Moodlemoot 2011

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Fast Effective Moodle Induction-2

May 4

Posted by anned in GuestPost, MootUK11, workshops | No Comments

  • Many thanks for your attention, questions and dialogue after my presentation.
  • As promised, here are notes on some of the items.
  • Please note that I have already created another message on this blog that has more details about the context, workshops for staff and the student induction at Coventry University.

Presentation

I used Xerte Toolkits for my presentation visuals. Note that page 2 has two parts. More about Xerte Toolkits on page 3 – turn on your sound as it reads it to you – start it using the navigation at the bottom of the pane.

Styles

Using heading 1, heading 2 in the text of your topic summary, label, web page and so on will automatically pick up the scheme’s definition of that style. This image shows the headings in Moodle’s formal_white scheme. (By the way, I used styles for my blog posts too!)

Student Guide

Here is page 5 of the Moodle student induction guide that was used this academic year at Coventry University. It was originally produced to be printed to A3 size. Use it by all means but please give me credit by mentioning my name.

Dr Anne Dickinson

e-Learning Unit

Coventry University

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Eye Tracking & Moodle: Where do students look?

Apr 18

Posted by gergelyrakoczi in GuestPost, MootUK11, workshops | 3 Comments

Hi,

I’m from Vienna University of Technology and investigate eye movements during learning. The basic question that I try to answer at my presentation is: How do students actually ‘see’ and work with Moodle? My session is organised in practical point of view as giving answers to the following questions:

* How do users navigate within Moodle?
* Where do they start their searching processes during certain tasks?
* How do learners behave immediately after accessing single pages of the learning environment?
* Which type of elements do they fixate first?
* What components are among the highest fixated?
* What elements are ignored?
* Which usability issues could be found by eye tracking?
* How can I create eye-catching teaching material?
* How can I improve my Moodle’s user interface?
* Where can be blocks and features optimally positioned?

Are you interested? If so meet me at:

Tue, Session A, 15:15

I’m looking forward seeing you!

Gergely

PS: Here is a visual appetizer for my presentation … ;-)

Eye Tracking Moodle

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Introducing the new Moodle question engine

Apr 15

Posted by Tim Hunt in GuestPost, MootUK11 | No Comments

The new question engine is something I have been working away at for about 18 months now, and it is nearly ready to go into Moodle 2.1. So far, very few people outside the Open University have seen it, but this is your chance.

I think it a big step forwards for the Moodle quiz, but my opinion is not important. I want to know what you think. It is not too late to make changes in response to your feedback. I hope to get through my presentation reasonably speedily to allow plenty of time for questions and discussion.

Photo of TimI am a little disppointed that my talk is not until the end of the conference. I am the Moodle quiz module maintainer, and I was hoping to say “please come and grab me at any time if you want to talk about the quiz module or question bank.” Saying that in the last session will not be very effective, so, let me say it here:

Please come and talk to me at any time about the quiz module or question bank.

I am including a photo so you know who it is you would need to look for.

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Fast Effective Moodle Induction

Apr 15

Posted by anned in GuestPost, MootUK11, workshops | 3 Comments

Anne Dickinson
e-Learning Unit, Coventry University
Tuesday afternoon, Session E, just before the coffee break.

As you can see, I’m the last in the group so we might be pushed for time.

Below is the bit about the workshops. I’ll concentrate on demos and tips during the session itself, although you will find some tips below…

Context

At the beginning of this Academic year, 2010-2011, Coventry University switched to Moodle as its sole virtual learning environment (VLE). Courses at Coventry are modular and every module at the University has its associated web.

2009-2010

  • The previous academic year, staff had been encouraged to move the stuff which had been residing in the original VLE.
  • Training sessions “Moving to Moodle”, “Moodle Doodles” were held.
  • A library of resources “how to” guides and movies was built.
  • The services of a team of (mainly) students was called upon. This team is known as “The Flying Squad” and they were paid to answer queries and move more problematic items such as quizzes

This academic year

  • A range of basic workshops continues to be available for all staff. Induction for students follows a similar pattern to last year’s induction.
  • A seminar “More about Moodle” has recently been given, to highlight how to shorten the topics list, embed youtube videos and illustrating other Moodle Activities that are available in Coventry.
  • The printed guides and “how to” videos have been expanded.
  • We continue to have the services of the Flying Squad who have helped tutors with student induction as well as help with routine enquiries from staff and students.

