Totara & Moodle Plugins for Learner Engagement

Blended learning helps students and trainees feel more engaged with the
material theyre assigned. Its not at all surprising when you replace or
supplement a students textbook with an innovative way of looking at the
material, youre already going to get their attention. When it comes to the
Moodle LMS, the following plugins help students feel like theyre
collaborating and learning in interesting ways.
Team Builder
Lets you build teams based off a set of criteria. You ask your students some
questions, and then develop a predicate based off their answers for your
teams. Its also an effective drag-and-drop interface for building Groups,
helping you save a little time on the administration side.
Dialogue
Lets students or teachers communicate in a two-way private conversation or
with all members of a group. These can either be individual, or
group communications. This plugin allows users to attach documents to
their dialogue posts, and view a time stamped history of their interactions.
Moodle Welcome
New users receive a configurable Moodle welcome message with
instructions on what steps they should take next in Moodle. Using Moodles
event system, this plugin is prompted/stimulated/ whenever new users are
created, whether they have been manually created or self-registered.
Moderators of the new user creation will also receive a notification.
BigBlueButton
With this standalone plugin, Moodle can integrate with BigBlueButtons
platform, allowing you to deliver instructor led, real time web conferencing
sessions. This allows you to share slides, audio, video, chat, desktops, and a
virtual whiteboard. It also provides recordings of all sessions, so they can be
watched again at a later date.
Lesson Objectives
Shows current lesson milestones in the side bar (to both teacher and
students). The teacher can check off milestones as they are completed. One
important feature of this plugin is that students can view all lesson
objectives a week at a time to track progress.

Face-to-face

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Activities are used to manage in-person (e.g. classroom) trainings which

require advance booking. The Face-to-Face plugin allows you to create
different course dates at various locations. Administrators can set the date,
time, session description and number of seats available for each event.
Adobe Connect
This is the officially sponsored integration plugin for Adobe Connect Pro, and
Moodle. It provides single-sign-on access to both platforms, and allows users
to set up Adobe Connect Pro meetings by adding an activity instance, and
including the meeting name and template, start and end time, a setting of
either private or public, and a url (if desired).
Attendance
The Attendance plugin allows course instructors to keep track of a learners
participation in a course, by keeping an attendance log of the students.
Instructors can also download these logs in an Excel format, or a text
format, for a tangible record.

Best Moodle Plugins for Course Presentation & User

Experience
Totara and Moodle 2.0 and later versions offers better overall course
presentation and user experience. Thanks to constantly updating plugins,
the open source learning managements system makes it easier to view
information, create lists, categorize activities and create easy-to-use
checklists at the click of a button.
Book
This plugin makes it easy to create multi-page resources with a book-like
format. Basically, you can build complete book-like websites inside of your
Moodle course, including chapters and sub-chapters. Books can then be
printed entirely, or by chapter.
Collapsed Topics
This plugin provides an interchangeable topic or week based format that
relieves users from the Scroll of Death when a course has an abundance
of topics. This makes it easier to rifle through course topics without getting
lost, and is nifty for teachers and students who need a better user
experience.

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Pcast
This plugin makes it simple to create podcasts in Moodle. Podcast episodes
can be instructor created or added by course participants. Podcasts are
great multimedia features for any Moodle course.
Checklist
Teachers and students can create checklists for individual assignments or
for a series of activities. Teachers who prefer total control over students
progress can check off items themselves, but some users have found
greater student buy-in when theyre authorized to check off their own
progress.
Certificate/Simple Certificate
The Certificate plugin creates PDF certificates/diplomas for students of the
course and is completely customizable. You have several customization
options for your certificates you can add borders, watermarks, seals, grade
information, and you can even add custom text.
Lightbox Gallery Resource
This resource allows you to create image galleries within your Moodle
course. It allows teachers to create, edit, and delete galleries as they need.
Small thumbnails are then generated, which are used for the thumbnail view
of the gallery.
Accessibility
The plugin allows users to customise Moodle to their visual needs. It
supports changing of text sizes and colour schemes. Customizations save to
the users session allowing them to persist between pages, but it can also
save permanently to the database.
Progress Bar
The Progress Bar is a time-management tool for students. It visually shows
students progress in any course activities and resources. Teachers have
access to an overview page where they can see the progress of all students.

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Best Moodle Plugins for Mobile

Mobile Identity
This is a custom plugin created by Lambda Solutions that allows you to add
additional methods of authentification, including by ID scan, by SMS
providers, or face match through either a browser, or mobile camera. This
plugin is available up to Moodle 2.9, and is only available through Lambda
Solutions.
Mobile Apps
Some of the features of the Mobile App include a responsive design for
phone and tablets, quick access to your course contents, and abilities to
download and view some resources, upload pictures into your private file
area, and call course participants by touching their phone number.

