Hello everyone,

We’ll be blogging from London today for the annual FOTE conference – future of technology in education. This is an annual event that attracts 350 elearning experts from around the UK. It is an excellent opportunity to share best practice and learn about what other colleges and universities are doing well, and how we can improve.

As usual, my notes will get taken here, along with a few videos and photos. Please leave comments or feedback.

We’ll also be talking with echo 360 – our lecture capture provider and the driving force behind our 509 room. We’ve now enabled the Moodle interface for lecture recording, so this year we hope to move beyond our one room pilot. Perfecting the technology will be key in doing that. We will be enabling HD recording and viewing lectures by mobile devices (iPad, phones) from the mid term break.

Opening Session

ULCC – Richard Macabee, director ULCC.

ULCC is now hosting over 1 million student users. Also announced a partnership with Echo 360.

jan Martin Lowendhal – the CIO and the future of education

How do you manage the flood of services and make the technology useful for education?

Organisation centricity vs people centricity
- how does the death of distance affect learning technology?
- we have to ask ourselves, who has control of the means of production and distribution?
- obvious connection to marx here – but a different revolution this time.
- “what are the things I shouldn’t fiddle with?” – what software is necessary and what is so general that is should be outsourced?
- email is a good example – google and Microsoft give email away to education for free, so why have it internally?
- if I don’t give a service quickly enough, they’ll go to the cloud and get what they want themselves.

What you have is a situation in which staff can now afford to go buy what they need themselves. Might not be perfect, but there is a chance that the tech savvy can do it faster then you can build it from scratch.

- so what does a CIO do? How can you change the processes of the institution
- there is a role – when microsourcing you reduce the possibility for collaboration – you reduce th possibility for collaboration.

So we have a “hype cycle”
- we hit the peak of expectations
- then we have a crash when it turns out what we have is not perfect.
- bring us to the trough of disillusionment
- and we recover to about 20 percent of our initial goals.

And there are key trends
- communication
- sourcing – cloud
- standards – education, technical

Cloud sourcing for items like email is already more than 50 per cent of all email services at UK education institutions.

Nick Skelton – pervasive media and education

What do games do for us?

Games encourage the behaviour we want. Hence the card game we have today – everyone has a playing card, and the goal I to ask “are you Thursday” – I’ll post a photo of the rules in a bit.

Te point of this game is not to use tech, but to get practitioners work with technologists – to make memories that stay with people.

Education is important, but so are all the other thing that take place. If we get our of our technical bubble and interact with other areas, we an create powerful and meaningful experiences.

Bristol uni is just starting to dabble in this, but there is potential in games, and it creates opportunities for learning through social means.

The best idea in this session was the “send yourself a letter” – you write yourself a letter – something you want to tell yourself in six months, six years, whatever. You swap letter with a partner – they send it. A great way to connect to others.

Cailean Hargrave

How can you use analytics to improve student retention?

The idea is to use data modelling to make feedback available to lecturers – let them identify behaviour and attendance patterns that allow them to direct attention to student that need it. IBM has some background here.

As it happens, these predictive analytics allow you to identify problems in student success and address patterns before you lose the student. We have these systems, but it’s difficult to make sure the right people (teachers) see it.

Edinburgh Telford college.
- visual dashboards
- quick reference for predictive analytics
- highlighting attendance issues to staff and students.

The good news is that Guildford College will have this capability as well. It is now built into Moodle and will be implemented for the end of the year as part of our ILP solution.

Birmingham metropolitan college is working on a similar project in concert with IBM. They are working to predict student failure, and pre-empt it.

What if you could text, or Facebook message and let the student know that we know they are having difficulty and there are resources to help. Why if you could remove that burden from teachers?

What if you could identify who needs help straight away based on regional statistics amongst student coming in?

Call to action – IBM.com/smartplanet/analytics

COFFEE!!!

Ahhhhh….