Workshops for staff

This academic year Moodle workshops for members of staff include the following:

Your Moodle home page:

  • basic features of Moodle
  • essential module information

Adding files to Moodle:

(yes this was what most of them wanted)

  • smaller files can go to Moodle (max 2M)
  • larger files to Curve digital repository (Equella)

Grades in Moodle:

  • We are in the process of automating the movement of grades from Moodle to the University’s student database.
  • Tip: we used offline activity to add a column that didn’t have a Moodle activity related to it. We encouraged people to use percentages for the results. It then made it easy to use weightings to calculate totals.

Workshops for tutor groups

  • These were given on request
  • Also, workshops have been given for admin staff who get questions from students such as “why can’t I see my module (Moodle Course)”?

Moodle Open Workshops

Demonstrations are given on request and people just come along to Moodle away on their own. These have been held monthly.

Moodle Induction for students

  • There is a briefing session for tutors and student proctors (helpers) who are involved in the induction.
    • They use the session to explore the Moodle Induction Course for themselves so that they can prepare themselves for possible problems that students might have.
    • We get advanced notice of some problems before the students arrive.
  • An economic version of the student guide was created. Last year’s had been a dual booklet giving both Moodle and the previous VLE. This year’s is a dual sided A3 sheet of paper that can be folded into an A5 booklet. Most of it is how to get into Moodle!

Presenter

Anne Dickinson’s Coventry University blog (CUBA stands for Coventry University Blogging Academics) :)

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Mooting Moodle – A panacea for blended learning or a problematic proposal?

Apr 13

Posted by cdenholm in GuestPost, MootUK11 | No Comments

From a practitioner view point there can be a tendency to see the implementation of Moodle as an institutional VLE as either a panacea for many of the current challenges, or as an unnecessary addition to the problem.

This session gives an honest review of the ongoing journey of implementing a blended learning model using Moodle. The design incorporates a blend of online asynchronous learning activities delivered via Moodle, replacing the traditional lecture, supplemented by workshops/seminars. This key skills unit was delivered to over 800 undergraduate students over 2 years and involved 11 academics.

Innovating blended learning pedagogy and exploring the diverse functionality available in Moodle has presented challenges from both technical and pedagogic perspectives. This session focuses on the practitioner experience of developing the blended model, meeting challenges and planning for development. Challenges include assumptions about students and their experience with online learning as an integrated and accepted feature of their educational experience; and involving a large staff team who have the responsibility to ‘build on the blend’. These findings are based upon large quantities data via the rich sources from Moodle as well as student questionnaires and staff perspectives.

We will share the key things we have learned from the experience so far and invite discussion with participants on shared experience and future possibilities of the ways in which the blend between technical and pedagogic rationales may be developed and utilized to best effect for students.

Clare Denholm, Southampton Solent University

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Some sessions to watch out for!

Apr 12

Posted by ghenrick in GuestPost | No Comments

In just 7 short days the Unconference for the UK Moodlemoot for 2011 will be in full swing.  With the nice approach to the Unconference “developer” day its hard to plan what to focus on. I look forward to seeing what presentations appear in ‘The Grid’ filled in by the attendees.  So hoping to see something about Moodle 2.0 plugins on that!

The full Moot kicks off on the Tuesday, and apart from the must-see keynotes, there is a myriad of choices available in the sessions!  It is a very hard choice to make for the most of the sessions which to go to, which to miss. The following presentations are ones which have caught my eye:

  • “From messy repository to quality interaction and engagement” – Janina Dewitz from Barking and Dagenham College
  • “Moving the Open University to Moodle 2.0″ – Ross MacKenzie, The Open University
  • “The unified VLE: the Good, and the not-really-so-bad and Ugly” – Catherin Milligan, University of Strathclyde
  • “It’s not as scary as I thought” – Mary Cooch, Our Learning
  • “Teaching with Moodle: Best Practices in Course Design” – Michelle Moore, Remote-Learner
  • “Eye Tracking Moodle: Improving usability & what do students really see?” – Gergely Rakoczi, TU Wien – Teaching Support Center

On the Wednesday the presentations that have also caught my eye include:

  • “Mobile, Moodle and the Open University” – Anthony Forth, The Open University
  • “Reading Lists and Referencing: Refworks integration in Moodle” – Hannah Young, Southampton Solent University
  • “Turnitin’s Moodle Direct plugin – Considerations for use” – Bob Ridge-Stearn, Newman University

Its going to be impossible to get to all the ones I want, but I will certainly try to get to as many as possible. Which reminds me, I should really go sign up to the sessions before they are full!

