UEL Student Guide v1.9
UEL Student Guide v1.9
Table of Contents
1 Introduction 4
2 Definitions 4
8 User Menu 13
9 Dashboard 14
10 Profile 15
17 Calendar 20
17.1 Add Events to the Calendar (User events) 21
17.2 View the Events 22
18 Messages 23
18.1 Sending messages 24
18.2 Messages Area 25
18.3 Adding and messaging contacts 26
18.4 Deleting Messages 27
19 Preferences 28
19.1 Edit profile 28
19.1.1 Preferred Language 28
19.1.2 Forum Preferences 28
19.1.3 Editor Preferences 29
21 Forum 38
21.1 Getting familiar with the VLE forum 38
21.1.1 Main Area 38
21.1.2 Autosave 39
21.2 Using VLE forum 39
21.2.1 Creating new thread 39
21.2.2 Edit thread 41
21.2.3 Thread navigating 41
21.2.4 Reply to post 42
21.3 Subscription 42
21.3.1 Forum Subscription 42
21.3.2 Thread subscription 43
1 Introduction
The main aim of this guide is to provide students with an introduction to the University’s online
resources and more specifically the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Our university is using a virtual learning environment called Moodle to model authentic, real-world
education by integrating a set of virtual concepts for classes, examinations, resources, etc.
The guide uses pictures with captions for a better understanding of what is being described. When
arrows and numbers appear near the pictures, simply follow the sequence in the description. All pictures
are identified by their topic name and number, therefore, some instructions may refer to a specific
picture number.
2 Definitions
1. VLE: It stands for Virtual Learning Environment, where you will be reading, submitting your
assessments and interacting with your teachers and classmates. You will gain access to the VLE
only when you successfully register to at least one module.
2. Email / Username: It is your personal email address you have used to register with us. If you
have requested to change your email address in our records, then you would use the new email
address as your username.
3. Password: It is the password you received via email when you applied for the university. In
case you have changed that password, the latest password you have entered would be the valid
one.
Access to the VLE is granted to whomever has been registered to any module at least once.
If a student has not registered to at least one module yet, then access to the VLE is not provided at
that point.
Note:
If you forgot your VLE password, you can reset it by using the “Forgotten your username or
password?” link located on the login page. (Ref: VLE Password Reset)
When copying your credentials from the email, make sure that you do not copy any extra spaces on the
sides.
Password Change
Once you log in for the first time you will need to change your password to proceed further.
1. In the “Current password” box (1), enter the password you received in the email. (Image 1)
Make sure there are no spaces before or after the password when you copy and paste it.
2. In the “New password” box (2), t ype in your new password which must follow specific criteria
(4). (Image 2)
3. In the “New password (again)” box (3), type in your new password again to confirm it.
4. Requirements for the system to accept your password.
5. To save your changend password, click on the “Save changes“ button.
Type in your email address in the "Search by email address" box. Use the email address which you have
used to register with us.
Once you click the “Search” button you will view the following message as shown on the image below.
Click “Continue”.
In the next screen, type in your new password twice, next to the “New password” (1) and “New
password (again)” (2). Make sure to meet the password criteria (3), otherwise, your new password will
be rejected.
Once you click “Save changes” (4), your new password will be set and you can use it to log in.
You will be automatically logged in to your VLE account.
The colors of the boxes on Image 1 are associated with the colors of the headings below.
Header
In the header, you will see the “Navigation bar”, from which you have quick access to the “Courses
menu”, the “Bell icon” where you will see your notifications, the “Speech bubble icon” where you can
quickly access your messages and the “User menu”. From the user menu, you can access the dashboard,
your profile page, your grades, your messages, your preferences and the Help Center which contains
useful information.
Left-Column
Here you can see the “Navigation drawer”. In the Navigation drawer, you will find the “Dashboard”, the
“Calendar”, the “Private files” and the “My Courses” category which will only show when you have
access to at least one module.
8 User Menu
The user menu is located on the top right side of the page next to your image. Just click on your name
and the menu will drop down.
Profile View or edit your profile details, grades overview, forum posts.
