Moodlemoot 2011

Just another Blog.ulcc.ac.uk weblog

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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Finding the Balance

Apr 18

Posted by dpilat in workshops | No Comments

It’s Sunday afternoon and outside my window a bunch of starlings makes the most atrocious of rackets (I know bird song is supposed to be beautiful, but if you’re preparing a talk for MoodleMoot11 every distraction automatically qualifies as racket). I am in the process of putting the finishing touches to my presentation for  my first ever MoodleMoot but I am having a sneaking suspicion that I am not hitting the right tone: when preparing for a MoodleMoot, does one target the educationalists or the geekier part of the audience? How much Moodle does a talk have to feature to be appropriate for the event?  Is it ok to focus on the content of the educational progamme while emphasizing that without Moodle it wouldn’t have worked? Does that offend the Moodlerati? And how to solve this conundrum? Having a look at last years videos didn’t really help.

Dilemmas on a Sunday afternoon.

Any ideas, oh hivemind?

 

Dirk

 

 

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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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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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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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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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Implementing electronic submission and marking with Turnitin’s Moodle Direct plugin.

Mar 25

Posted by bridgestearn in GuestPost, workshops | 1 Comment

Implementing electronic submission and marking with Turnitin’s Moodle Direct plugin. Well, that was the original submitted title and the one that appears in And the winners are… post. However, it has since been shortened, on request, to Turnitin’s Moodle Direct plugin – Considerations for use.

Also shortened is the length of time I have to present this. Originally I planned for an hour. Thirty minutes to demonstrate Moodle Direct and Turnitin’s GradeMark software and 30 minutes to discuss the processes and results of our trial.  This has been reduced to thirty minutes total which is barely enough time to fire up a browser and show the plug-in. Nevertheless, that is what I want to do – show people Moodle Direct in action. All too often, in my experience, information sessions about Turnitin integration are conducted with the ‘aid’ of PowerPoint presentations.  However, this isn’t very helpful for people who are contemplating installing it, Far better to see someone else’s implementation so you can decide whether or not you want it and to know later, if you do install it, whether yours is working similarly.

So, I’m going to live dangerously and demonstrate the Moodle Direct module on Moodle 1.9 connecting to our institution’s Turnitin account and accessing Turnitin’s databases in the U.S. Additionally I will also show how you can use the GradeMark  software online via Moodle. There won’t be time to then stop and deal with our institutional trial so I intend sharing our experiences from the trial while I am showing Moodle Direct and GradeMark.  However, in this blog entry I’ll describe the trial itself.

Before I start though I should say briefly a little about myself  – I am the head of a small e-learning department in a small university college in Birmingham called Newman University College. I have no links with Turnitin,  iParadigms or iParadigms Europe Ltd other than our institution has an account to use the Turnitin service.

Our main motivations for seeking an electronic submission and feedback solution is threefold: 1) to enhance the student experience and satisfy student demand for it, 2) to provide richer and speedier feedback and 3) to alleviate a paper storage problem in Exams & Assessments department.

Background to the trial.
In 2009 we installed the Moodle Basic plug-in on a Moodle development server. We tested it within the e-leaning department and demonstrated it to interested academics and to Exams & Assessments department. Although some institutions use and like this plug-in, we chose not to use it.  When a student submits a paper they are redirected from Moodle to Turnitin. We experienced a lag and sometimes saw white screens. This led us to believe it might be confusing for students.

When the Moodle Direct  (originally called Moodle Native) plug-in was announced in 2010 we decided to take a second look. This integration is deeper than the Basic one and the student submits to Turnitin via the Moodle interface not via the Turnitin one.  The submission process is much slicker – just like submitting to a Moodle Assignment.  The elearning department and a few volunteer academics tested it and also tested GradeMark, which allows you to mark online, and we considered it significantly better than the previous version and thus worth introducing to the wider university college community. And so started our current Turnitin Trial which started in January 2011.

Participants of the trial.
A general invitation was sent out to academic staff by the Quality Office for volunteers to join an Electronic Submission Working Group who would report their findings to the Learning & Teaching Committee. Once volunteers had come forward Quality Office then contacted all subject areas who were not represented and asked them to nominate someone. Exams & Assessments also contributed two members of staff and a student representative from the Students Union also joined. We also have a representative from Student Support and our Disability Coordinator is also on board. All in all, the working group comprises 28 members.

Stage 1.
Environment.
Moodle course with a Moodle-Direct Turnitin Assignment and two feedback forums.
Roles.
Members of the working group took the role of student.
I took the role of tutor and marked and graded the submissions
Tasks
Members of the working group:

  • Submitted a piece of work to the assignment
  • Viewed their originality report
  • Viewed the tutor’s  feedback
  • Provided feedback in forum 1 about the uploading process
  • Provided feedback in forum 2 about receiving feedback and their grade

Stage 2.
Environment:Moodle course with numerous Turnitin Assignments (one for each member of the working group) and one feedback forum.  The assignments were created by the e-learning team and local permissions changed so making each member the tutor for their own assignment.  The elearning team uploaded three files to each assignment using three fictitious student accounts.
There was also a forum to collect feedback.
Roles.
Members of the working group took the role of  tutor.
Staff in the e-leanring team took the roles of students.
Tasks
Members of the working group:

  • Viewed their students’ Originality Reports
  • Marked their students’ submissions using GradeMark
  • Graded their students’ submissions using GradeMark.
  • Provided feedback in a forum on their experiences of marking using GradeMark  via Moodle Direct.

That was supposed to be the end of the trial and that is as much as I will report back on at MoodleMoot, however, the working group then decided it ought to look into the Moodle options (ie without Turnitin’s Moodle Direct plug-in). So two further trials were organised:

Stage 3.
As Stage 1 but using the Moodle Advanced Uploading of Files type assignment.
Stage 4.
As Stage 2 but using the Moodle Advanced Uploading of Files type assignment and returning a response file.

It was then decided that before proceeding further it would be useful to scope existing electronic submission activity across the university college and the head of our Learning Development Unit is managing a study which will be conducted by an external consultant to do this. So, as you may have gathered this is still a work in progress and still will be at the time of MoodleMoot. However, I will be able to demonstrate the integration and share some of our observations, not only about how it works but also about people’s perceptions and concerns about moving over to electronic submission and marking.

If anyone reads this and intends coming to my session, feel free to ask questions in advance thorugh the comments facility on this blog and I will either answer them online or make sure I deal with the issue in the face-to-face session.

All the best,
Bob Ridge-Stearn
Head of e-Learning
Newman University College, Birmingham.

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