New features in CCLE 1.9

Public/private setting You can now control the display of each content item (file, link or activity) on your course site using a new “public/private” setting. To access this setting, Turn Editing On, then click the padlock icon to toggle between public and private. By default, items added to your course site are “Private”, which means they are only visible and accessible to your enrolled students and TAs. Any item set to “Public” becomes visible to guests, without a login. This is especially useful for displaying a publicly viewable syllabus to interested students. Public/private functionality is available in collaboration sites, as well as course sites. View a short video on this feature here.

Student access to past course sites To protect copyrighted content and your own intellectual property, we have implemented a policy of disabling student access to past course sites at the end of the second week of the subsequent quarter. This now applies to all past course sites prior to Summer 2008. Students needing access to past course materials will need instructor permission to reactivate access to their sites.

Assign Roles Instructors can now “Assign Roles”. Anyone with the role of Instructor can now change the Role of any Participant in the same site. This means that Instructors (and TAs) now have the ability to raise and lower the permissions level of another student or TA in the course. Log into your site, and go to Administration > Assign Roles. Note that this also applies to anyone with Instructor level permissions in Collaboration sites. View a short video on this feature here.

Pre-population Participants list will be “pre-populated” with your enrolled student roster. Instructors will soon be able to click Participants and see all enrolled students and TAs, regardless of whether or not they have yet logged into the CCLE system. This means you can create Groups for each of your sections and include everyone, whether or not they have logged in.

Groupings Groupings add functionality to the already familiar Group feature in Moodle 1.8. Groups are collections of participants, and a Grouping is a collection of Groups. Groupings allow for more granular access control to resources and activities. View a short video on this feature here.

Quiz Categories The interface for quiz categories has changed dramatically, but hopefully, you will find it more intuitive to use. View a short video on this feature here.

Sharing Quizzes There is a completely new method for sharing quizzes in Moodle 1.9. The new methods allows instructors with specially assigned roles to create quizzes and share them with others. Depending on your role, you can either create questions or simply just use them. The advantages over the previous method of sharing quizzes in Moodle include:

  • Images stay intact from course to course.
  • Questions cannot be deleted by others who share the quizzes. Please contact your Systems Administrator for more information. View a short video on this feature here.

Special thanks to Annelie Rugg and Mauro Leonardo for contributing to this article.