Help Center Help Center provides VLE guidance, student guide and FAQ
9 Dashboard
In the “Dashboard” page you are able to see your courses and your progress in each course. Here you
can also find the Clock block which shows the server time the platform operates on. The calendar block
can be found here as well.
You may access the dashboard either from the “Navigation Drawer” or from the “User Menu”.
10 Profile
The “Profile” page may be reached from the “User Menu” (top right) and then by clicking on Profile.
Click the “Details” tab and you can edit your profile, upload your photo, etc. You can also view your
forum posts and forum discussions as well as accessing the Grades overview.
Image 1: Profile
You can access your grades overview for all courses via the “Grades” link in the “U ser Menu” (top right
of each page). This lists all courses you are enrolled in. If you click on a course name, you will be taken to
your user report, showing activities and their grades in that course.
The navigation drawer allows you to navigate easily through the VLE. It
can slide open or close when you click the “hamburger menu icon” (1)
in the top left corner.
Under “My Courses” (2), you will see the courses you currently have
access to.
Once you are in a course, the navigation drawer allows you to see
other course participants, your grades, and will allow you to jump to a
section in your course.
You will view the "Search" box. Simply type in your Offer ID (#####), click “Go” and you will find your
course.
The center column of the course main area has two parts:
a) The first part is the general introduction message accompanied by introductory material
relevant to the course.
b) The second part is the topic section. Each topic is easily identified by the grey background color
behind each topic’s title. The user has the option to Open all or Close all topics at once by using the
buttons shown in the image below. Each section has its own introductory text and a number of different
types of files such as PDF’s, audio recordings, videos, presentations, word documents, text files, and
links to other sites.
17 Calendar
In the calendar, you can view your deadlines for assignments and quizzes, chat times and other course
events or you can create your own events.
1) Site Events: These events are global and visible to every user in the VLE.
2) Category Events: These events are related to a specific category and are only visible to the
participants of that category.
3) Course Events: These events are related to a specific course and are only visible to the
participants of that course.
4) Group Events: Students and Instructors of a specific module are part of a group. These events
will be visible only to people belonging to this group.
5) User Events: User scheduled events are only visible to the user who has created the event.
6) Other Events: These events are related to general events that are not associated with the other
mentioned events.
General
4) Description It's optional, but you can describe the event as well.
Duration
Repeated events
Upcoming Events Block (Image 2). As the name of the block suggests, you are able to view upcoming
events. As you can see in the image, our event starts “Today” and ends today.
3) Navigate to the calendar and view all the upcoming events.
4) New Event takes you straight to “Add Events to the Calendar” (image1).
18 Messages
You can send instant messages to your Instructors or your fellow students directly in the VLE. The VLE
messaging system notifies you when there are new posts in forums (if you are subscribed), assignment
submissions etc.
New messages are highlighted with a number in the messaging menu at the top of the screen:
By clicking the “speech bubble icon” (1) new messages are shown, go to your preferences page (2),
view contacts (3) , starred messages (4) private messages ( 5) and to view all messages (6).
Image 3: Messages
To add a contact, click on the contact’s name or picture and you will see a screen similar to the one
below.
1. Click “Block user” to block a user and not receive their VLE messages.
2. Click the “Add to contacts” to add them to your contacts.
Contacts may be accessed from the “Contacts” (1) link and then either messaged, blocked or removed
(2).
Note that messages of a particular user can only be deleted, and not messages of other users involved
in a conversation.
19 Preferences
ser Menu) , and then click on the
To access your preferences, click on the “User menu” (Ref: U
“Preferences”.
Image 1: Preferences
Forum tracking
Enabling forum tracking means highlighting the posts you have not read yet, which should improve your
forum navigation.
20 Assignments
Important note:
In case a student is unable to upload his/her assignment on the VLE, he/she must immediately send
an email to his/her tutor informing him/her about any technical issues and attach the assignment file
as evidence. The student should also contact the Technical Team, informing them about the technical
issue. Please be as descriptive as possible when reporting a technical issue.
After clicking on the “Add submission” button in the assignment activity, you will see the following
message, indicating where you need to click on.
Then a pop-up will show up with the agreement where you will need to agree by clicking on the “I
agree” button.
