Kenji Lamb, Delivery & Engagement Partner at CDN, introduces the latest updates from the Scottish Moodle User Group (SMUG), a vibrant community of Moodle enthusiasts from diverse sectors, dedicated to sharing knowledge, collaborating on best practices, and advancing the use of Moodle in education and beyond.
The Scottish Moodle User Group (SMUG) has been running for almost two decades now, a collective of Moodle enthusiasts drawn from across public, private, and third sectors. We maintain a public Jiscmail list for our 230+ members with an open invitation for anyone interested in Moodle to join. Members use the list to share experiences/resources, post questions, and advertise vacancies (the only thing we discourage is direct sales). We also hold hybrid and online SMUG Meets throughout the year, where members deliver presentations on current topics and share what’s happening locally.
Our last SMUG Meet was held at the new Jisc Innovation Hub at the University of Stirling on the 29th of October; over 30 of our members were there in-person to share stories (and donuts). If you have the chance, I’d recommend attending an event there – it’s a lovely view of the campus and you might get a chance to play with their Proto hologram kit. Over 40 of our members joined online from across the nation (and further afield). There was a lot of interesting discussion covering course design, secure assessment, accessibility, and the topics from our presentations. The best part of it though was connecting with others who work in the same space.
We try to record as much as we can to share with those who can’t join us on the day. You can catch up with the presentations below:
Developing a Moodle Course Template at the UofG
Eric Davies & Gareth Peevers, University of Glasgow
The UofG has introduced a Moodle Course Template for the first time. We will describe the iterative development of the template, the challenges that arose—from gathering feedback from staff, navigating the varied expectations of stakeholders across different colleges and launching the template via the Course Template Wizard. We’ll also report on our findings from UX testing with students.
AI Development Update & Enhancing Assignment Management
Michael Hughes, University of Strathclyde
This session provides a brief update on the latest developments in AI with the release of Moodle 4.5. Separately, I’ll cover features we’ve introduced for managing assignments, including the implementation of late penalties and an option to request extensions, aimed at improving the grading process for students and educators.
From Chaos to Clarity: Simplifying Moodle to Match MIS
Emma Hanna & Raymond Moir, West College Scotland
This presentation outlines how we streamlined Moodle by aligning it with the new Civica system. We’ll cover how outdated courses were cleaned up, new naming conventions were introduced, and the overall VLE structure was improved for better efficiency and usability.
During the Meet, we discovered that a member was developing a school provision via their Moodle, so we’ve decided to hold an online ‘Moodle 4 School’ session on the 3rd of December (11-12) to showcase different design approaches and try to come up with some general tips for anyone looking to do something similar. There’s a lot of interest around the use of ‘Safe Exam Browser’ for summative assessment, so we’ll be scheduling a session to cover that too.
If you’d like to sign up for Moodle for School session (and the mailing list), then you can follow the registration link below:
Register for the Moodle 4 School (Online) session on the 3rd of December, 12:00-13:00
Looking forward to seeing you at a future SMUG gathering!
