Tertiary education

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

LMS plugins by/for Universities

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

• The Open University has contributed many very well written and highly popular plugins besides the superb LMS quiz engine
• AMC Academic LMS Cooperation has shared several really good plugins
• 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 lms 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 LMS 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 Accessibility 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 users and instructors.
• The Groups and Groupings Block by the University of Muenster is an LMS 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 Catalogue block by the Université de Cergy-Pontoise provides a visual and central place for a instructor 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 users allocated to their choices fairly based on the overall choices/preferences made by all users 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 users 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 instructors/graders. These guides are created by instructors and are based on templates created by administrators. The template creation system allows the generation of LMS forms containing textarea, file uploader and links.
• The University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil developed the StudentQuiz module to enable users to collaboratively create their own question pools within LMS,
• The Course usage statistics, developed by the needs of online Brazilian university, UFLA, is a LMS 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 instructors at the University Polytechnic of Montreal created the Group Choice – to let the users being able to form their groups, with groups already created by the instructors the standard way.
• … and many more

Discipline-specific plugins

There are many LMS 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 LMS 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 LMS’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 optimized for online learning, focusing on the things that matter – your learning activities and content.
• The Boost Campus theme is an LMS 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 LMS server or desktop computer. All simulations are open source.

Useful links for tertiary educators

• Using certainty-based marking To encourage users 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
• StudentQuiz module – While LMS’s Quiz module allows instructors to define quizzes to be answered by users with a variety of question types, StudentQuiz moves one step further allowing users to contribute to the pool of questions related to the course. StudentQuiz can be configured to award points for contribution and participation by users and allows instructors to moderate the question pool by approving or deleting an unsuitable or wrong question. StudentQuiz enables users to rate and optionally comment the questions they answered, awarding the creator of the question with additional points.