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

This example has been running for over a year in Coedylan and more schools (Primary and SENs) are adopting this approach, of individual pupil courses.  In addition to encouraging parents to engage with the school and their child’s learning, it also offers the possibility of migrating the pupil courses to the Secondary School Moodle.  Where it is hoped the pupils can become editors of their own course and use it to record their progress through out Secondary School.

Dilemmas on a Sunday afternoon.

Any ideas, oh hivemind?

Dirk

• Innovation and local development
• Building a community – DevCSI experience
• Tips for a successful unconference

I tried to give an overview why developers, and particularly local developers (i.e. working within the education sector, or for the sector)  are important for technical innovation in education. I also outlined the things that managers and developers need to be doing in order for technical innovation to occur, some examples included, being given ‘time’ and ‘space’ to work on innovative projects, try new things such as agile development techniques and pair programming (even just once) and get out and meet fellow peers at events, network, share ideas and experience.

I also outlined the work of the DevCSI project, which is all about:

• Growing a community of support, development and innovation for software developers in Further and Higher Education

I outlined and highlighted some of the the work in phase one  and phase two of the project (09-10 and 10-11). More, detailed information is available on my presentation – link at the bottom of the page.

I then moved onto the value that local developers provide organisations, e.g:

• understand local context, act as bridge between remote service providers, open source communities, and local end users and add value by integrating into local contexts
• work closely with end users to deliver innovation
• developers have particular skills such as computational thinking and version control which the institution can learn from
• measuring the value of what developers do

I also tried to give some ideas and share experiences of starting a community:

• have a core group of people who are leading the development of the community
• don’t be afraid to ask for help from existing projects, commercial sponsorship (e.g. DevCSI etc)

I outlined a number of case studies we are commissioning and the need for more case studies in the area of e-learning. I also outlined  the results of the DevCSI Stakeholder Survey carried out with UK F/HE, regarding the value of developers. I was approached by Dan Attwood from Midkent college who has offered to give me a case study re: developing a moodle plugin.

Also, Roy Yarkoni from the Open University Of Israel approached me, who is interested in speaking about developing a community of developers in Israel. We agreed to continue this via email in the first instance.

I mentioned the idea of a UK Academic Developer Registry and judging by the nodding of heads, there was general agreement about the idea being a good one. Gavin Henrick suggested using Mahara as tool for developing the registry. As discussions are fairly early in this area, this idea will be considered seriously.

I finished off giving the audience some tips from my own experience of running and attending unconferences.

I really hope they found the presentation useful. I was conscious that my slides were quite dense with a lot of information to absorb, hopefully though, people got something out of it.

My slides are available here.

Thanks to all for listening and remember DevCSI can help you with the creation of your community, please contact me either about this, or other potential ‘success stories’  which demonstrate the impact of local development!

Have a great unconference, sorry I can’t be there till the end!

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 …

http://bit.ly/eW5LWd

Only 24 hours to go to launch…

Adobe Connect software offers an integrated, easy-to-use web conferencing and online learning tool available to a learning community anytime, anyplace. The software serves educational institutions looking to extend their reach and increase enrollment through virtual classrooms that bring faculty and students together online to teach, learn, and collaborate in real-time.

“The open source plug-in provides Adobe Connect customers with a powerful, Learning Management System integration solution with Moodle,” said John Schuman, Solutions Architect for Adobe Education. “Now education institutions have a high-impact, cost-effective way to deliver online teaching, learning and training.”

If you want to learn more please leave a comment, visit our stand at the Moodle Moot or e-mail Collaborate sales@collaborate.com and we will be happy to guide you through Adobe Connect and the integration.

I’ll be at the pre-Moot unconference, have red-ish hair & will be wanting to discuss thing like above, which could be good for learning & save time.  Jago

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.

I 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.

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) :)