Flipping naked – 140 seconds to tell us your vision of learning

Andrew Stewart

Technology in education is bleak
1. We don’t yet understand what education is
2. We play constant catchup

Debate this, online at purpose.org.uk

Educational adoption of mobile tech vs mainstream tech adoption.

- this is a bit of a depressing graph
- we never get to systemic adoption

John Bernard – BBC

future of tech is mobile
- BBC learning have noticed growth in UK secondary students accessing bite size elearning service.
- 1.2 million
- 40 percent mobile uptake in sub Saharan Africa
- the rise of mobile learning time and place shifts learning
- becomes bite size, or pocket sized.
- micro learning – can be triggered at any time.
- mobile learning is social. Mobiles are already being used for social purposes.

Michelle Hoyle

Gaming and online activity
- World of Warcraft
- more of an even gender balance than you’d think
- how is it related to HE?
- many of the same social issues, diplomacy, and social interaction.
- useful learning opportunities

Paul Johnson
- mobile device as future of elearning
- repositories for research data
- created an object store for android, iPhone, and iPad

Last session – Janet UK

The future is with the user
- they bring their own device
- they choose what they access or what they do
- financial background also applies – they pay fees, students are customers now.
- Janet provides this service, it should be there and invisible. Much like janet is to 18 million users

Panel discussion

Universities don’t know what students want.

So what do they want?

Best points from the panel:

• why is it we only say we need to provide good services now that students are paying £9000
• didn’t we always have to provide good service?
• it is insanity to have IT security or usage committee that don’t have students on them
• there will never be enough student PCs to satisfy everyone.
• they want to know it works on their device, that there are no problems
• making them aware that using your private device on an education network has implications

What about the students who can’t be bothered to bring the tech with them?
- security issues
- lugging around laptops
- didn’t know they can access materials via the cloud.
- this is a communication issue. Will the student be bothered to come see the IT team?

I ask a question – what about BYODB – bring your own device bias? Should we concentrate on specific majority devices to extract value or be more agnostic and accept a lower common denominator for functionality?

Top tips
- the needs for students need to be embedded in a while bunch of other strategies
- learning and estates strategies
- governance: how change is introduced and managed
- engagement with the student body

afternoon session James Clay

How often do you hear “it’s really nice when the students aren’t here”

- students are dangerous
- they bring in untested devices!
- they may not pay fees!
- they are a health and safety threat!
- they plug in their own devices!
- they unplug computers!

STUDENTS ARE A THREAT!!!

We need to change the culture of our organisation – we still see students as dangerous and a threat.

PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE CHANGE

How can we label students a voice to be heard?

GET RID OF THE LEARNERS

- no Id badges
- no security issues

silos
- political inertia
- little kingdoms
- we’ve always done it this way

September is the busiest time of the year
- it happens every year!
- why do we not change?
BECAUSE OF POLITICS AND INERTIA

do learners know what they need?
- no, if they knew everything, they wouldn’t be learners
- we should listen but they do not necessarily know what they want
-
A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them – Steve Jobs.

Not: what do you want

Try: what do you want to do?

Librarians have a tendency to solve problems by putting up a sign. James put up a sign that said “no swimming” and it’s not been a problem since!

Don’t be led by learners, but be informed.

The key for James is that we often let politics get in the way and forget our students. We forget where our bread and butter comes from.

Emily Nash – student representative, NUS
Charter on technology in higher education

Problems
- cost
- hesitancy in adopting new technologies.

Students want to contribute to the agenda. The demographics of students tend to be changing. The student experience is more central than ever in the face of education reforms.

NUS think that more needs to be invested in communications technology and has been conducing research to find out more.
- hard for students to understand
- students complain a lot about the environment, but the emphasis should not be on them to come up with solutions
- NUS has a charter on technology in higher education.
1. Institutions should have an ICT strategy
2. Institutions should invest in staff development and effective us of technologies should be recognised and shared.
2. Staff and students should be holistically trained. Regular training and support should be available
3. Technology jaws should be accessible to all.
4. Innovative us of digital technology should be supported by the curriculum development process.
5. Administration should be more accessible through the technology
6. Institutions should highlight link between technology and employability
7. Infrastructure needs to be in place

Talk to your academic VP – a good place to start.

