This academic year sees the introduction of
Lancaster’s new Student Portal and Moodle Virtual Learning Environment. The newly introduced Portal boasts a clean, easy to use interface, boldly decked out in the colours of Lancaster University.
However, this change has occurred relatively unannounced, appearing shortly before the
beginning of the new academic year.
Richard Clark, VP Academic, told SCAN that “the
reasons behind switching…is simply because the
limitations we were finding in LUVLE were
becoming unworkable.”
One of the benefits of the Moodle space
appears to be its interaction with the new library services. As the library introduces more eBooks to make resources more
accessible to students and staff alike, these
resources can be linked up to your modules on Moodle. This allows
students to access reading
materials for seminars and
assignments online, as opposed to obtaining a hard copy from the
library.
As students have begun to return to lectures this week there have been some
problems with the new
portal. One third year
student of the Management School complained that, “many lecturers don’t seem to know how to use Moodle, which has led to confusion in my classes about which work needs to be done.”
Clark addressed this in his statement, pointing out that “one of the
main problems this year is the limited
interaction that some
tutors have with the
Moodle spaces assigned to them; leaving them bleak and lacking information”.
In order to combat
this issue, LUSU are
proposing to give tutors
incentives to keep their spaces updated, with
student-nominated awards for the best Moodle
spaces.
Clark did advise that the Student Portal may still face some issues, stating that “obviously when you
implement something new there are going to be
hiccups so I ask for a
level of patience with this
new system until we can
find the problems and fix
them.”
However, it seems that the majority of
students are happy with
the changes thus far. The portal allows students to have everything that they need on the front dashboard screen, enabling access to the library catalogue and their emails from one place.
The general consensus seems to be that the
interface is much cleaner and
compact, making it easier to find everything you need in one
simple space. In addition to this, the ability to view a
complete, concise list of their modules will help students to keep track of assignments
and announcements
posted by tutors; whereas with the LUVLE website,
sometimes announcements could
