Tertiary education

The use of Moodle in Secondary education is often extended further at the tertiary/university level.

Moodle plugins by/for Universities

Many Universities have created custom Moodle plugins which were later shared in the Moodle plugins database, for example:

• The Open University has contributed many very well written and highly popular plugins besides the superb Moodle 2 quiz engine
• AMC Academic Moodle Cooperation has shared several really good plugins, including the Offline quiz.
• There are more than ten plugins made by the University of Ulm. A sandbox plugin programatically restores courses to predefined course states. It can be used to provide playground moodle courses which will be cleaned periodically. The Course overview on campus block was also made by the University of Ulm.
• The Active quiz The original plugin (real-time quiz) was written by Davo Smith, to which the University of Wisconsin - Madison (funded by an educational innovation grant given to the Medical school) re-wrote the plugin, which is now named active quiz
• The User tours local plugin allows administrators to create tours of Moodle to introduce new features, important information, and more. It was paid for and sponsored by the kind folk of Dublin City University.
• The Course dedication block was developed by CICEI at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University.
• The Accesibility block integrates the ATbar from Southampton University ECS.
• The PoodLL anywhere development was funded by the Birmingham City University
• Quickmail was developed at Louisiana State University

• One of the authors of the Course description works for the Reutlingen University
• The Mahara assignment submission was made from code developed by the University of Portland, and Lancaster University
• The EJSApp is backed by the Spanish Open University (UNED) and other Spanish Universities, such as the Huelva, Complutense and Almeria Universities
• The Media Gallery plugin was written by Adam Olley for the University of New South Wales
• The Engagement analytics report was developed as part of a NetSpot Innovation Fund project by Monash University
• The Custom Course Menu, developed by the University of Portland, is a block to display enrolled courses in a highly configurable manner for both students and teachers.
• The Groups and Groupings Block by the University of Münster is a Moodle block to display groups and groupings to users. The plugin differentiates between the capability rights of users to evaluate the appropriate amount of information to be displayed.
• The Collabora - Collaborative document editing by the University of Münster provides a document editor for real-time collaboration. Changes to a document are immediately reflected for other users who are accessing the same document. Moodle users can collaborate on simple text files, word, spreadsheet and presentation documents or upload a document. The plugin requires a self-hosted Collabora Online Server (CODE) that is accessed using the so-called WOPI protocol.
• The Catalogue block by the Université de Cergy-Pontoise provides a visual and central place for a teacher to access everything he can use in his course (activities, reports, blocks, ...) Frequently used items can be marked as favorites for quick access.
• The University of Nottingham has made several good plugins:
  • The allocation form by the University of Nottingham can be used to provide more than one choice ("choose three workshops from the following selection") and/or to have students allocated to their choices fairly based on the overall choices/preferences made by all students using the Allocation Form you've set up.
  • The tutorial booking module by the University of Nottingham is designed to allow instructors of a course to create slots that the students can sign themselves up to. It replicates the sign up sheet on an office door.
• The Monitoring of Learning Plans is a report by the Université de Montreal. The main goal of this plugin is to facilitate the work of Learning plans managers. It provides an overview of user learning plan, without leaving the page to get information related to this learning plan (such as rating in courses,user evidence,)
• The Moderator Guide block, created by the Coventry University, displays guides for external teachers/graders. These guides are created by teachers and are based on templates created by administrators. The template creation system allows the generation of Moodle forms containing textarea, file uploader and links.
• The University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil developed the StudentQuiz module to enable students to collaboratively create their own question pools within Moodle,
• The Course usage statistics, developed by the needs of online Brazilian university, UFLA, is a Moodle report plugin that helps the admin to known how the courses are being used by users (e.g. as forum, as file repositories or as activities repositories).
• The Attestoodle plugin, developed by the University of Caen and the University of Mans, is used to generate periodical training certificates for students on a massive scale, based on learning milestones completion.
• The CAPQuiz - additional activity for Computer Adaptive Practice, was developed by Ålesund University College and NTNU Toppundervisning at NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology. It was funded in part by Norgesuniversitetet.
• The PDF Annotation by Aachen University, allows students to insert questions, comments and remarks on learning materials in PDF format directly into the document.
• The Supporter administrative tool by Technische Universität Darmstadt, lets you easily manage your users and courses within a single window without reloading whole pages. Look up users and courses, enrol students, change settings and much more.
• ETH Zürich developed several question types and plugins which support especially online assessment in improved way.
• The Ludic course format - is a Moodle course format plugin, resulting from research work in gamification, that presents course structure and contents graphically. Images are dynamic, evolving over time to emphasise student achievement. LUDIC was developed by EDUNAO as part of the LudiMoodle research project. The LudMoodle project, involving researchers from the Université de Lyon and the LIRIS, investigated the impact of different gamification techniques on user engagement for users with different motivation profiles.
• Kickstart helps teachers to create better courses using course templates. Instead of an empty course, teachers can pick a course template when they first access their course. Templates are created by the site admin and can define everything for the course — format, layout, sections, ready-made activities, texts, blocks etc.
• Chris Kenniburg, from Derborn Public Schools in Australia has written many excellent plugins, including the old Fordson theme for Moodle 3.x and the new LearnR theme for Moodle 4.x.
• Professor Gordon Bateson works in Computer Assisted Language Learning in Japan and wrote the awesome Essay (auto-grade plugin, HotPot and many other plugins.
• Luca Bösch at the BFH Bern University of Applied Sciences has worked in the making of many excellent plugins, including the Boost Union theme and the Differentiator.
• Renaat Debleu worked at the International Health Sciences University Kampala Uganda and made the course completed enrolment plugin.
• Daniel Thies at the Eternal Trinity Lutheran Church made an excellent Cloze editor for Atto plugin and many more.
• Stephan Robotta at Berner Fachhochschule BFH developed a great cloze plugin for the new TinyMCE editor and many other plugins.
• Jez H works at a UK University and maintans the excellent Adaptable theme, used by more than 18000 registered Moodle sites worldwide.
• Don Hinkelman at Sapporo Gakuin University in Japan made the Sharing cart plugin.
• Astor Bizard at Université Grenoble Alpes has contributed many Moodle plugins plugins including dyslexia plugin that adds a user preference to use Dyslexia mode to improve readability for dyslexic users, and AI Jammer, a text filter is an attempt to make copy-pasting of online exams subjects into third-party tools (AI-based tools) more difficult. The filter will inject random letters within texts. These letters will be made invisible on pages with CSS, but will be present to jam copy-pasting or automatic page reading.