Hello all,

Writing from home today, Guildford College! We are hosting Moodle Fest 2011 on behalf of JISC.

All sessions will be recorded today, so they’ll be available from here soon.

Update: videos available here:

http://bit.ly/moodlefest1

http://bit.ly/moodlefest2

The first session is myself. I gave a brief overview of our transition to Moodle from Blackboard and where we stand. Then moved on to lecture recording and video intake. Also exploring individual learning plans. The idea was not so much to do new things, but to start by doing the old things well – the focus is on convenience.

Mary Cooch. Wrote a book on Moodle.

——–
Second session – Martinez Fryer, South Downs College

I’ll be a bit sparing on notes, since the whole thing will be available on video. We start 45 minutes into the video, so you can skip ahead to there.

One thing that stands out is the strength of eLearning provision at South Downs College.

Training

Getting started – beginners level
Moving on, model assignment Moodle quizzes, wikis – intermediate level
Moodle improvers – navigation, book activity, multimedia.

They have over 20 people as elearning champions. The training provision is exceptionally strong. This is a serious challenge for us at Guildford, as we have one elearning manager. Building up the staff champions is a key consideration, and a big challenge.

————

Moodle bites – short session

Mark Johnson: Tauton’s College

This is an overview of upgrading from Moodle 1.9 to 2.1. The key here is the sheer trickiness of upgrading. Installed modules and plugins are an issue. There are issues with roles especially a manager role if one has been created for 1.9

Ursula Bailey: Sparsholt College.

Mike Wilson: NVQs – PLP and Assessment Manager – used for making assessment claims on NVQs. Sour hampton is using e-tracker, but it does not have an e-portfolio system. ULCC has an advantage here.

Mike has written a Moodle component that works with e-tracker. It essentially does the same thing.

NDAP website has the criteria we need. They’ve learned not to give staff admin access – focus is on grading. The video has the full details, and we’re off to lunch!

AFTERNOON SESSON

Roger Emery from the University of the Solent.

They added a simple video component – it makes adding in video quite straightforward. Students use in to practice presentations with each other. This is something that is both simple and useful.

- planet e-stream. The ability to record live tv and link it into Moodle.
- sentient reading lists. They are working on a Moodle plugin for a refworks plugin.
- this is an example of pulling in the library to Moodle

E- portfolios. Moodle is very tutor-centric and Mahara is very student-centric. There is a Moodle assignment type called Mahara assignment.

Adobe connect pro – provides a means of allowing students to conference and interact via Moodle. This seems preferable to the big blue button as it is a managed service.

Text alerts – notifying student what is going on makes a difference.

“Web site gets the bums on seats and Moodle keeps them there.”

JISC Moodle site offers several courses which can be brought into Moodle and used for our own purposes. They offer an summer collection of sorts, of new courses and materials.

ILT health check. Offered as a helpful option by JISC followed up by a Diagnostic report. This is a quiet moment in the video, a soft voice well away from the room microphone available there.

Hello all! Blogging from George Abbot school today. We’ll be looking at the use of iPads in education and deployment via our mobile learning forum

Session is being run today by Simon Birch -- Solutions Inc Apple reseller. They do a fair bit of apple sales in the education sector. Simon is focused on teaching and learning.

Issac Asimov video on technology:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CwUuU6C4pk

Overview of the App store and iTunes U -- the focus is on the large community and the possibility for using resources. There are 25 million iPads out there in the past 14 months.

A focus on creating, accessing and sharing. The iPad is useful in that you can capture photos and videos. The idea is you can then submit to your learning environment.

Battery power is running low, I may have to cut this blog short. A lot of the functionality is around the use of ePub files and the use of apple technology in learning. The iPad has much potential here, but methods of assessment and evaluation are still a bit thin. The challenge is to develop either a way of delivering learning materials effectively, and evaluating or assessing using these devices as well.

