mod simplelesson

Introduction

Simple Lesson is a third-party plugin for Moodle 4 that can be used for content presentation and assessment. It allows multiple pages of content to be navigated and the adding of a question from the Question Bank to any page. There is reporting for teachers and students on both question responses and lesson attempts. Simple Lesson also implements GDPR requirements.

2-minute overview: vimeo video

Upgrading from Version 1

Version 2 uses some new features of Moodle 4, in particular the updated Question Bank and the new set of question tables in the database. IMPORTANT: Therefore, it will ONLY work in Moodle 4. It can be upgraded as follows:

1. Update your Moodle installation to Moodle version 4. During this process it is not necessary to copy the Simple lesson plugin code. However, if you wish to preserve your old Simple lessons do not remove the database tables of Simple lesson.
2. Upgrade your Simple Lesson plugin to Version 2.0.
3. If you backed up any Simple lessons or courses including them, they should work after upgrading except that the questions will be missing.

If you upgrade Simple Lesson Version1 in a Moodle 3.5 to 3.11 to Version 2 it will not work because of the changes to the data table changes made in Moodle core.

Simple Lesson Features

• Supports adding questions from the question bank
• Behaviours adaptive, immediate and deferred feedback supported
• Essay questions supported (manual grading required)
• Easy to add and then automatically sequence pages
• Consists of multimedia pages with simple hyperlinked navigation
• Summary lesson attempt reports for students and teacher's
• Manual marking of essay questions, updates to the gradebook.
• Implements GDPR privacy requests for reporting and deletion of user data
• Designed for Moodle 4

Simple Lesson has features in common with Book, Lesson and Quiz. It has been designed as a formative assessment tool. For summative assessment Quiz and Lesson have more features such as timing and access restrictions.

Duplicate, Backup and Restore have been implemented but questions will be lost because of the way Moodle Question Categories are implemented across activities and courses. However, once you export and re-import your questions to the new course, they can be added back to the Simple lesson.

Installation

Obtain the code from github or https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_simplelesson.

If you download a zip file, unzip the code into a folder named simplelesson in the moodle/mod folder.

Visit the administration notifications page to install the plugin.

You will find documentation (User Manual) inside the moodle/mod/simplelesson folder.

Learning Strategies

Simple lesson allows a number of different strategies or uses in the classroom (or elsewhere). It is designed to be more of a formative tool than a summative one.

Presentation tool

You can use it simply as a slideshow or presentation to present multiple pages of multimedia information to the user. In this way it is similar to a book but without chapters and sub-chapters.

Pop quiz

When you don't want to go to all the bother of designing a quiz, Simple lesson is a quick way to put together questions you have already created (of course you can also create questions from within Simple lesson as well).

Demonstration of learning

If you adjust the permissions for an instance of Simple Lesson you can allow students to create their own Simple lessons to demonstrate their knowledge of a subject and to test their colleagues as a fun activity.

Assessment of understanding

Because Simple lesson provides a number of statistics on student answers and attempts, downloadable to csv, you can gain some insights into student learning as you would do for a quiz. One advantage might be that you can create content pages more easily in Simple lesson than you can in a quiz and you can order them very quickly with the autosequencing feature.