Gavin Henrick, Learning Solutions Consultant, Remote-Learner Canada

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Enhance the user experience with EQUELLA 5

Apr 11

Posted by mbrighella in GuestPost, MootUK11, Sponsors | No Comments

EQUELLA 5 enables users to search, create, and manage content online, providing one central system to meet the requirements of an institution’s teaching and learning, research, media, and library content.  This latest offering of the digital repository greatly enhances the user experience with an improved user interface, enhanced search capabilities, and the ability to discover and upload third-party content into EQUELLA.

EQUELLA5 screen shots

EQUELLA5 screen shots

One of the highlights of EQUELLA 5 is the extension of search capabilities with remote repositories, which provides users with the opportunity to further explore a wider spectrum of content. This feature builds upon the strengths of EQUELLA’s search capabilities, allowing users to access and import resources from external repository searches, and save time by importing results directly into a collection. This new function also allows EQUELLA to search within other institutional repositories, with the importing of metadata and resources.

EQUELLA 5 provides users with the ability to:

  • Create, store, manage and share multiple types of educational content from a single digital repository – ideal for research, libraries, and learning objects
  • Discover, classify, and compare digital learning resources in a managed content environment
  • Seamlessly integrate with Moodle, including Moodle 2.0
  • Access multiple types of learning content, from documents and streaming content to copyrighted materials, regardless of where the content resides
  • Give online users the same experience as on-campus users
  • Experience an enhanced user interface with a new contemporary, fully customisable design
  • Directly harvest content from remote repositories for extended search and discovery capabilities
  • Increase overall usability through tailourable portlets and custom link creation to suit individual user needs

To learn more about how EQUELLA 5 can take your digital content to the next level, visit our exhibition stand B1 at MootUK11.

Michaela Brighella, EQUELLA

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5 Years of Moodle at the University of Sussex

Apr 8

Posted by poprandi in GuestPost, MootUK11 | 2 Comments

Aims of our talk

At last year’s UK Moot we were excited by the discussions and ideas that were generated between HE institutions.  This year we hope the event provokes similar debate and we emerge with plans and community projects which will improve the learning environments we are creating. Our long-term aim is to shape Moodle into a product which meets our shared needs and drive developments into Moodle core which will benefit our institutions.

Our talk will focus on some of the developments the University of Sussex has been engaging in over the last 5 years and some which we will be engaging in the near future and we hope others get involved.

Our context

At the University of Sussex we have been running an institution-wide Moodle install since 2006.  As of the 2010/2011 academic year we have over ten thousand staff and students coming to our site per week (seven thousand most week days). Eighty per cent of Sussex course modules have an online site to support its cohort’s learning, which is almost two-thousand online Moodle sites.

Our challenge

Our students have committed their time and money to their studies.  They deserve high quality support activities and materials, including those made available to them via online sites and its our job to make sure they get it.

Our tutors are great, long-suffering and working in uncertain and stressful times. Despite their best efforts they are frustrated that Moodle can still make it difficult for them to produce course websites of the quality they would wish.

Our reasoning

Our install of Moodle at Sussex is :

  • not the only website our users visit
  • not the website our users visit the most
  • not the website our users interact with the most

social media used by tutors

  • not the only website at Sussex which provides student data (degree time-tables, grades and feedback are accessed through the managed learning environment)

Our course site designers are busy academics for whom teaching is only part of their role and developing teaching support materials such as their Moodle site is only part of their teaching commitment.

The implications of this

Most tasks our users perform in Moodle they also carry out with other applications or websites, but the workflow patterns they need to learn in order to use Moodle are unfamiliar to them. By tweaking these Moodle patterns to be more similar to those used by other websites we find we are often able to improve our users’ experience of Moodle.

Our methodology

(Not included in our talk)

project flow

In order to do this we apply a user-centered design approach, asking the users to design the system they need. We do user testing, design, and iterate until we developed a solution intuitive enough to need minimal help and documentation.

Our solutions

Study Direct

  • Integrate lots of institutional data which requires extending Moodle to hold this data
  • Include customisations of Moodle interface to improve its navigability when:
    • Creating course sites and learning activities as a tutor
    • Interacting with sites as a student

Some of these will be presented in the talk, others we have talked about on our Sussex elearning team blog.

The Future of Moodle?

Moodle needs to become a system which is more intuitive for students and busy academics to use. It must evolve to make it simpler to produce high quality, easy-to-use course websites and learning activities. It must adopt similar patterns of interaction and workflows that people using the web today are familiar with.

