Distance Learning Faculty Training Certificates

Certificate 1: Distance Learning Essentials

Course Duration: 2 hours
The aim of this course is to provide attendees with all the knowledge to create a Distance Learning (DL) course that meets the standards of DL courses at the University of Nicosia as well as achieving the skills needed create engaging activities and to better perform course and student monitoring.

This course is broken down into two parts that provides information on the following areas:

  1. DL Guidelines
  2. Moodle Basics

Each area is described further below:

A. DL Guidelines (1 hours)
To receive the certificate attendees must attend this part.
After completing this part of the course attendees will be familiar with the requirements for offering a DL course at the University of Nicosia.

Attendees will be encouraged to have an open discussion on what they think should be included in a DL course and what they hope to achieve while offering a DL course. Following this discussion, these DL documents will be outlined:

  • DL Documentation
  • Faculty Guidelines for the Development and Delivery of Distance Learning courses
  • Guidelines for the Preparation of Distance Learning Course Outlines

Attendees will be provided access to these documents in digital format during the training.

B. Moodle Basics (1 hours)
Attendees should now know what the minimum requirements for running a DL course are. After completing the second part of this course attendees should be comfortable to create Moodle basic activities as well as monitor the performance of their students.

Moodle Basics is designed to give attendees a fundamental understanding of Moodle and how to manage online courses. It aims to provide attendees with the knowledge and skills needed create basic activities and to perform course and student monitoring. Topics covered include:

  • Course Creation
  • Creating Content in Courses (Forum, Assignments, Files, Folders, Pages, URLs and Labels)
  • Monitoring Assignments and Anti-Plagiarism
  • Gradebook and Course Reporting
  • Course Management

Certificate 2: Moodle Essentials

Course Duration: 3 hours
The aim of this course is to provide attendees with skills needed to create more engaging activities in their Distance Learning courses. These activities will take the students’ focus away from the course content and shift it towards student generated content and student-to-student interaction.

The following will be covered in this course:

A. Chat
A simple and familiar tool to most participants, the chat activity allows participants to have a real-time synchronous discussion in a Moodle course.

B. Glossary
The glossary activity allows participants to create and maintain a list of definitions, like a dictionary. The entries can be searched or browsed in different formats. A glossary can be a collaborative activity or be restricted to entries made by the teacher.

C. Quiz
One of the more common modes of assessment in Moodle, the quiz activity allows the teacher to design and build quizzes consisting of a large variety of question types, including multiple choice, true-false, short answer and drag and drop images and text.

D. Groups
Promoting group work can be achieved using the group functionality in your course. You can assign a student to one (or more) groups and in their groups students can work together to complete a task.

E. Wiki
A wiki is a collection of collaboratively authored pages. Basically, a wiki page is a web page everyone in your course can create together, right in the browser, without needing to know HTML. A wiki starts with one front page. Each student has the ability to create new pages and build on content developed by other students.