Background: Computer-aided learning management systems (LMSs) are widely used in higher education and are viewed as beneficial when transitioning from conventional face-to-face teaching to fully online courses. While LMSs have unique tools for transferring and assessing knowledge, their ability to engage and assess learners needs further investigation. This paper focuses on a study examining the LMS "Moodle" to ascertain the effectiveness of "Moodle quizzes" to improve, assess and distinguish knowledge in a civil engineering course at an Australian university. The course has a database comprising 62 formative and 61 summative quiz questions with embedded text, images, audio and video. This study investigates the use of these quiz questions with four course cohorts and 169 students. The quizzes assessed competencies of students during various stages of a study period through automated marking. The suitability of questions to assess and distinguish student knowledge levels was determined using a psychometric analysis based on facility index (FI) and the discrimination index (DI) statistics embedded within the Moodle quizzes. Results: This study highlights strategies used to set and review quiz questions for formative and summative assessments. Results indicated that students were engaged and satisfied in the formative assessment because they viewed the interactive videos between 2 and 6 times and 65% of students attempted all the formative questions. The FI indicated student pass rate for the summative questions and DI indicated the difficulty of these questions, while the combination of FI and DI results separated students with different knowledge levels.Using these Moodle statistics provided information to make effective decisions on how to improve the summative quizzes. Conclusion: The multimodal quizzes were effective in teaching and assessing a theoretical engineering course and provided efficient methods to replace conventional assessments. The FI and DI indexes are useful statistical tools in redesigning appropriate sets of questions. Time-poor academics will benefit from using these easily attainable Moodle statistics to inform decisions while revising the quizzes and making assessments more autonomous.

Background The Moodle Learning Management System (LMS) is widely used in online teaching and learning, especially in STEM education. However, educational research on using Moodle is scattered throughout the literature. Therefore, this review aims to summarise this research to assist three sets of stakeholders—educators, researchers, and software developers. It identifies: (a) how and where Moodle has been adopted; (b) what the concerns, trends, and gaps are to lead future research and software development; and (c) innovative and effective methods for improving online teaching and learning. The review used the 4-step PRISMA-P process to identify 155 suitable journal articles from 104 journals in 55 countries published from January 2015 to June 2021. The database search was conducted with Scopus and Web of Science. Insights into the educational use of Moodle were determined through bibliometric analysis with Vosviewer outputs and thematic analysis. Results This review shows that Moodle is mainly used within University STEM disciplines and effectively improves student performance, satisfaction, and engagement. Moodle is increasingly being used as a platform for adaptive and collaborative learning and used to improve online assessments. The use of Moodle is developing rapidly to address academic integrity, ethics, and security issues to enhance speed and navigation, and incorporate artificial intelligence. Conclusion More qualitative research is required on the use of Moodle, particularly investigating educators’ perspectives. Further research is also needed on the use of Moodle in non-STEM and non-tertiary disciplines. Further studies need to incorporate educational theories when designing courses using the Moodle platform.

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Contribution: An evaluation of the effectiveness of Systems Engineering (SE) courses in developing students' Systems Thinking (ST) capacity in both the cognitive and affective domains. A combined cognitive ST performance and affective engagement with ST assessment is proposed as an approach to assess students' ST in both domains. The results can support course change decisions and guide learning experience development. Background: SE education aims to produce graduates with strong knowledge and skills in SE and a strong appreciation of the practical value of ST, which addresses the cognitive and affective domains in education. Consequently, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of SE courses in developing students' ST in these domains, an area that studies do not consider. Intended Outcomes: An understanding of the ST ability of undergraduate students in an SE course in a domain specific engineering program in both the cognitive and affective domains. Application Design: A study evaluated the effectiveness of two SE classes in developing students' ST capacity using a combined cognitive and affective assessment tool developed and validated in previous studies. ST assessment is determined by combining ST performance and affective engagement. To observe the transformation of students' ST capacity, a longitudinal design collected data at two times in each of two offerings of an SE course offered by the same university in two locations-Australia and Singapore. Findings: The course developed students in most dimensions of cognitive ST, but did not appear to improve students' affective engagement with ST.

This article provides a description and analysis of the way in which research degree students and their supervisors at one Australian university (the University of South Australia) use a popular online plagiarism-detection system, iThenticate. The study identifies how these two groups use iThenticate by analysing usage data together with data from an anonymous online survey conducted 12 months after the university took out a pilot subscription to the system. One hundred and nineteen students and 26 supervisors responded to the survey, representing 61% and 43% of the active users in each category. The survey found that the two groups of respondents used the system differently but that, while for both groups iThenticate’s regulatory function in preventing plagiarism (whether international or accidental) was important, the system’s potential educational function in improving research writing capability and publication was equally important. The study highlights the value of regarding the use of anti-plagiarism software so as to encourage a move way from a simple focus on its punitive regulatory dimension and towards its educational possibilities and suggests directions for future research on the relationship between this type of software and the ways scholars work with other people’s texts to recreate meanings and develop original contributions. Implications for practice or policy: Online plagiarism detection systems (such as iThenticate) can be used either negatively to police doctoral students’ practice or positively to improve their research writing practice. Academic developers should promote a positive approach, aimed at improving research writing practice, as the preferable pedagogy in using online plagiarism-detection systems.

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