LST Overview & Moodle Help

Learning Systems Overview

The Learning Systems Team (LST) manages and maintains the University’s Learning Management System (LMS) and learning technologies. Since its inception in 2007, there has been significant growth in the use of Moodle at USP. Today, Moodle serves more purposes than just learning management. It facilitates learning; is used for record management and provides more services because of its integration with other USP services. There are also other systems that form the complete Learning Systems.

Currently the learning system at USP is made up of:

Moodle (main component - LMS)
Mahara (eportfolio)
Integration with Turnitin (to check similarity)
Repository
Integration with Banner services

Meet the Learning Systems Team

Dhiraj Bhartu - Manager Learning Systems (currently on secondment)
Varunesh Rao - Learning Systems Administrator & Acting LS Manager
Rajneel Totaram - Learning Systems Developer
Sanjeet Chand - Assistant Learning Systems Developer
Koroata O'Brien - Communications Assistant

Moodle Help

Email: moodlehelp(at)usp.ac.fj or helpdesk(at)usp.ac.fj

Call: (+679) 323 2117

Location: CFL, Level 3 Communications Building, Laucala Campus.

Moodle

Moodle is USP's official Learning Management System. Moodle stands for Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. Moodle is used to facilitate the delivery of courses at USP. Face to face (F2F) courses use the Moodle platform as a supplementary service to share learning resources and enable student communication and interaction outside the classroom. All courses offered in the F2F, blended, online and flexible mode have a Moodle shell available for use by staff to help them deliver online teaching resources and interactive activities to the registered students. Moodle provides a range of interactive tools to support and enrich the learning experience, such as discussion forums, assignment submission, journals, glossary and multimedia elements which can be embedded or linked. Online courses use Moodle in more depth to create collaborative communities of learning.

USP Moodle: http://elearn.usp.ac.fj

Please visit Moodle.org to find out more about Moodle.

Mahara

Mahara is the USP’s eportfolio tool, which provides each student with an intuitive web-based tool for planning, reviewing, reflecting upon, recording and presenting their professional and personal development. The use of eportfolios is now slowly being integrated into USP courses. Eportfolios are a collection of digital artefacts that students collect as they take their learning journey. Mahara is integrated with Moodle and users access it via logging into Moodle.

Please visit Mahara.org to find out more about Mahara.

Turnitin

Turnitin is the plagiarism detection service used by USP. This service is integrated with Moodle and users only need to access Moodle to use this service. Turnitin is used to detect similarities in submitted work on Moodle. It does not judge whether a student submission has been plagiarised.

The Turnitin similarity report does not differentiate between correctly cited references and unacknowledged or intentional copying. It only reports text matches, and provides a ranking of submissions, according to the level of text matching with other sources in its database. A Lecturer or student then analyses the matches and determines whether the level is acceptable. Using this information a Lecturer/student can determine if there is a case of potential plagiarism. Turnitin can be used to teach proper citation method(s). Teachers can check the originality and citations in student work. If made available to students, students can check their own assignments before their final submission. This can help prevent or reduce students submitting plagiarised work. The Turnitin service compares all submitted work against a vast digital collection of submitted student work, Internet pages, books, journals, and periodicals.


Centre for Flexible Learning (CFL)