moodle

Musings on Moodle part 2 – layout and design

As the previous blog post in this series indicated students often experience dissatisfaction with inconsistencies among layouts and types of information provided on Moodle courses. With over 1,307 standard Moodle courses and an additional 172 Summer School courses on Moodle there is a huge variety in approaches to using Moodle. The most common complaint that students have is not being able to find material. Setting up a well structured course design can avoid this problem.

Clear signposting

Your course should have an intuitive logical structure, this can be linked to the course structure (course topics) or face to face teaching (week 1,week 2) but it should be consistent and easy to navigate. Keep assessment information in one place and use clear titles and labels (see more on labels below). You may want to include a simple statement on how students are expected to use the course or particular resources and activities.

Avoid the ‘scroll of death’

Moodle courses can all too often develop into extremely long page of resources and activities with users finding they have to scroll down and endlessly search to find anything. Several of the new themes such as ‘collapsed topics’ or ‘grid’ format help to signpost and divide up your Moodle course in easy to navigate sections. (A guide to different Moodle formats can be found on our Moodle portal).

Use labels
It is always worth using labels to identify different aspects of your course. Labels can be images as well as text, remember to use creative commons images and attribute appropriately. When providing titles for resources and activities make sure they are clear, consistent and work out of context, generic titles like ‘summative assessment’ can cause confusion.

Make it accessible

Any images should contain a description for screen readers. Different colours and fonts can be useful to make distinctions between information but make sure they can be read clearly and will work on all devices. Check out the Government Digital Service guide on the ‘Dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility’. When adding files or links make sure that you select ‘automatic’ for the display option under appearance settings to allow for pop up blockers or devices that will not download files.

Remove clutter

A cluttered course can be difficult to navigate. You may want to use the book or lesson activities to group resources together. Make sure that you update your course each year, are the resources from 3 years ago still relevant? Do the links to external resources still work?

Apply restrictions

Access restrictions can hide and then reveal activities so students cannot progress until they have met certain requirements.

Groups and groupings can ensure that students only see material that is relevant to them. Class groups are created automatically from timetable information so using the groups option in activities allows teachers to view student participation by each of their class group.

Activity completion
One way signpost the suggested or compulsory activities on your course is to use the activity completion feature. If you can combine this with course completion it provides students with a clear indication of how they are progressing on the course and can give you a quick snapshot of how students are engaging on the course.

Mix it up

Using a variety of resources; images, video, tv, web, audio, can keep students interested and engaged in course content. Alternative formats can allow for different approaches to study (listening to a podcast on the commute) and help students to apply concepts and theories from classes and lectures to real world case studies and develop critical thinking skills.

Similarly a mixture of activities can develop students understanding and indicate that they are expected to be active learners. See post 3 for more details on how to embed moodle activities into your face to face teaching.

To see some examples of good Moodle design see our Moodle portal.

September 27th, 2016|Moodle, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

Musings on Moodle Part 1 – the standardisation or baseline debate

Over the Summer LTI had a lively email discussion on the pros and cons of Moodle baselines and the issues raised prompted this series of blog posts on making more of Moodle.

Ways to standardise the VLE

Some institutions use a baseline or template to ensure that all courses have a bare minimum of features and some degree of consistency on the layout and content. For example, UCL introduced a baseline in 2011 after consultation with students indicated that they found inconsistencies with layout, navigation and types of information available on Moodle. York St John University introduced University wide minimum expectations in 2015. Research into sector wide opinions and approaches to baselines carried out by Peter Reed at Liverpool University indicated that there are three common approaches to creating standardised VLE’s (simple checklists, detailed checklists, and detailed rubrics).

What to include?