**If you are having issues viewing the Turnitin agreement please try using a different browser or clear
your browser cookies and caches.Some mobile devices might have issues viewing the whole
agreement so it is recommended to use a computer device**
Step 2: Click the “Add submission” button (1) to bring up the file upload page.
There are two ways to upload a file. Based on the requirements shown at the top of the box (2) you can
see the maximum allowed size for the specific assignment and the allowed number of files you can
upload simultaneously. You can browse for a file (3) or drag-and drop the file (4) from your desktop or
folder to the big blue arrow where it says “You can drag and drop files to add them”.
When the upload completes and your file(s) appear in the Files area, click the “Save changes” button
(5).
There are some assignments that are restricted to specific file type(s), meaning that you are allowed to
submit only a specific file type(s). As shown in the image below (image 4) for example, here the
assignment accepts five different file types to be submitted.
Note: This does not mean that you need to submit all five types. You can choose one file type to submit.
Your document has been saved as a draft (1). That means you have the opportunity to revise your
document until the due date. Please do not forget t o submit for marking before the due date. When you
submit the document, your tutor will know that it’s ready for marking.
If the assignment link has Turnitin enabled, your document will be checked for plagiarism. You should
see the “Turnitin status: Queued” below the document that you have uploaded (2). Come back later to
see your “Turnitin status”, if the similarity report is too high you can edit your submission until you are
satisfied with the result.
To edit your submission click “Edit submission” (3). This will take you back to “Step 3”, where you can
replace your document. Click on your document then click on the delete button and then the update
button. After that upload a new document, as described above in “Step 3”.
To remove your submission click “Remove submission” (4). This will remove your assignment
submission but the assignment will remain as draft. You will then need to click the “Edit submission” to
upload the new document.
When you finish with the revisions you may have made, you must finalise your submission. To submit
your document for marking, click the “Submit assignment” (5) button.
Step 5: Click the “Continue” button. Once you finalise your assignment submission, you will not be able
to make any other changes on it.
Upon successful submission, you should receive a receipt email that the assignment has been submitted
successfully.
Note: Only If the Turnitin is activated on that specific assignment, you will be able to view the similarity
report.
21 Forum
The forum activity module enables participants to have asynchronous discussions i.e. discussions that
take place over an extended period of time. The “Announcements Forum”though, is an exception, due
to the fact that it is not made for discussions, but for providing students with information relevant to the
course i.e. different announcements and news, generated only by the teachers. Therefore, you may not
reply nor create a discussion there.
Forum Icon:
After you click on the forum link you will see a screen similar to the image below.
1. Button for adding new thread to the forum.
2. This is the search engine of the forum.
3. Title of the thread (click to open).
4. Author of the thread.
5. Shows how many replies the thread has.
6. The settings of the forum.
7. The blue icon indicates you are subscribed to the thread; you can click to unsubscribe.
8. The greyed icon indicates you are not subscribed to the thread; you can click to subscribe.
21.1.2 Autosave
While you are writing a new thread, you may notice that below the text editor the notification
appears every minute, and informs you that the thread you are writing got saved.
To retrieve the saved thread, simply start a new thread, and you will see your thread recovered and the
following notification below the text editor,
You will see a success message informing you that you have 30 minutes to make changes to your post.
Then at the bottom right-hand corner of your post, you will see Edit, Delete and Reply. Click on Edit and
you will see the form to edit the post.
21.3 Subscription
You can subscribe either to the whole forum and receive notifications from all of the threads or you can
subscribe to one or multiple individual threads of your interest (recommended).
The link will change to “Unsubscribe from this forum”, and of course by clicking it again, you will be
unsubscribed.
To unsubscribe you need to click on the icon and once it turns grey you have unsubscribed.
If you have VLE related questions, please take a look at our Student Help Center using the
following link: https://vle-uel.unicaf.org/course/view.php?idnumber=help
Finally, if neither the SIS Help Page nor the Student Help Center could help, please contact us
using this link: https://sis-uel.unicaf.org/help/support.
In order to help you and to respond efficiently to your message, please make sure to include a
meaningful subject line, keep your message focused, and be as descriptive as possible.