Title: 4.3 Student Inductions
Course: Certificate in Online Education

Creating student accounts

For student to access their courses on your Moodle server they will need to have a user account.

Moodle provides a wide range of options for the creation of user accounts, from manual account creation to fully automated account creation by linking to your student information system. How the accounts are created on your Moodle will vary according to your organisations policy.

To help ensure students get the most from your course (and to save excuses such as 'I didn't know how to login'), we recommend that your students are given a short orientation/introductory session on how to access your Moodle and how the find their courses. You may have an elearning team in your organisation who are able to arrange and run these orientation sessions.

The next page describes our suggested content for these introduction sessions.

Student inductions

Once the accounts have been created, it is advisable to run a short student induction session, lasting approx 1-2 hours. The induction sessions will ensure that:

- students are able to log into the computer terminals
- students have changed their password to something other than the default. It is important to encourage students to keep their passwords to themselves
- students are able to log into Moodle and find their courses
- students are aware of where to go in case they need assistance with the computer facilities

The induction sessions may be run by the elearning team or the tutors themselves.

Ongoing student support

Even though students are able to log into Moodle and find their courses, they are likely to need some help and support to encourage them to complete the activities and take an active part in the online aspects of their course.

As a teacher you're likely to need to remind and encourage students to use the content and activities you have spent time creating. One way to do this is to make some of the activities count towards their final assessment grade, and/or request that student submit all their assignments online.

A number of factors may restrict the extent to which can do this, for example a restriction on the number of computer available for open access, technical issues with the internet or network connections. However students should be encouraged to report any problems as soon as possible, so they can be dealt with swiftly.

In the case to technical or lab opening issues, the ICT team or the college management should be informed so they are able to help rectify the problem.