LIT2T Leadership Guide

8 TO: TABLE OF CONTENTS the template is often complementary, getting specific functions of the template to work perfectly takes some expertise. While the results can be impressive, the primary motive behind free templates is to entice the user into a web-hosting contract. ROLES in the LMS include: Guest, Student, Non-Editing teacher, Teacher, Course Creator, Manager, and Administrator. The settlement language training centre administrator, along with their educational technology team, must decide on the assignment of technical rights within these roles. How instructors achieve more advanced roles must also be defined. The LearnIT2teach training model can be used to help make this decision. ACCESSIBILITY is an important issue for instructors and learners. During off-peak times, instructors can prepare lessons after school hours or from home. Learners can use 24-hour access to view or submit tasks or assignments. A centre can choose limited access through scheduling to save Internet costs. USER MANAGEMENT is important at a language training centre as learners move upwards through language proficiency levels. To complicate this situation, continuous intake necessitates continually adding learners to the LMS. The decision must be made whether to allow individual instructors to add and delete learners from their courses, or to appoint a central user-manager to control the flow of learners in and through the system. COURSE MANAGEMENT involves many issues. Courses are created, customized, archived, downloaded, deployed and reassigned. Definitive policies on course quality assurance, as well as storage, must be considered. FILE MANAGEMENT includes four issues that should be considered: permitted file types, folder structure, file backup and file-naming conventions. Managing files properly will improve reusability of content. MONITORING USER ACTIVITY can help with security and identify areas of the courseware that are underutilized or are producing undesired results such as erroneous reporting. An instructor or technician should be assigned to identify any problematic issues. MODULES OR PLUGINS add functionality to a Moodle LMS. However, they are also created by third party vendors, creating a reliability factor. Moodle offers hundreds of third party enhancements to the main product, with this risk. Tempting examples are thumbnail images lists, a slideshow, a Flashcard glossary or an analogue clock. It is always good practice to install these on a test site before installing on a live site. VERSION UPGRADES are far too frequent with Moodle. The timing of your upgrades is critical to the smooth running of your courseware, and it will take a lot of reading and consulting with others in the Moodle community to determine when upgrades are best for you SECURITY settings within the LMS must be clearly articulated to protect the privacy of all users as well as the data on the LMS. SYSTEM SETTINGS reflect the structure of the institution and the requirements of the curriculum. These must be discussed and made into policy, since they have a great influence on security and the integrity of the courseware. BACK UP AND RESTORE features allow a course to be copied and archived. A course can be immediately duplicated for another instructor or class. Backup and restore can also be applied to