Spring 2023 begins Monday, February 6
University Spring 2023 Moodle courses will open to students on Friday, February 3, 2023. If you would like, you can make your course available to students earlier, for example opening your course to students for Preview Week.
If you haven’t done so already, you can request your Moodle course in SPIRE. Don’t forget that each semester you will need to request Moodle for the courses you are teaching.
For step by step instructions on requesting a Moodle course, see:
The Winter session is also wrapping up. Remember that the last day of Winter classes is Friday, February 3, and grades are due Thursday, February 9 at midnight. You can upload your grades in SPIRE directly from Moodle.
Moodle Tip of the Month: Create Student Journals in Moodle
Did you know that you can use Moodle to create journals for your students? Using groupings and forums, you can make journaling spaces private so that only the instructor and TAs can read students’ posts. You can set up journaling spaces to be available to only the student, or to make them visible, but prevent others from commenting.
Planned Downtimes
There are no planned downtimes outside of regular maintenance windows for January 2022.
Scheduled routine maintenance windows for UMass Amherst Moodle in the Cloud are Thursdays 11pm-12am (ET). Regular maintenance is a necessity for a stable, secure, and improving service. Many of these maintenance windows will not actually have the site unavailable for more than a few minutes, but it is still not advised to plan activities or set due dates during maintenance windows.
You can check the status of Moodle, Zoom, and other supported teaching technologies on the IT Services Status for Remote Teaching and Learning page.
Moodle Help and Resources for Instructors
To learn more about Moodle or to get help, you can:
- Review our Moodle Support Articles.
- Contact the Instructional Media Lab (instruct@umass.edu) with a question, or to set up a time for a one-on-one consultation.
- Request a consultation with an Instructional Designer.
- Join our Instructor Support Zoom room between 10am and 3pm to meet with a staff member.