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Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center

Notifications from Moodle

Our apologies for the increased traffic to your inboxes; the last thing we want to do is send out Moodle spam.

Most of you probably received a number of emails from Moodle this morning, following the upgrade to Moodle 3.9. This is not something we saw when we tested the upgrade on the Moodle development server, so was quite a surprise. I got flooded with notices myself, from all of my old (but still open) courses on Moodle. Our apologies for the increased traffic to your inboxes; the last thing we want to do is send out Moodle spam.

These emails were from the Analytics function in Moodle, which we have disabled for now. The learning analytics tools can be an important aid for us to help our students succeed in our courses, but our current situation of having over 9 years of old but still open courses on Moodle has certainly led to problems. We’ll look into rolling out these tools with the migration to a new Moodle server next summer, when we’re not dealing with a decade of old courses and we have time to provide workshops and other support for using the new tools.

With Analytics disabled, you should not still be receiving these notices. You can control the email notifications you receive from Moodle from Analytics or any other tool (e.g., Turnitin, discussion forums, etc) by setting your Notifications preferences.

Look for a notice at the beginning of next week, advertising a set of workshops to demonstrate some of the new features available in Moodle, with the upgrade to version 3.9, such as the Whole Forum Grading option for discussion forums. Also, VoiceThread has announced a major overhaul of their VoiceThread assignments. These new versions of the View a VT, Comment on a VT, or Submit a VT assignments will be rolled out to everyone on June 30, 2021, but they are available for faculty to adopt in their individual courses right now. We will also have workshops coming up to demonstrate the new VT assignments.

If you would like to help provide feedback on future Moodle developments (e.g., evaluating the built-in Safe Exam Browser, Moodle analytics, add-ons and other enhancements to Moodle, theme selection, etc), consider joining our informal faculty advisory group for Moodle. We’ll provide early access to try out features on the new server, and have some ongoing conversation next semester about Moodle choices. If interested, send an email to the TLTC.