In terms of moderation of these devices, you can limit the devices, but tracking user behaviour is more difficult. The principle of using config profiles is how iPads are managed. The profile can also load up web apps or web clips. This can be a useful way of having dynamic apps on an iPad. What we mean by this is the ability to embed a web page in an iPad app, which gives us the ability to make ongoing pages.

There is also something called “mates rates” for educational discounts. We’ll have more information on this later on from the wiki.

More info here:

“Please continue to use the wiki. Feel free to add comments to any page and if you have any news you’d like to share, just let me know: https://wikiserver.solutions-inc.co.uk/groups/mobilelearningforum/”

Username & password for both: forum

Additional apps that were mentioned:

• Zite
• WedDAV Nav
• iGuildford
• Plan Book EDU
• Idea Flight

Good morning all, I’ll be blogging from the Cambridge LSN-LRI technology for learning workshop today. I’ll be giving highlights from each session, and videoing a session or two for those who have expressed interest in particular sessions, especially ILP.

As a starting point, it is worth nothing that several other colleges in attendance are using ULCC’s ILP solution, which will be very useful to us.

Distance learning is the first topic of discussion, we are relating our plans and experiences. Some interesting points are
- formal assessment
- reducing the need for tutor intervention when using a blended approach
- 16-19 cohort. Given funding squeeze can we reduce time via blended learning? Turns out that this is not a good idea with this age group. Work better in practice with work-based and dedicated distance programmes.
- the number of courses that can be serviced with the content developed is quite small. It’s hard to generate the appropriate content. The idea is to work with other colleges on this.

- A lesson learned is that we all seem to be good at doing new things (video, learning deputes, etc) but we seem to be very bad at sharing.
- the delivery model does change in subtle ways when the interaction moves online in part. There are efficiencies that can be realised.
- do we have examples of services that have been used to reduce face to face contact?

- there is a difference between turning on the shiny toys and how you plan for it from a teaching standpoint. The senior exec at Cambridge college would be quite happy to have Moodle and Skype from the start, but there is a serious risk that teachers would not engage with it

Interesting point: are students in the loop with learning and eating development? They are the core consumers, do we make the products (smartboards, Moodle) accessible to them in such a way that students can take ownership and make demands about what they want from the technology?

Curriculum managers often drive the agenda by setting goals themselves for blended learning. A high level of technical expertise is not necessarily as needed as we think. Seeing examples of best practice is a good driver

Next session coming up is “tracking learner progress” -- of particular interest to Guildford since it is based on technology we are using to the same end.

note: You’ll want to turn the volume way up -- the iPad’s mic isn’t all it could be in a big room.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqiBcUagJp0

Next up -- eILP system.

This is LSNs ILP system.
- main principle: reuse as much info as possible.
- data protection issues about students not having access to their own information to ensure it is correct.
- also for wider college teams in different roles.
- developed for all colleges in Northern Ireland
- students seeing their own information led to a huge influx of feedback on address changes, incorrect info, and other details that helped bring things up to date.
- attendance stats are built up across all courses, not just the one. You can also display a week by week pattern -- ie. show a period of several weeks when attendance suffered

http://youtu.be/EBJT710IBXg

Funny enough, I never knew what people meant by “registers” -- they mean attendance records…. Suddenly it becomes clear!

- they use a dual log on where you can log in as tutor or student and upstate agreed actions. The student can update their response before a 1:1 evaluation. It’s a one time update only, to prevent tampering with agree actions.

- also offers learning journals aims and goals. This is covered in the videos, which I will add to thi presentation later, although be warned -- the presenter does not sound at all enthusiastic. I think he knows it’s 3:00 -- the day is wearing on.

- they use existing information in the system and report on non-activity as well as activity. There is a problem here though -- it would require access to Eclipse NG, which might be a bit controversial -- the amount of tools you want accessing your student information system is quite deliberately a very small number.

- teacher access to disciplinary records.
- they rely on the college data system, but also on their own ILP. If we change our MIS system we’d essentially have to redesign the system.

