below to learn how groups work on Moodle:

5. Provision your site with Panopto

Panopto is UAL’s primary tool for recording, storing, editting, and sharing videos.

Panopto works through integration with Moodle. When a Moodle site is ‘provisioned’ with Panopto it creates a parallel Panopto folder of the same name. Any videos you record or upload to this folder can then be viewed by anyone enrolled on the corresponding Moodle site.

This is a convenient way to manage viewing permissions on a site-by-site basis; however, it does mean that every year we need to re-provision our sites and transfer any videos we wish to reuse from the preceding year’s Panopto folders into the current year. 

If you plan on using Panopto to record or share videos, re-use videos from the previous year, or embed videos in your Moodle site, please watch our video demonstration video playlist: