On Tuesday 18 March, LSE hosted the Moodle User Group (Greater London), or ‘MUGGL’, the get-together for learning technologists and others who are using Moodle to enhance teaching and learning at universities inside the M25. Here are some notes from the meeting.

Online Moodle training

The session opened with presentations from Ben Audsley of the Royal Veterinary College, and Eileen Kennedy of the Institute of Education, both of whom are running moderated online courses as an alternative to the usual face-to-face Moodle training. This reflects a similar project at LSE, Using Moodle: Online, which is currently in its pilot phase. This is a useful opportunity to share experiences between the 3 institutions (and with Goldsmiths, as well, who are also running such a course).

Reporting tools

Jess Gramp (UCL) demonstrated a great reporting tool for Moodle. This can be pointed at a duplicate of the Moodle database, and it will produce a report for a given category, showing the types and levels of activity going on in each course. The report is organised in pedagogical terms, with columns relating to collaboration, discussion etc., so you can quickly see which courses are actually making the most of the features of Moodle. Jess will be sharing this with us at LSE, and we will try to generalise it for use here and beyond.

In a similar vein, Andy Konstantinidis from King’s College demonstrated “KEATS Analytics”, an Excel sheet that can import a downloaded Moodle log file, and perform various analytics on it. He later shared this with everyone on the MUGGL mailing list, so we can all take advantage of his work.

Sharing good practice

Stephen Malikowski from St. George’s has set up Virtual Learning Activities, a collection of exemplars published via on WordPress, and he invited contributions. These are real activites created by lecturers on Moodle (or other VLEs), and demonstrated in context. Rather than making the courses public on their host VLEs, they are presented as case studies by way of screenshots or screencasts, allowing for the framing context to also be presented.

Minimum standards for Moodle courses

Rose Heaney from UEL led a panel discussion on minimum standards. The main theme emerging was that what works well is to involve students; to work with them to understand what minimum they expect, and using them to create standards and communicate them to staff. Several universities are using some form of rating system for courses, allowing students to review and rank their own courses.

Here in CLT we have often been wary of such approaches, worrying that minimum standards can turn into simply “what all Moodle courses look like”. However, Jess Gramp said that the experience from UCL is that minimum standards can sometimes push teachers to go further; i.e. once they’ve started on the improvement journey, they keep going.

Steve