Peter Reed’s (2015) research indicates a growing number of UK HE institutions have opted for some kind of standardisation of the VLE (of the 24 institutions that responded 75% already had some form of minimum standard and 25% were looking to introduce some minimum standards 21 March 2014, http://thereeddiaries.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/sector-wide-subscription-to-vle-minimum.html). But then the obvious question is what a best practice VLE should look like? Internal surveys at Liverpool indicated that while staff and students often favoured the introduction of minimum standards there was some inconsistency regarding what should be included in a course. Students appeared to be most interested in accessing quite practical course information and resources (Lecture Notes (95%); Past Exam Papers (93%); Further Reading (88%); Timetables (86%); Module Leader Contact Details (83%)) rather than learning activities. However analysis of what students do on the VLE has indicated that when such material are available they are not always accessed. Which brings us neatly to the main issue that LTI have with introducing a baseline or checklist at LSE;

Simply including certain tools or resources on a Moodle course does not guarantee that they will be used, either by students or staff.

Every Moodle course could be automatically set up with a discussion forum (just as the course announcements feature is a default in all courses) but simply having a discussion forum available does not mean that it will be used well or at all. Measuring how well tools are used is fairly difficult to ascertain but analysis of how much tools are used indicates that currently discussion forums are often set up and then remain empty.

Improving the learning experience

Over the years LTI have debated the pros and cons of developing a template or best practice for Moodle courses and have researched the differencing opinions across the sector. As learning technologists the LTI team are most interested in using technology to enhance teaching and learning. Devising a long list of requirements for every course can easily turn into a bureaucratic tick box exercise that adds more to teachers workloads than improving students experience of Moodle. A good learning experience needs to consider the design of the course i.e. navigation, usability, consistency etc. (see post 2) and how activities can be used to contribute to the learning objectives (see post 3).

Although a baseline can be useful, especially for online only courses, LSE Moodle editors currently have the freedom to choose the structure and content of their Moodle courses and LTI encourage best practice and offer training, advice and guides on using Moodle. The best way to ensure that a Moodle course is well used is for the teacher to be engaged with the editing to ensure that it is relevant and useful for students.

See our guides on how to use Moodle for teaching and book a one to one training session via the training and development system.

References

Peter Reed Staff & student perspectives on introducing minimum standards VLE, November 12 2013

http://thereeddiaries.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/staff-student-perspectives-on.html
‘Hygiene factors: Using VLE minimum standards to avoid student dissatisfaction’ Peter Reed and Simon Watmough E-Learning and Digital Media, January 2015 vol. 12 no. 1 68-89. Published online January 29, 2015, doi: 10.1177/2042753014558379

September 20th, 2016|Moodle, Reports & Papers, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

Making more of Moodle

Here within LTI and in the wider learning technology community there has been a longstanding debate on how to make more of Moodle and ensure that it is used to it’s full potential as a learning tool. In an ideal world the VLE(1), in our case Moodle, plays an essential part in the learning process, allowing students to go at their own pace through material, test their understanding of key concepts or theories, work with others to develop and produce content, gain feedback on their progress and build a learning community. Online course features should interweave with face to face teaching, link to the course learning outcomes and follow a clear sequence of activities which build on each other and are referred to in lectures and classes. That is how it could be used, but how is it currently used at LSE and what can we do to improve things?

In these three blog posts I have explored the issue of how we can make more of Moodle. These short Musings on Moodle are grouped under the three themes of standardisation, layout and design and embedding Moodle activities into face to face teaching.

Part 1 – the standardisation or baseline debate

Part 2 – layout and design

Part 3 – embedding Moodle activities into face to face teaching

(1) Virtual learning environments (VLE’s) are online interactive platforms that are designed to support educational courses, by providing a consistent way for staff and students to store and access resources and tools. These online learning spaces allow teachers and students flexible access to material and provide ways of communicating and assessing collaboratively and individually. Here at LSE we use Moodle as our VLE with the aim that it will support ‘blended learning’, (a combination of online and face to face learning).

September 20th, 2016|Moodle, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies, Uncategorized|Comments Off|

Celebrating LTI’s Moodle men!

This week two members of the LTI team were recognised for their work at the 2016 IMT awards.

Chris Fryer the LTI Systems Manager was awarded ‘unsung hero’ for his behind the scenes efforts to ensure that Moodle is always up and running and working well with other LSE systems.