Last presentation for today -- MOLEnet

- A little background on this. : funding was cut but the project has carried on. It is available here

There is a large collection of material, and a personal library where you can store your materials.

MoleFE is an extension and improvement of the mole net project:

Media browser, easy to use and has built in quiz functionality. The functionality is between mobile learning and online assessment. Quite interesting. Sadly it is not quite working at the moment -- being worked on. The Activity Developer is an interesting way of developing content fir mobile devices using mobile devices.

A key problem -- it’s lacks the tracking capability of Moodle. While interesting, it seem not to be a fully ready product just yet -- and its not free. £3200 a year and the audio isn’t working and the demo has gone a bit astray. Its more of a legacy keep-alive project really. It does look nice and the intent of keeping the project alive is laudable, but at the current stage it lacks developers and polish -- the idea is to raise awareness of it. Anyone who takes it one would take it on as much as a development project as anything else.

Its been preserved but without govt funding it is moribund. The hope is to bring it to life again through collaborative development.

And thats it for the day!

Hello all – day two of Moodlemoot UK.

Open university of Israel. Interesting item on the “scroll of death” – Moodle courses tend to be flat – if it is extensive, it tend to go on, and on, and on. They’ve used collapsible content items to address this.

New activities

• Files activities
• video record activity
• websites

New blocks

• Who’s online – split into sections (course, department, section)
• Smart Block – create new activities and resources and assign group premissions

Video and chat

• Video incorporated into Moodle chat
• You can watch a video and leave comments and have a conversation as you watch.

The Process

They undertook this development over a year and two months.

1. Instruction of designers
2. Design and best practice
3. Integrate Moodle into other university systems
4. Development of new features
5. Course content transfer
6. Quality assurance
7. Teacher training
8. Teachers build courses
9. Pilot kickoff.

This looks to have been a deliberate process . It puts into perspective the goal of Guildford to deploy, develop and train teachers in Moodle in under 4 months. You’re provoking a rethinking of teaching methods and goals.

Daniel Mackley – York St. John University.

Presentation: “And nine months later we had Moodle”

York St. John took a “compressed” timeline – 9 months. They were using it as a secondary VLE.One of the first steps was to get hesitant people on board. Transfer of courses was a big component. What they did was to say to staff “you have to have a clean start” – this isn’t my preferred approach. The biggest change they made was based on academic feedback – but they could only upload one file at a time.

They needed a way to upload more – multiple file upload. Should we do this via Webdav? hard to say.

They also developed a student and staff feedback module, so they could constantly gather feedback as the development process went along.

Added an audio recording tool – nanogong likely. Also email tool and calendar notifications.

End user training was central. Staff were concerned about the move and had reseverations, despite the fact the performance of the system was much improved. Their solution was to stretch out training over several months and to develop instructional videos. This meant that staff were not dependent on the trainers. Also developed step by step guides.

They also took one day a week for faculty visits – they’d make themselves available to a faculty on fixed days for support. Also created “champions” who would have the job of being Moodle evangelists.

Technical bits – They use SITS student information system. They use active directory to establish groups that are then passed to Moodle.

They are looking at big blue button as a virtual classroom. Replacement for Wimba horizon. I keep meaning to get to this – busy busy.

The move to open source has made it much easier to collaborate. Licensing doesn’t restrict who can use the system and who can’t – you can allow external users in. They also can resolve problems quickly.

Student experience with any VLE is directly correlated with staff use. To get the staff on board students have to be enjoying and using it. Make sure your students are consulted on the design and use of Moodle at an early stage.

Did they have many problems? Short answer – no. It went very well and had very few problems. But they did this internally – no external support at all. This should be seen as a continuous process of student engagement and technical development.

lunch!

Hi all,

Blogging from MoodleMoot 2011 today. Morning session covered a fair amount about data migration and Sharepoint integration for portals. Current presentation is from Ross Mackenzie – open university

Moving the open University to Moodle 2.0

• Clear visual difference between Moodle 1.9 and 2.0 was desired to help you know where you are.
• 69% apple and 22% android mobile traffic.
• how to handle this traffic? App or mobile web?