• When Leo Zav was at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), he made the spreadsheet question type for Moodle 2.1 to 2.5, but sadly, has not maintained it since 2013.
• When Andreas Glombitza changed jobs in 2013, he could no longer maintain the cloze editor for TinyMCE plugin and Germán Valero from UNAM maintained it for Moodle versions 2.4 to 4.1.
• The Dyslexia plugin adds a user preference to use Dyslexia mode to improve readability and accessibility for dyslexic users. It will change the font throughout the site to OpenDyslexic. It will also slightly increase letter and word spacing. It was developed with support of Université Grenoble Alpes..

• ... and many more ...

Each user can enable or disable it on their preferences page.

Discipline-specific plugins

There are many Moodle plugins available for teaching/assessing several disciplines at and beyond secondary education:

• Category:Discipline-specific Moodling
  • Biology
  • Chemistry
  • Language teaching
  • Mathematics
  • Medicine
  • Music
  • Physics
  • Programming

Themes

There are several Moodle themes made specifically by and for a University. A few examples are::

• BCU and Adaptable Birmingham City University. They are based on bootstrap and allow for extensive customisation and some unique features to help improve Moodle's usability.
• Klass This is very very modern theme suitable for your school / college / university and other online educational websites.
• Snap's user-friendly and responsive design removes barriers to online learning, enabling you to create the modern, engaging experience users expect on the web today. Its intuitive layout is optimised for online learning, focusing on the things that matter - your learning activities and content.
• The Boost Campus theme is a Moodle Boost child theme made by the Ulm University, which is intended to meet the needs of university campuses and adds several features and improvements.

PhET simulations

PhET simulations are interactive simulations for science (physics, biology, chemistry, Earth sciences) and math at elementary, middle school, high school and University levels, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, that provides fun, free, interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations. The simulations are written in Java, Flash or HTML5, and can be run online or downloaded to your Moodle server or desktop computer. All simulations are open source.

Useful links for tertiary educators

• Using certainty-based marking To encourage students to try to understand the issues, not just react immediately to a question.
• All or nothing multiple choice question type This question type is great for life-saving or death-causing, critical situations/procedures/steps in medicine or engineering.
• Competencies and Learning plans
• Effective quiz practices - Using quiz at large scale or in assessments is big topic at tertiary education. An introduction to how to use this powerful plugin you find here.
• StudentQuiz module - While Moodle's Quiz module allows teachers to define quizzes to be answered by students with a variety of question types, StudentQuiz moves one step further allowing students to contribute to the pool of questions related to the course. StudentQuiz can be configured to award points for contribution and participation by students and allows teachers to moderate the question pool by approving or deleting unsuitable or wrong question. StudentQuiz enables students to rate and optionally comment on the questions they answered, awarding the creator of the question with additional points.

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• There are many good Moodle tutorials and books made by Universities available to everyone:

... to be listed here later...

... to be continued...