He is a very deserving recipient of this award as LSE Moodle has the highest rates of ‘up time’ across the whole of the UK compared to other HE institutions. Over the last academic year it has been online 99.99% of the time, this means that the system was ‘live’ for all bar 42 minutes in 2015/16!

LSE Moodle has supported the running of 1651 active Moodle courses across all departments, the IPA, language centre, TLC, HR and LSE Enterprise (a 50% increase from the previous year and that doesn’t include those courses in the Summer School and TRIUM). Moodle courses were accessed by over 22000 unique users and facilitated over 15.5 million ‘participating actions’ (actions where students and staff click to do something on Moodle).

His work has not gone unnoticed by those in IMT with staff recognising his dedication to the job:

“Chris Fryer doesn’t seem to ever truly take a holiday. Regardless if he is hiking through Italy or looking after his kids, if there is an emergency he will take time to fix it”.

In addition, our very own ‘Moodle Man’, Milan Popovcic was awarded “Excellence in Customer Service” for his work on responding to LTI.Support@lse.ac.uk emails. Recent analysis of the LTI emails has illustrated that LTI responded to queries from every academic department, centre and institute across the school from staff and students alike. Moodle is the most common query but topics also included questions on online assessment, the use of forums and social media, how to record audio feedback and requests for training. The number of emails received has gone up year on year, with 4667 emails received for September 2015 to June 2016.

Milan is often the member of staff that responds to these calls for help and was one of the most nominated colleagues across several categories with positive comments from customers and colleagues.

“Delightful manner, patience of a saint, really cares about helping academics with their problems, not just answering their queries but also developing them to help themselves. Milan is a joy to work with”.

We are currently working on developing more resources and support to go on our new website which should be up and running before the start of Michaelmas term 2016. In the meantime if you have any queries, Moodle or otherwise please contact lti.support@lse.ac.uk

June 23rd, 2016|Announcements, Moodle, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

Announcing the IGNITE! Grant Winners!

Successful projects funded through the IGNITE scheme are now underway. We had over 20 project applications put to the committee and after much deliberation projects were chosen for their innovation, scalability and alignment to the School’s Education Strategy. Here are the winners:

Enhancing Your Moodle

Jennifer Jackson-Preece, European Institute
- (Re)designing Moodle courses EU450, EU457 and Eu458 to maximise their pedagogical aims and deliver with a more distinct look and feel with clear links to Mahara for professional skills development.

Online Blended Learning

Lourdes Hernandez-Martin, Language Centre
- A multilingual platform of audio and audio-visual materials to develop students’ interactive aural skills and increase their language exposure.
Nancy Holman, Geography and Environment
- Developing professional skills the use of Participatory Action Research to deliver a practice-based learning project which provides engagement, consultation and Research in Urban Geography and Planning, especially when partnering with organisations such as a local authority.

Innovation, by Boegh on Flickr (CC)

Feedback and Assessment with Technology

Edgar Whitley, Management
- Developing a scalable feedback system that integrates with Moodle and works effectively for the three constituencies affected by feedback: students, faculty and professional service staff.

Gamification

Jose Javier Olivas and Jessica Templeton, LSE100
- Experiencing the Dynamics and Limitations of Market and Regulation through Gaming by incorporating game design mechanics and techniques aimed at encouraging knowledge, skills development, collaboration and discussions in reference to the academic literature.
Andrea Pia, Anthropology
- The Long Day of Young Peng is a point and click serious game exploring key themes in the study of contemporary China through the eyes of a young Chinese Migrant.

May 25th, 2016|Announcements, Assessment, eAssessment News, Ed-Tech news and issues, innovation, LTI Grant Winners, LTI Grants, Teaching & Learning|1 Comment|

Turn It In at LSE

Turn It In (TII) is the leading online service that provides originality checking of academic work, and also a range of functionality for feedback and peer review. In relation to originality checking, while the appropriate use of ideas and concepts is still best judged by an expert teacher, TII is the most efficient and effective tool to check student writing to make sure it has not been copied from another source.

LSE has been using TII to originality check the work of students via teachers and departmental staff logging into the TII website and uploading submitted assignments there.