Feedback is around using browser-based renders. as a result they’ve co concentrated on theme based web pages.

OU is going down the path of making the whole course available via a mobile device.

June 13 – OU hosting session for people dealing with issues surrounding Moodle 2.0. Good opportunity for technical and non-technical alike.

Moodle 2.1 will introduce changes to quizzes – rather substantial.

Poor connection today -will go into more substantial detail tomorrow.

Final session:Moot UK 11 “unconference” report

This session is more oriented towards Moodle development community and the usefulness of developer meetings in solving common problems. Some points:

• The value of local developers – having people who know Moodle in-house is valuable. Complete outsourcing can leave you feeling a little helpless.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Lessons learned:

• Listen to student needs
• Deliver when they want and give it to them immediately
• Avoid what they dislike

Seems obvious, but you’d be surprised.

Wifi will be improved tomorrow 300 of us in attendance and 720 devices trying to register.

And onto last event of the day.

—–

4:00pm, Frank McLoughlin CBE, Principal City and Islington College.

Presentation: Its the culture stupid!

Reflections on where FE/HE is going.

• It is a transformed sector
• 1993 – report “levels of non-completion is a substantial waste of a national resource”
• Moving on to now : success and retention rates multiplied outwards.
• 59 percent to 79 percent retention over 8 years . We are now doing substantially better – about 90 percent achievement/retention. Low drop off rate.
• City and Islington graded outstanding in every measure
• Queen’s anniversary prize – the only college to win it twice.

The loss of the EMA has been catastrophic – we, ‘re back in a situation where coming to College will get much harder. People in the middle class don’t have to worry about working or out of school responsibilities – EMA recipients were able to equalise.

In 2012,  students will have to take out a loan in order to do access courses.  You’ll have to take out a loan before you take out a uni loan. Hard times ahead.

The point here is that the quality of the student cannot exceed the quality of the education. It is the culture of learning and teaching that defines the type o students that will be created.

What were the terms and values associated with FE? :Aspiration, excellence, social justice, communication, empowerment, performance.

Is about engaging people with what we’re trying to do. If people aren’t engage, there’s no point. Its about the extra voluntary work people put into a job they believe in. As a principal he’s been in a position to tell people that they should move on – not to sack them but to say, “your cynicism is causing rot inside – life is too short, find something to do that you love!” Pretty frank, but very h0nest.

Coaching: You’re not born a good teacher.  Working with teacher is not about pinning them to the wall, its about working with them to make them better players.  In some cases, its only working with other teachers that gets you through the process of becoming a teacher.

So how have we changes the culture over the years to encourage this?

1. Build a framework for reflection and dialogue

Peer and join observation, sharing best practice,systemic self assessment.

The idea of teacher observation as a form of management is mad. Its not about that. Lecturers are not teachers – intensive training of teachers is a vital part of improvement.

They don’t call it the Quality Unit – they call it the “Teaching and learning Unit” – because thats what its about.

A question posed – what does outstanding teaching look like?

We avoid punishment – instead follow up with coaching of teachers. There isn’t an instance where this has not worked.

Training on innovation – in total, not just in the “e” bit.

NLNN – millions put into wonderful learning objects that came to no use whatsoever.

Useful features – your attendance – part of the Individual Learning Plan.
The ILP lets you have a two way conversation – the student can see where they need to work and they are assessed on an ongoing basis.  The idea is to start getting them to manage their own learning.

Does this work?

For City College 93 per cent would recommend it to a friend. 80 per cent agree that continuous improvement is part of the college.

He is the principal and chief exec, but he does not use the latter term – he’s a teacher in an admin role. If he wanted to be an exec he could have gone into private industry. College is not like that – the dynamic is different.

Lessons

- Give power away – particularly to the learner

- High expectation curriculum and offer with parity of esteem between the education pathways

- Develop employability skills

- strong links with employers and jobs and a work related cirriculum.

