Adding Notes about Your Learners

Notes are a useful tool that instructors can use to keep memos on learners' performance, illness, or achievements. You can also use notes to share information about learners with the Moodle instructors of other courses. Notes are not visible to learners; they are visible only to you, and you have the control to make your note available to other instructors.

Creating notes

You can access the Notes page and create notes anywhere that you can click a learner profile or from the Participants link on the front course page. To create a note, take these steps:

1. Click the Participants link in the People block on your course front page.
2. Select the check box next to the desired learner.
3. From the With Selected Users drop-down list, select Add a New Note.

   You can also find the Notes section on an individual student profile, Notes tab. See Figure 8-8.

   Moodle takes you to a new page with the learner's name, a text box for your note, and a drop-down list on the right of the note to select who gets to view the note.

   Figure 8-8: Ready to add a new note on the Notes tab.

   

4. Write your note.
5. Set privacy for your note by choosing an option from the drop-down list next to your notes.

   Your choices are

   • Personal: The note will be visible only to you.
   • Course: The note will be visible to other teachers' accounts that have access to your course.
   • Site: The note will be visible to other teachers in all courses on the organization' Moodle site.
6. Click the Save Changes button.

   Moodle returns you to the participants list.

Using notes

Notes help you keep tabs on your learners and can be useful when you are assigning projects, grading, or setting up groups. Do think carefully about making a note available to a whole site. For example, if a school Moodle site has 300 courses, the note you placed on the learner's profile will be available to all the teachers. This functionality is useful only if you want to share something with many instructors that interact with the student (for example, if your student won a scholarship or was in the hospital for an extended length of time).

To look at your newly added note, select the learner profile, and you see a number of tabs appear across the screen. The following list briefly describes their functionality:

• Click the Notes tab to go to the notes functionality. Under Personal is the newly added note. See Figure 8-9.
• From this Notes page, you can edit or delete the note by clicking the blue link. For instance, you may want to make it available to the course. From the Edit link, you have the drop-down list that allows you to change the status of the note.
• You can add new notes to Personal, Course, and Site. Notice that by the Course option, you have a list of which courses the student is registered for.

Figure 8-9: Looking at added notes.