Monthly Archives: February 2011

Morning all.  Blogging from Havant College today on Moodle. JISC hosts these forums regularly and we like to get out to see how others are implementing Moodle,  and what issues they have to address.

10am – the moring starts with students talking about their experience of Moodle. Forums are a popular tool with students, especially geography forums.

The students say they used to be a bit shy about posting, but as exams came on they started posting links that the teacher encouraged. They have a habit of putting video links on the forums to illustrate concepts (like in this case, volcano). It saves the trouble of trolling through the Internet for materials – its more of a shared effort.

Student Union – difficult to get students motivated . Publicising events is important.  Posting a blurb on Moodle gets it emailed out to everyone – which is a real strength of Moodle.

Thats a snapshot of how Hants does Moodle.

Question: How do you motivate the staff?

Ans: 500 per cent increase in the past 5 months. They’ve made it easy. Moodle vouchers to help with 1:1 sessions and workshops. Workshops at the beginning was fine, but now they do “speed moodle” -10-15 mins on how to do simple tasks. How to create quizzes for example.

New strategy is speed and impact.

This leads to the students asking “why isn’t it on Moodle?”

10:20 – we’ve moved onto a tour of Havant’s Moodle.

They use it a little like a portal, but they do group together courses and present information to students who may be interested in the next course/level – A2 and AS for instance.

The use of Moodle in this case is pretty typical. Information such as trip info, exam papers, and so on are typically put onto Moodle – it just makes it easier.

Quizzes: Hot potatoes is used. Gradebook works well and is used quite a lot.

Read reciepts for forum posts allows them to tell how popular individual posts and topics are amongst students. Polling has also been very popular with students. Took half an hour to install the necessary plugin. Very simple and part of the standard moodle plugin site.

Good question – is there a seprate student Intranet? Ans: no – this is the Intranet. What they’re doing is using the My Moodle page to push certain information. The problem the questioner had is that for him the portal, the VLE and the work calendar are separate, and there is no way to coordinate them.

They do want to make more use of the calendar, as it is very flexible in how it can set events – either at user, course,  programme or site level.

It does raise the interesting question of if using Moodle as an Intranet is a useful idea. I’m a bit mixed on this. Moodle is useful as a VLE, but it appears they’ve adapted Moodle to serve the purposes of an Intranet. As he puts it, its a bit of a mish-mash and a dumping ground. I’d prefer a bit more structure. They still use the college network for things like HR documents and confidential materials – in this case more security is needed.

Lesson here is that Moodle has been very well recieved as a learning and teaching tool for staff and students, but its value as an Intranet is less well defined and the implementation needs work.

11am:Southampton Solent Update/Showcase - Roger Emery, Southampton Solent University - online submission using Turnitin.

Solent is using a very clean and good looking Moodle VLE. Design does make a significant difference. They have moved to complete online submission of papers. They spent 3 years piloting Turnitin before making this leap. They use Moodle 1.98-1.99 at the moment.

They modified the turnitin plugin – its open source so you can do that. What they’ve done is move all the extra options to the advanced button – so you don’t see it by default and don’t get confused.

They’ve also developed a good approach to help. at the bottom of the page are notes, videos,  and a help form. The help form lets you ask a question, but it also takes n0te of where you were, what you were doing, and emails your tutor as well as the support team. This is new, and exceptionally useful. I dno’t think anyone has thought of doing this sort of thing before.

Videos are used as well to good effect. They have professionally produced videos with a student demonstrating typical tasks such as assignment submisstion.

http://mycourse.solent.ac.uk/ is the Moodle site for Solent University. It is exceptionally well done and a good model for what I’d like  GC Moodle VLE to look like.  The bulk of the talk is on Turnitin, but much more interesting is how they’ve laid out and organised their Moodle instance and a central portal. The seperation is very well done and student life and student learning are separate, but implemented very well indeed.

