We've made several enhancements to the Vassar Moodle during the break. Chief among those are:

• A new Questionnaire activity allows instructors to create and deploy questionnaires within a class.

• An instructor may now export the contents of a forum (discussion board) to a text file for downloading. (This function is not available for "simple" forums.)

• An instructor may now set forums to allow anonymous posting. (See notes about limitations to anonymity before using.)

Students: If you've used Moodle's Scheduler function to sign up for office hours with your instructor, you should double-check your appointment time.

Some students' profiles were set to show times at Eastern Standard Time setting, even though Vassar is currently using Daylight Savings Time. That caused appointment times to be displayed one hour earlier than they should have been, for those students.

The error has been fixed, so it won't happen again, but you should review any pending appointments.

Dear friends:

We have just announced a series of introductory and intermediate level Moodle workshops for October break. We will be offering the following sessions:

Introduction to Moodle
This workshop will cover the basics of setting up a course site in Moodle: organizing a site, uploading files, making links, and adding students.

Moodle Gradebook and Assignments
This workshop will cover how to manage the gradebook in Moodle and how to use the Assignment function, with which students can submit papers, etc., for grading.

Moodle Forums and Blogs
This workshop covers how to use forums (discussion boards) and blogs in Moodle.

Moodle Wikis and Scheduler
This workshop covers how to use wikis in Moodle and how to use the Scheduler function to set up office hours, with which students can sign up for appointments.

The workshop schedule is as follows:

Introduction to Moodle, Monday Oct. 19, 1:15-2:15, library classroom
Moodle Gradebook & Assignments, Monday Oct. 19, 2:30-3:30, library classroom

Moodle Forums & Blogs, Tuesday Oct. 20, 1:15-2:15, library classroom
Moodle Wikis and Scheduler, Tuesday Oct. 20, 2:30-3:30, library classroom

Introduction to Moodle, Wednesday Oct. 21, 1:15-2:15, library classroom
Moodle Gradebook & Assignments, Wednesday Oct. 21, 2:30-3:30, library classroom

Moodle Forums & Blogs, Thursday Oct. 22, 1:15-2:15, library classroom
Moodle Wikis and Scheduler, Thursday Oct. 22, 2:30-3:30, library classroom

If you would like to attend any of these workshops, please let us know by emailing us at acs@vassar.edu. See you!