What do we mean?
Dashboard - a customisable area in Moodle where staff and students can display access to their courses and see upcoming deadlines
EUI - the Essential Unit Information (EUI) block in Moodle displays a series of tabs with core information for students, including any assessments and their associated deadlines
Assessment Overviews in Moodle
Introduction
Students often study multiple units at a time and are given access to a separate Moodle course for each unit. Within each unit lecturers will set activities with deadlines (i.e. a coursework assignment with a due date). Students can see an overview of their deadlines in a number of ways.
- In the Assessment tab of the Essential Unit Information (EUI) block
- In the Moodle Calendar
- In the Timeline tab of the Moodle Dashboard
- If due dates are not included on Assignments, then they won’t appear in the calendar or dashboard
- If due dates are created far into the future (instead of the actual submission date) students could be misled
- If due dates for submission points that only apply to a sub-set of students (e.g. those taking supplementary assessment) have not been restricted to that sub-set group, then all students will receive reminders to submit, which could cause undue stress
Assessment tab of the EUI block
When Assignments or Quizzes are created, they can be ‘tagged’ as either summative or formative. This will ensure they appear in the Assessment tab of the EUI block. This provides a quick overview of Assessment for a single unit.
Note: you can add information, including due dates, for assessments held outside of Moodle in the External System Assessments area. For example, you could add placeholders for exams.
Moodle Calendar
Any activity or event that has a due date will appear in the Moodle calendar. If required there is a way of adding the Moodle calendar to Outlook as a shared calendar. This will provide an overview of all deadlines across multiple units.
Timeline tab of the Moodle Dashboard
In the Dashboard students can view the Timeline tab where they will see a list of activities with deadlines. They can customise this list to view ‘by course’ and over differing timescales (All, Next 7 days, Next 3 months, etc.). This provides an overview of all deadlines across multiple units.
Below is the 1-minute video guidance provided to students on how they can view their activity deadlines through the Timeline on the Dashboard.
Updated on: 2 December 2021