They’ve also got an excellent course in Moodle called Succeed@Solent: http://mycourse.solent.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=3257

11:30 – Planning towards Moodle 2.0 migration – John Potter, RSC South East

Themes, plugins and courses aren’t compatible. If your 1.9 is marginal 2.0 will be a bit of a push. They run their Moodle off virtual servers at Kent. Those servers are based on Sun Solaris virtual machines (I’ve some experience of their setup).

Filesystem repository must be enabled.

There is a lot of concern over database load and third party plugins. The database load is going to increase quite a lot.   The question becomes – do I run it as a database centric install, or do I hold onto the moodle data directory?

A database-centric approach is a decent option, the question is if the single server is strong enough to keep up with it. A virtual server environment would be best though – it can scale to match performance. The question for us here is how much server capacity is required.

Viewing documents is an issue as well. Google docs integration has been extremely useful – no more requirements for Word or Powerpoint to be installed. But the setup is complicated.

The Open Univeristy is moving to Moodle 2.0 in 2 releases – the first in June. They’ve invested 4.5 million in Moodle and they’re pushing bug changes very quickly. This bodes well for anyone doing a 2010 launch.

The consensus is that its best to run Moodle in Virtual machines – the scaling is much much better.

Lunch!

1:15pm Parallel session 1: Open Forum – Round table showcasing/troubleshooting – facilitated by Artie Vossel-Newman
Parallel session 2: Havant College Moodle User Showcase – facilitated by John Illsley/Jayne Morris

Some discussion of how moodle integrates with MIS for student data . The data structure that they use is interesting. All courses are assigned to certain default groups. These groups and the course IDs are associated with the identifer in the MIS system.

Manual course enrollments are in the central group, but are kept separate. This works like data keys in Blackboard.

This leans a bit technical, but a good question just came up – how can you prove that the sysetm is doing well? How to you measure student or teacher usage?

The feedback has changed from “I wish my tutor used Moodle” to “I wish my tutor used Moodle as well as other tutors do.” The emphasis has changed from using Moodle to using Moodle well.

Moodle has proven useful for cases of student appeals – evidence showing when a student read a document, which one it was and what the student is using is becoming increasingly common at Solent Uni.

Nanogong is used for audio/language training at Hants. They use the script and the voice in the course to train, and submit an audio message.  Works better when the mic is plugged in. You submit it as a message but pressing the record button, giving the message a title, and submit it like any other item. The teacher can then play it back.

The teacher can reply via a recording and place it next to the student’s audio submission. So the student can hear the correct pronunciation. Its reliant on Java, which is a bit of a shortcoming, but still a useful tool under evaluation. This has been a really useful exam tool. When they revise from home the teacher can help them out by giving feedback.  The potential for distance learning for English as Second Language Students is quite good.

Two goals here:

1. Learn vocubulary in a fun way

2. Try and check their notes – how good are the notes they are taking?

Teacher checks, edits, and students can then go back and see the changes.  If a student misses the class, they also get the vocabulary, which they would otherwise miss. This is done through a combination of Nanogong and the Moodle glossary tool.

The great thing is that this idea went from proposal to implementation in about half an hour. Installation was not complicated.

They have a Japanese course here, and Moodle is set to Japanese language mode for this teacher.  Live videos and embedded videos. As a rule, you can set a course to the individual language you are working in.

Creative commons images used in Moodle are getting better and better – an increasingly valuable resource . They link through to the original image.

Useful forum discussion follows after this – knocked down some very interesting questions, and had an incredibly useful conversation with the guys from Solent – the ability to record a quick video from a webcam is exceptionally good. It can then be attached into your Moodle course as a personalised instruction from the teacher. Considering every laptop has a camera these days, this is a brilliant idea. We’ll be keeping an eye on this closely.

Finishing up  closer to 3pm today. Q&A session on talking to MIS systems.

Very useful day – will inform Moodle strategy going forward.

Next Moodle meet will be a regional event. Maybe at Guildford? Worth talking about.