- Innovate, but be aware of boy and girls with toys – don’t rely on a technological fix . The toys help, but in the end its about the teaching and learning.

- 40 per cent of kids in Islington are not going to work/schoool. Some people are third generation unemployed.

- There is a real isuse around employability and getting local people into jobs.

I presented the results of our Strategic VLE review recently, the result of several months of research and effort. We concluded that Moodle offered the best means of taking the mission of the College forward, combining the great work being done by teachers with an easy to use and well supported learning resource.

Some of the topic covered in the presentation include why we recommended the move to Moodle, who else is using it, how it will improve teaching and learning and Guildford, and the proposed schedule for implementation.

For those with an interest, the report is available. As teachers, learners, and support staff, we welcome your feedback. You can also view the presentation below:

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.

Hi All,

Back to publishing here, and we’ve got some interesting tidbits from BETT 2011. I wasn’t expecting much from the show, so rather than lose time on projects I need to finish, I sauntered up on a Saturday for a look. I was in for a bit of a surprise. Last year, I was just getting started in the job. This year, a lot of my main goals have been accomplished – the VLE review is complete, the recording classroom is built (if not fully out of pilot just yet) and I’ve learned a lot.

There are still major issues though, including how much value we get for money on these projects, and can we do more for less? I’m really pleased to say the answer is “easily, yes”

Some highlights then.

Telepresence: I’ve been looking into ways to connect our three campuses, and the cost associated with it is just astonishing. Its hypercar money. Obviously that isn’t going to happen in the current climate. So in steps Avermedia with this little number:

this is a H300 conferencing unit. You can get a H100 as well, but the 300 allows you to connect up to four sites at once. Its HD, records the session if you want, and is dead simple to initiate calls with.  In essence its a sub £2k multi site conferencing solution with all the bells and whistles built in. I tried it out at BETT and we called up a camera set up at the Gherkin. Quality was excellent, even over a busy connection. Standards compliant, open, and can call anything. Its a show stopper. If the camera can be plugged into an Echo 360 unit, then life is good. We’ll see on that one.

Desks: As part of the learning-enhanced classroom project, I had a custom desk installed in a classroom and the equipment embedded into it. I didn’t have much choice according to my reseller, and I can’t say the final product

grabbed me. See left. Meh. It was remarkably expensive, overdue and I couldn’t vet it beforehand to make sure it suited. What I saw at delivery was what I got.

So what I found when I got to BETT was surprising: fully prepped lecterns! They’re done by an outfit called TOP-TEC. I was duly impressed at the embedded monitor arm, Crestron device point, and electronic switch for raising or lowering the unit (sit, stand – its all good). Better yet, they’ll laser engrave your college’s logo and light it accurately with led lighting. All good. Shame it costs a fortune right? Thats the kicker. It costs half what I paid a cabinet maker to do it for. They even showed me a price list on the spot and guaranteed 4 week delivery.  You can slot a PC, an echo 360 unit and a conferencing unit in. If you want, you can have up to twelve 1u slots. All in a very attractive desk package. Did I mention you could choose your colour scheme from a variety pack? I can’t possibly imagine why I’d go through the pain of building another wooden, ergonomically suspect desk again.

Crestron touchpad controls: So not bad really, but the goal was to figure out telepresence, and reducing the cost of lecture recording classrooms by at least half. So onto the Crestron booth. The guys there were chatty and friendly, and they got the idea that I didn’t necessarily want a £2k unit for every single classroom. So they showed me the £300 one.

Its just like the £2k one – except it controls only 4 devices. I only have four devices in the current room! Thats not a faceplate in the pic to the left – its the full alternative to the 1u racked unit. Ethernet and control chips are embedded in the back. Seems that I was given the most expensive option first time around. Funny that.  These are the entry level items – embedded controller and easy to mount. Push button interface if you want to switch between devices. However we have something more – a fully customised control program that we designed in house. Will it work on this device? Oh yes it will! Works exactly the same – you just copy on the firmware and go.  Which means you can also the graphical interface. This cost a pretty penny last time, but go figure – there’s a cheaper option there too. On the right you see the £700 graphic controller. push buttons are optional – I tend to remove them to keep things simple.

