Email sent to the class from Announcements and Quickmail is sent "from" the professor. When the professor receives one of these messages (from themself) the Google Mail SPAM filters get suspicious and you may receive a warning. Review that message and dismiss it if appropriate.

Student photos are uploaded to Moodle periodically but not all will be available. Further, students are able to replace uploaded id photos with a picture of their choosing. Should we mention Gravatar? Generic faculty  and staff photos are uploaded to Moodle but can also be replaced by the the individual.  

If for no other reason you may wish to use the Moodle Mobile App to get direct (push) notifications from Moodle on your mobile device. Moodle does not "speak" text/SMS but the app pushes messages directly to you.

Problems in the Campus Safety ID-Card server resulted in the loss of dozens of student (and staff) photos created over the summer of 2019. These photos remain missing in Moodle as well as other (Faculty Dashboard) photo repositories.

 Grades can be imported from a spreadsheet into Moodle to: create new grade items, update multiple grades at once, ...

Although most Moodle email gets through to students, the bulk nature of Moodle mailing and the vagaries of Google Mail SPAM filtering may result in one or more students finding Moodle messages in their SPAM folders. Professors may need to inform new students that Moodle sends to email and not to text (although direct notifications are available for students using the Moodle Mobile App)

Moodle Grades can be very confusing. Some good references are below but you may want to contact ITS for help getting started.

• Grade Items
• Gradebook (video, print)

More Moodle Tips can be found here...

It is simple for a professor to create a backup of course grades. Grades | Setup | Export (then select Excel) will download a spreadsheet with Grades and Feedback (if selected) that can be read outside Moodle in any compatible spreadsheet.

A course image, blank by default but under control of the professor, displays in the user Dashboard. Profs may want to add a Course image under Course settings to distinguish their courses in the Dashboard.

You can control Assignment grade access and notifications for students by using the marking (grading) workflow setting.

Profs will notice that students who have dropped the course will be listed under Participants as 'Suspended'. This is something that we can't change, but you can filter them out of the Participants by selecting Active students only. Students listed as Suspended cannot see the course and will not be listed in Grades, mail, or most other Moodle features.

Topics and Weekly are not the only layouts for a Moodle course. One approach which addresses the "Moodle scroll of death" is the Collapsed topics format; self-enroll as a Student and see how this looks here. You can configure Collapsed topics layout and colors under the course settings.

Students have access to a Moodle course to learn how to use Moodle; check out Learner Orientation - v3.6 - here.