Best Moodle Plugins for Exam and Quizzes

Open University Question Types
Open University has developed and release a set of question types to be
used within Moodles quiz activity. The question types expand on the
standard available questions (true and false, multiple choice, short answer,
etc) by adding new question formats to the quizzes.

Best Moodle Plugins for Automating Enrollment

OAuth2 Authentication Plugin
This authentication plugin is based on the OAuth2 protocol and allows for
users single sign-on (SSO) with their Google, Facebook, Github, LinkedIn, or
Windows Live Account. Additionally, the first time a user logs in, a new
Moodle account is created.
Email-based self-registration with admin confirmation
Allows self-registration with admin confirmation instead of user confirmation.
Confirmation link is sent to the main admin accounts email address. The
confirmation will be complete when the admin clicks on the link, sending an
automatic welcome message to the user.

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Banner/luminis message broker

This plugin allows for real-time integration between your Moodle site and
the popular student management system, Banner. It also allows you to
create users accounts in Moodle, setup course shells, and manage
enrollment into courses by integrating and digesting XML student
information from Luminis broker.
SAML Authentication
A popular and commonly used data language for exchanging authentication
and authorization information between the applications. To simplify what
this plugin does, it essentially allows existing user accounts in one
application to be transferred over to another and created in Moodle or
Totara.

Best Moodle Plugins for Reporting

Zoola
This Totara & Moodle plugin is the leading module to quickly and easily
extract LMS data into reports, dashboards and ad hoc queries for the
learner, managers and the administrators. Zoola is a robust, scalable
reporting tool with full scheduling and delivery capabilities managed from
the cloud.
Course Size Plugin
The Course Size plugin will run a report that provides you with a rough
estimate of a courses total storage disk usage. The report includes the
course name, the disk usage, and the backup size. It also includes a report
on how much storage is being allotted to outside users and courses, as well
as backup use.
Configurable Reports
This plugin is a Moodle custom reports builder and is very useful to extract
additional information about courses, users, etc. Configurable Reports can
be created without SQL knowledge, making it a useful tool for Moodle admin
and teachers.
Want more on Advanced Moodle & Totara Reporting?
Download Zoola eBook Now

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Best Moodle Plugins for Compliance

Subcourse
Essentially, Subcourse allows you to create a meta-gradebook with the final
grades for all of your learners in another course. Using this information,
instructors can limit access to certain activities to users in one course, until
they have met a grade requirement in another course. Grades are pulled
automatically every 10 minutes, but they can also be pulled manually at any
time.
VeriCite
VeriCite is a plagiarism detection service. This plugin instantly scans work to
detect plagiarized, or improperly cited text across a large pool of databases,
online sources and repositories of papers that are particular to your
university. It also provides instant reports that identity different degrees of
matching, per submission, and across submissions (to check for peer-to-peer
plagiarism).
Attendance
An essential component in any course, the Attendance plugin allows you to
keep track of learner participation in each course. This provides a log to
track the attendance of students in each course, allowing teachers the
added functionality to export the attendance log into an Excel format, or a
text format.

Best Moodle Plugins for Administration

Sharing Cart
This allows you to share your Moodle content, including resources and
activities, across multiple courses in your Moodle site. It duplicates your
course items into a personal library, and moves those duplicates between
courses across your site. It copies the items without user data, so you can
be assured that security is not being compromised. It also saves you the
time it takes to import and export numerous activities into numerous
courses.

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Sign-in Sheet
This plugin allows you to easily create a sign in sheet with the names of
each student in your course, next to blank line where they can sign to verify
that they attended class. At the top of the list, there will include the course
name, and the current date. If you are conducting a live session course
where attendance is a graded component, the Sign in Sheet is an easy tool
to keep track of this.

Putting Things in Motion: Moodle Plugin Installation

If youre installing a plugin right from the Moodle plugins directory:
Use your admin login, and go to Administration Site Administration
Plugins Install plugins, and click the button that says Install plugins from
Moodle plugins directory. Plugins in the Moodle directory will be organized
by category. Search for the plugin you want, click Install, and then click
Continue. You should receive a Validation passed! message if you dont
receive this message you cannot install the plugin. Once you receive the
message, click Install plugin.
If youre installing a plugin via an uploaded ZIP file:
Use your admin login, and go to Administration Site Administration
Plugins Install plugins, and upload the ZIP file directly. From here, in the
Show more section, you will be allowed to add additional details if your
plugin hasnt been detected automatically. You should now be taken to a
screen with an acknowledgement message, stating that you are now
installing the plugin.
Plugin Check:
To ensure that your plugins have been properly installed, use your admin
login and go to Settings Site administration Notifications. This is also
where you can check if there are any updates available for your plugins.

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