Moodlemoot 2011

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Finnish national and local perspectives on Moodle migrations

Apr 11

Posted by Anni Rytkönen in MootUK11, pre-Moot, workshops | No Comments

Finnish Moodle users form a self-organizing group, called Moodle Circle, who meets at least annually in national ”moots”. In recent meetings we had discussed Circle members’ plans and needs in the future Moodle2 migration, so in the February 2011 meeting we agreed on a questionnaire for collecting information concerning migration plans. 15 Circle members in Higher Education have so far responded, presenting a majority of the largest Moodle installations in Finland. I thought that the summary might be of interest for international readers as well, as it shows one national perspective to the Moodle2 migration, so I quickly translated it to English with some additional context information. The English summary (pdf) can be found in the Circle wiki (sorry, only in Finnish..).

Like the national summary shows, most universities provide their Moodles with at least three language packages. That is also the case in our Moodle at University of Helsinki: we have a strongly edited local Finnish language package, a somewhat less edited Swedish package, and the English language package is used about as is. Parallel languages used in course area design emphasize the need for consistency in used concepts also between languages in the teacher user interface. As we support teachers in the pedagogical design and use of web-based environments in teaching at the Educational Centre for ICT and faculties, we have noticed that the selected activity names  guide teachers in their selections of activities, sometimes resulting in not-so-well-implemented course areas. Used names cannot be changed whenever, but as part of the Moodle 2 migration process it would be motivated to rename some of the activities. But how should they be named, to support teachers in best way possible? To learn more about user language preferences and habits, we published a request to response to a questionnaire. Some of the results will be discussed in Kristiina’s workshop session Nomen est omen (translations matter) on Wednesday.

My workshop presentation “Dos and dont’s”, concerning our process from Blackboard to Moodle, is hopefully useful for participants who are considering the same decision. We started the process in 2008 with a comparative user survey, and the process is finally ending in the autumn with Blackboard shutdown. Blackboard teachers were informed via a blog with instructions. In the workshop I thought we could discuss the phases in the process, but, if hoped for, I could also be prepared to present some results from the comparative survey too.

Any comments and questions concerning our workshops are welcome here, and we’ll (try to) take them into account in our preparations!

Anni Rytkönen (@helsinki.fi)
specialist in educational technology, Educational Centre for ICT, University of Helsinki

Kristiina Karjalainen (@helsinki.fi)
specialist in educational technology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki

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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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Serving & including your communities: Mahoodle & more

Apr 4

Posted by jbrown in MootUK11, pre-Moot, workshops | No Comments

You might be a learning provider in the community that runs (NQF) entry to degree level courses. You might be wondering how the many learner systems and services out there, will integrate to provide learners with a simple, personalised & comprehensive user interface. You may also be wondering how to do this efficiently, improve the quality of learning while also widening access & remaining competitive. This is how the title ‘Serving & including your communities: Mahoodle & more’ came about.

I will present a brief case study of how we are personalising our Moodle, including ilp module enhancements & how we plan to use Mahara. Then I will present a broad picture of related learning systems & services, how they fit together, and how they might be developed & improved for the benefit of learners. The following diagram should give some idea of how broad & holistic an approach I am taking:


Learner Services diagram by Jago Brown

Jago Brown, e-learning coordinator  Stanmore College

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Boost your Moodle Backup, Automation and Fine Tunings

Mar 29

Posted by amer in MootUK11, pre-Moot, workshops | No Comments

For the 2nd year, I’d like to share my experience in tuning Moodle, which might help you manage your Moodle site better. Handling a huge Moodle site is tedious if you don’t at least improve some traditional methods and automate part of the work. I will be glad to over last year’s presentation and share how i improved Reports and some administration handling.

This year’s presentation will tackle some further tunings below.

Improving backup methods helps you avoid getting off your chair, going to the data center and restoring from tapes!

  • Choose which categories to backup and save space on tape and time. Choose when to backup courses with logs enabled and when to backup with logs disabled and save more on backup time duration.
  • Other than the traditional tape backup, which happens once a night, how about restoring 1 hour old material?
  • How about restoring a 24 hours old database snapshot without going back through the hassle of restoring from tape?

Why not make use of scripts and let them do some tasks that show that you have been there, active and have a strong memory!

  • Want to put Moodle into maintenance mode early morning, or late at night, without having to login and do the work manually?
  • Added temporary admins to the application and forgot to remove them at the end of the day?
  • Bored from theme banner/logo? Do few different banners and automate their rotation every other week and show your users you are constantly coming up with new banners.

I will also go over few other minor code edits which add up to the improvement of the administration of the application.

See you there!

Amer Hamade, American University of Beirut

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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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Workshop Wordle

Mar 11

Posted by Frank in workshops | 3 Comments

Well the title says it all. I thought it be nice to visualise the accepted workshops for this year’s UK Moot. This Wordle is based on the list of workshops in the previous post and hence contains presenter names and their institution, probably why ‘University’ is so prominent. I’ll produce on with just the workshop titles at a later stage, will be interesting to see how things change. I assume ‘integration’ is likely to stand out. What do you think?

MOOTUK11 Workshop Wordle

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