Check out our Sussex elearning team blog to get more information about Moodle at Sussex.

Paolo Oprandi, Educational Technologist and Systems Developer, University of Sussex

Stuart Lamour, E-Learning Developer, University of Sussex

Carol Shergold, Head of Learning Systems, University of Sussex

John Davies, Education Developer, University of Sussex

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Monitoring student progress & annotating assignments online

Apr 5

Posted by dsmith in GuestPost, MootUK11, workshops | 2 Comments

About 3 years ago, I got bored of marking BTEC assignments by hand (carrying piles of paper around, students losing work before their resubmission deadline and complaints about the legibility of my handwriting), so I started to investigate ways that I could use our college install of Moodle to move the whole process online.

I wanted a system that could consistently handle all different file types – word-processed reports, spreadsheets, presentations, images – and without the need to download each file, save it carefully, embed comments in it (which would have need different applications, depending on the file type) and finally upload the new file back to the students.

Not satisfied with any of the solutions I found at the time (although there are now some interesting-looking, commercial options such as Red Pen Tool and Turnitin GradeMark) I found a couple of open source PDF libraries, wrote many lines of javascript and PHP code and, thanks to the way that Moodle supports plugins, was able to create the assignment type. Once students have saved their work as a PDF (which can be done from any application, by printing to a PDF printer, such as PDF Creator), they can upload it to the VLE. The teacher can then read the work, add comments and underline sections, all from within their browser, before sending back a new PDF to the students, with all the feedback embedded in it.

The second plugin I created, the Checklist module, was born out of the frustration of marking assignments where students had missed out important sections of their work. For a while I tried using multiple-choice quiz questions to help students keep track of what they need to do; this works, but offers limited formatting, is fiddly to set up and doesn’t allow teachers to see the progress as students go along. The Checklist plugin allows the teacher to create a list of items for a student to complete, which can either be ticked-off by the student themselves, or by their teacher, as well as allowing students to add their own items and view their current situation as a progress bar. You can also import a list of activities from the course (and have them automatically ticked-off as students complete them), display progress bars in a block or export the checklist results into a spreadsheet.

In my slot at the Moot I am planning to demonstrate the use of both of these plugins (including an updated user interface for the UploadPDF plugin – assuming I get it finished in time) and share a little about how they have been received by students at my college. I am also looking forward to hearing feedback and suggestions from anyone out there who is already using them, or thinking about installing them on their Moodle site.
Davo Smith

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Moodle 2.0, the Man, the Boy and the Donkey

Mar 28

Posted by Mary Cooch in GuestPost, MootUK11 | 1 Comment

I’ve been  reminded of this ancient fable a couple of times in my teaching career: For several years now we have been using the Moodle questionnaire module  to gauge feedback from students as to their opinions of teaching – quality of  homeworks, challenging tasks etc. When asked “do you enjoy this subject?” one pupil  (who happened to be from my class) commented:  “It is really interesting but a bit boring”.

On a similar vein, I recall trying to jazz up a languages lesson once and overheard a girl on leaving the class say “That was such fun! I LOVE French!” Fired up, I did exactly the same lesson with another class on the same day and got a whingeing response from another girl( in the quiet, discreet way hormonal teenagers speak) “That was sooo boring; I HATE French”

Back to the topic: I am looking forward to talking about ways of presenting Moodle to non-technical users in a way that will motivate them  -and particularly the best ways to introduce Moodle 2.0 to those comfortable (and happy) with Moodle 1.9. I must stress I don’t have any answers!!  But to help me focus, I asked a group of our teachers if they would spend some time creating a course on Moodle 2.0 and -like our pupils – give me their feedback.

ICT teachers were banned – there is a mix of primary, MFL, Humanities, PE, Music and DT staff. It is is early days yet – they only started a couple of weeks ago-  but already the initial responses are food for thought:

  • It’s much slower than the old version and much harder to find your way around*
  • It’s really fast and laid out so much better!*
  • The way they’ve changed the file system is a real drag.Where are the course files?*
  • Uploading files is far easier  in this new Moodle*
  • Everyone’s going to switch off completely if this is what we end up with *
  • I can’t wait till we get Moodle 2.0!*

There are other, more specific comments and suggestions, which I’ll leave till the Moot -but I had to smile. Perhaps, like the Man, the Boy and the Donkey, Moodle 2.0 cannot please all of the people all of the time – but let us as Moodlers work together to ensure it ends up pleasing as many of the people as possible for as long a time  as possible.

Mary Cooch @moodlefairy

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