Why Open-book Tests Deserve a Place in Your Courses

Of the many obstacles that web-based technologies present, combating academic dishonesty is among the most challenging. For many it is hard to envision a scenario where a student completes an online quiz (or test) without using their smartphone, tablet, or other device to look up the answers, or ‘share’ those answers with other students. Those of us who use online quizzes have experimented with lockdown browsers, randomized questions, and anything else we can find to try to ‘defeat’ the students in their quest to cheat. One potential solution is worth exploring: open-book testing.


Read more here.

Help Us With Our Digital Literacy Assessment!

We are re-rebuilding our Basic Moodle Training (BMT) course, and have decided to require an initial assessment of instructors' digital literacy knowledge, skills, and abilities. This will enable us to help instructors be able to support their students who seek out answers to basic computer and LMS questions and issues.

We have a good start on a question bank for our BMT Digital Literacy Assessment, but need your help to collect up as many relevant questions as possible. You are the ones in the field, so you should know best what should be in such an assessment, correct?

Click here to access the questions we have developed so far, and feel free to add questions of your own, and/or comment (Insert > Comment) on any that you see. You can also make a copy for yourself (File > Make a copy…).

Thanks in advance!

Moodle Gradebook Student View

Exporting Moodle Course Grades

Whether you use an LMS or not, you do NOT want to be the instructor who failed to keep records of the courses you deliver. If you use gradable items in Moodle, that task is very easy.

First, click the "Grades" link in your course shell Administration block:

Click the "Export" tab:

Click the "Excel Spreadsheet" link:

Keep everything selected, and click the "Download" button:

Your Excel file containing all of the grades in your course will be downloaded to your computer.

From there, we recommend keeping your course grades spreadsheets in your Google Drive, but that's another blog post…

Again, you REALLY want to make sure you keep records of your students' grades.

Knowledge ≠ Understanding