So what does this mean? We can now eliminate the remotes for the conferencing system. This means that you enter a room with one of these desks, touch the screen to star, and we add a button called “conference call” to the current selection. You then pick from pre-set locations and it automatically calls. You can zoom, hold, or conference in others – no need for a remote. Conferencing becomes dead easy.

So potentially we have professional, Guildford College branded teaching desks, with built in telepresence in some cases, lecture recording in others, and all containing a PC, DVD player and various bits safely locked in a height adjustable desk. All controlled through a simple touch pad on the top of the desk. Sounds terribly expensive right?

Some back of the napkin math drove it home for me. I could get the desk, the control system, and a telepresence/recording system. And I could do it for under £6k. Thats more than 2/3 cheaper than before. I’m astonished. To be fair, I’ve learned enough from the pilot project to know what to avoid, who to talk to and how to move the process along, but that’s why you do pilots.

So what did I get our of BETT? Well, we’ve found an inexpensive telepresence solution, a common means of cheaply eliminating remotes via our now-mature touchscreen software, and the ability to do a cutting edge learning-enhanced classroom for less than half of what we used to pay. Not a bad day out really.

All a bit technical in terms of chat, but there are learning objectives here that often get overlooked. The object is to have a simple, intuitive, and consistent  user experience. Teachers don’t want to wrestle with equipment – they want to have a experience that frees them to teach, and teach well. The equipment should fade into the background. Hopefully, the tech we’ve found at BETT will let us do just that.

Hugh will be attending appsworld today to find out what’s new in app development. For more information on the event check out the apps world website, the blog or Twitter #appsworld.

PS I was intending to blog during the day but relied on the WordPress iPhone app. I created a post, saved it and published it – all fine, but when I came back to edit it, none of my changes were being saved.

All speakers spoke about the need to apps to be cross platform (Blackberry (big with 16-19 female teenagers), OVI (Nokia), iPhone and Android (getting bigger and bigger by the day). Interesting they said that the iPhone app store was not used a great deal for finding apps, word of mouth and  advertising were most common methods. Interesting example about Angry Birds, it’s sold on iPhone/iPod for 59p but on Android its free (with ads), they can make more money this way. They have 6 million total sales on iPhone compared with 1 million sales on Android in one day – very big in Asia market. Grapple representative gave his views on developing apps saying don’t rely on top 100 model, try and get your app featured and stick to usual marketing methods.

Adobe gave a good presentation of software to help build mobile software, lots of things in common with Apple’s xcode, except it looks like all other Adobe products so should be easier to pick up. Adobe AIR enables developers to use HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash® Professional software, and ActionScript® to build web applications that run standalone without the constraints of a browser. Adobe AIR is a development environment for the delivery of applications across devices and platforms. Support for Android™ BlackBerry™ Tablet OS and iOS* mobile operating system, and TVs is now available. (except the iPhone is not supported).

Appcelerator was mentioned as an open source application development platform for creating native mobile, tablet and desktop application experiences using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP.

Appshed
Build a multiplatform app for just £475. This could all be done via a website. I had a demonstration, it looked quite good. You wouldn’t be able to edit the code but there was quite a range of tools to choose from.

Live Code (Runrev)
LiveCode empowers you to develop applications that run in any environment, using a fast and easy compile-free workflow.

mVenture
Online DIY App Builder for £45 per month. They specialise in developing iphone applications but can build apps for Blackberry, Windows, Symbian or Android platforms. Examples include an iPhone meeting planner for the conservative party conference, a windows mobile application that  works in conjunction with another product to detect narcotics and explosives at airports and most recently,  an iPhone app for sports including golf training and snowboarding.

But I’m not sure solutions like these will last term. They look good and will get better but will probably get bought out by the likes of Adobe and Co.

Useful terms to research further (GetJar, Adobe Inmarket)