How to Set up Distance Learning in Moodle™ for your University

Kiran

This is a guest post by Darlington Gospel. If you want to contribute to our blog, feel free to Contact Us!

The pandemic wave brought about mass-scale paralysis to most educational institutions, businesses, and organizations all around the world. The heat is still being felt today within every stratum of life, for instance, in the academic sector. In this article , we’ll help you set up Moodle™ for university.

Regardless of that fact, the covid-19 situation also caused a major rethink on how education is approached and engaged. And one of those platforms that have revolutionized how academics is engaged is Moodle™. 

About Moodle™

Moodle™ is an open-source Learning Management System in the e-Learning realm designed to efficiently and effectively create and deliver engaging learning content to your students all over the world. Moodle™ through a good time, customer services, and support have risen to become a popular choice of e-Learning platforms in universities, colleges, schools, and corporate organizations. You can find out more about Moodle™ or view our example-sites.

Benefits of Moodle™

Moodle™ handles difficulties such as hidden error catches, interface issues, basic reporting, complicated grading, and so on. Advanced LMS customization demands more time, money, and effort, especially if you are unfamiliar with coding languages such as PHP, HTML, CSS, and so on. You must be somewhat tech-savvy or be prepared for a high learning curve.

The All in One Hassle-free Solution to set up Moodle™ for University – Striking the Right Balance

If I tell you that you can have an online university in Moodle™, would you believe it? It’s possible!! Let’s look at the various plugins with which you can effortlessly set up distant learning solutions for your university, school, or corporate organization.

Getting a Professional Moodle™ UI

The first step for setting up Moodle™ for your online university is to install a professional-grade UI theme. We have a professional-grade UI premium Moodle theme called the Edwiser RemUI plugin which we recommend for the following unique features.

Custom page builder This feature helps you build custom Moodle pages from scratch, add drag-drop elements to different pages, and quickly create page layouts as per your own needs. This is how you achieve advanced beautification, branding, etc For your online university.

• Demo importer: This feature is a time-saver, How does it save your time? It saves your time by letting you import readymade/pre-made page templates and designs directly from the demo to your Moodle site. This would have been a huge task to undertake but this feature makes this process quick.

• Focus Mode: This feature as intuitive as it sounds provides the learner with a clean study interface that eliminates distractions and improves the attention of the learner.

Having a Kickass Course Presentation

The second step in configuring Moodle™ is to incorporate the course presentation plugin, which will help your students engage and perform better, with the all-new Edwiser Course Formats Plugin. The following are the reasons you should use the Edwiser Course Format Plugin.

• Clean Interface: Your course pages are well-designed, well-structured and engaging.
• Design Consistency: The design is consistent throughout.
• Content Clarity: The course content is not crowded or ambiguous.
• Content Control: Throughout the course, your student feels in command.
• Discoverability: Courses can be discovered with ease using the search field available on the interface.

One more thing about this plugin, it is free, and you can download it from the official page.

Seamless Reporting that goes Beyond Basics

The third step in establishing an effective Moodle™ LMS site is to incorporate an analytics and reporting plugin, with the Edwiser Reports plugin being the preferred option. 

Reporting and analytics are crucial for visualizing data, trends, performances, and also market forecasting which provide the basis for making the right choice for your business. Moodle has different types of reporting plugins. 

Intelliboard is a comprehensive reporting plugin that works with the most popular LMSs. The My Feedback plugin is known for letting students get an overview of their grades and view feedback on assignments in a simple manner. There is also another plugin called Zoola which offers you the ability to get analytical insights to help you increase learning effectiveness and engagement.

Although, the above plugins have good features that may solve your analytical need, however, some may be a bit costlier and some are not dedicated all-in-on reporting solutions.

For this reason, we recommend the Edwiser Reports plugin. This is an all-in-one, free Moodle™ reporting plugin. Check out this article on “Edwiser Reports vs Configurable Reports.” for a more clear understanding.

Quicker and Convenient Grading for Long-Term Motivation

The fourth step in preparing your Moodle™ LMS website is next on our list. You will have no difficulty grading in Moodle™. Moodle™ offers numerous grading plugins, however, we recommend utilizing the Ewiser RapidGrader plugin.

This plugin allows for faster, easier, and more accurate grading in Moodle. It allows you to assess many students and questions at the same time, making it easy to produce Moodle™ Grades. Some of the advantages of utilizing the Ewiser RapidGrader plugin are as follows.

• Grading interface that is quick and simple: A single screen serves all of your grading needs. When utilizing Edwiser RapidGrader, you no longer need to open a new tab for each new question. Everything you need is available in a single window, which speeds up the grading process. Please see the image below.

• Quick and simple access to graded status: The toggle bar indicates the status of the quizzes you’re grading in real-time. You may simply view the Non-graded/All questions as needed and plan your grading appropriately. See the images below.

• Flexibility with numerous grading methods: The many grading choices provide you with ample ways to handle the grading process efficiently. You have complete control over how you score your pupils’ performance.

• Reliable grading accuracy: Since grading in Moodle™ software is now simpler, you may improve your grading workflow by deleting repeated tabs. You may simply grade students in a flow within a single tab.

• Efficient and Targeted Grading: Using question filters, you may restrict the grading process to view and focus solely on a certain group of questions.

• Quick and easy access to student progress: Get a graphical representation of your student’s performance and understand each student’s basic learning progress and potential in general.

You need more reasons why you should grade your students with Moodle™ see this article.

Building better forms in Moodle with amazing layouts

Forms are the fifth stage in creating your Moodle™ online university. The complications that come with configuring a form yourself using the core Moodle LMS are tedious and time-consuming.

You will need an understanding of coding to successfully implement this, yet, it will cost you unnecessary time-wastage and difficulties in maintenance. The goodness is that the Edwiser Forms plugin takes care of all these hassles for you. We recommend this plugin for the reasons below.

• Quick form generation without coding: Form creation has been greatly simplified. The seven ready-to-use form templates might be used anywhere in Moodle™ software to construct dynamic and smart forms with only a few clicks. Using existing templates, you may create an endless number of form kinds based on your preferences without having to invest time in coding. See image below.

• Easily add forms anywhere: When it comes to adding forms to your LMS, there are no restrictions on where they can be placed. Edwiser Forms gives you the freedom to place your forms on a page, a Moodle™ activity, or anywhere else on your website.

• Quick feedback on course activity: Edwiser Forms allows you to include a custom feedback form as part of a course, which aids in sending the appropriate information to the right person at the right time.

• Be available to your users: Both new and old users may have questions about the courses or your platform in general. A contact form provides your users with a simple way to contact you as well as the ability to immediately communicate their issues.

• Collect user-specific information and auto-enroll them in the course: Before students enroll in your classes, you may collect some student-specific information. Following successful enrolment in the course, you may assign learners to a certain group or category of users based on the course they choose. This allows you to categorize your learners based on their course selections.

You can learn how to make custom forms in Moodle™ by watching the video clip or reading this article. There are many kinds of forms for various reasons, induction form is one of them.

The induction form helps your new students in settling in and becoming acquainted with the full Moodle™ course. It also gives you an excellent opportunity to showcase the top e-Learning courses and encourage greater learning among newbies on your Moodle site. 

Check out how to create an epic induction form for your university for an even smoother transition that will help your students settle in your University program effortlessly. Some of the benefits of using the Edwiser Forms are briefly discussed below.

You can also learn how to make Moodle™ forms smarter by using conditional logic.

Selling courses globally to make extra money

Installing a course sales plugin, which allows you to sell your courses online, is the fifth and final step in building your Moodle™ LMS website. As a result, we recommend the Edwiser Bridge plugin. Why should you make use of this plugin? Here are a few of the reasons why we recommend this plugin.

• Sell courses all around the world using different payment gateways: By connecting Edwiser Bridge with WooCommerce, you can easily sell your LMS courses in Moodle™ software throughout the world via different gateways and without any geographical limitations. It’s a convenient, quick, and most importantly secure way to sell and advertise your courses to a larger audience. See the images below.

• Manage discounts, promotions, and course bundle sales to maximize profits: By integrating WooCommerce, you can create a comprehensive digital shop for your courses, optimize your course pages, and simply sell your courses on WordPress. Through an e-commerce shop that connects easily with your LMS, you can sell individual courses or a package without the bother of investing in additional extensions.

• Sell any type of course – eBooks, Certificates, Video Courses, etc. Setting up an online storefront for Moodle™ software is simple. You can easily offer courses and related course content as physical items using a user-friendly WordPress interface.

• Earn recurring money with subscription courses: Sell more courses and increase your eLearning revenues by offering your Moodle™ courses as subscriptions. Because of the updated compatibility with the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, you can now set up monthly or yearly subscriptions on courses and make recurring revenue with each renewal.

You can learn more from our blog post on how to sell courses on Moodle.

All of these stages are necessary for setting up your Moodle™ LMS website for a lucrative return on investment, but if you’re pressed for time, or you want to keep it simple all-in-one, low effort, and Low Cost, you can opt-in for the Edwiser Bundle. This plugin does all of the aforementioned processes on a single installation and at a low cost.

Conclusion

To conclude this post, setting up a professional LMS site for your university’s distance learning may be challenging because most of us are constantly busy and will not have the time to individually set up all of the plugins discussed above. With this, we strongly recommend that you get the Edwiser Bundle. By using the Edwiser Bundle plugin you will be saving yourself time and money. Read this article on Moodle™ LMS made simple with the coolest Moodle™ plugins and Moodle™ tips for online classes.

About Author

Gospel Darlington is a remote Fullstack web developer, prolific with technologies such as VueJs, Angular, ReactJs, and API development. He takes a huge interest in the development of high-grade and responsive web applications.

Gospel Darlington currently works as a freelancer developing apps and writing tutorials that teach other developers how to integrate software products into their projects.
He spends his free time coaching young people on how to be successful in life. His hobbies include inventing new recipes, book writing, songwriting, and singing. You can reach me on Website, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or GitHub for any discussion.