TII integration with Moodle for originality checking

Learning Technology and Innovation (LTI), as part of their assessment and feedback with technology project, has reviewed the use of TII and implemented an integration with the School’s virtual learning environment Moodle in 2014/2015. This integration was a result of a number of different pilot scenarios that were reviewed and assessed.

At this point the integration for originality checking has been refined, tested and found to be robust and reliable. The LTI team has demonstrated it to representatives from almost every academic department at LSE. Feedback has been very positive, highlighting the efficiency and ease of access of originality reports the integration delivers.

Barring any unforeseen problems, LTI are confident the integration for originality checking can be rolled-out in Michaelmas Term 2016 so it can be used on every assignment submitted through Moodle. The official decision will be taken after the final review of feedback from the participating departments towards the end of the Summer Term and an announcement will be made after the Summer Term is concluded, well ahead of the ‘Moodle end of year arrangement’.

The Moodle/TII integration enables different settings to be applied to each assignment: for example, whether submitted work is stored to a repository so future work is checked against it, or to vary the baseline level of matched content that is deemed acceptable. This allows for a good degree of flexibility and for the integration to be configured to the requirements of different disciplines and assignment types.

Grading through Turn It In (GradeMark)

Turn It In also offers an in-depth set of functions for marking student work called GradeMark: efficient ways of applying course rubrics and standard marking comments of individual teachers across multiple assignments, thereby delivering richer feedback for students. GradeMark provides powerful functionality, but like all tools is best deployed when the user is comfortable and confident with it.

The LTI team is still working on enabling assignments to be marked through TII GradeMark and then have this grading information released to students via Moodle. A separate integration to achieve this is currently being tested, and any teachers who are interested in using it should contact lti.support@lse.ac.uk to agree an assignment where they can trial this.

Improving student writing

The availability of the TII service has generated a lively debate across higher education on whether it is a tool that students can use to improve their writing standards or if it provides an aid to those who want to cheat by massaging their plagiarism to an ‘acceptable’ level. By extension, opinions are formed on if students should see the originality scores TII assigns to their submissions; and if they should have the opportunity to revise and resubmit a piece of work if they can see that this score is not acceptable.

The common feeling from everyone involved in providing courses at LSE – both teachers and departmental staff – is that there needs to be a greater training provision if this service is something our students have available for their use.

This is something that the LTI team have noted in all the feedback they have received to this point, and they will be working with colleagues to try and create a solution that will enable TII at LSE to be as much a learning tool to improve writing as a quality assurance mechanism. Anyone interested in finding out more should contact lti.support@lse.ac.uk.

Want to know more?

The LTI team have been contacting Moodle users in each academic department to demonstrate the originality check integration, but if they have not been in touch with you yet or if you have any questions feel free to drop them a line! Please email lti.support@lse.ac.uk and LTI will be happy to provide more information.

Once Summer Term 2016 has concluded further information about the integration will be circulated to the teacher/editors for all LSE courses in Moodle.

April 13th, 2016|Assessment, copyright, Digital Literacy, Research Skills, Roundup, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

End of year arrangements for Moodle

Each year, Moodle courses are reset to remove old student data and make the courses available for the next cohort of students.

This year Moodle will be reset on 18th August 2015 for the majority of courses, and on 15^th September 2015 for courses used to submit dissertations.

Students will not have access to any materials from 2014/15 courses through Moodle after these dates. You must have downloaded any materials you wish to keep before the relevant reset date for your course.

See the LTI ‘Moodle end of year arrangements’ page for more details.

August 4th, 2015|Announcements, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

Edinburgh Castle, by Roel Wijnants on flickr.com

This year’s Moodle Moot took place at Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange on 15-16 April. The inventor of Moodle, Martin Dougiamas, was in attendance (accompanied by his kids), and he popped up everywhere, participating in panels & discussion groups and giving his usual “what’s next for Moodle” keynote. This gave us an overview of the new features in Moodle 2.7 (released this month):

New events and logging model – allowing for more detailed logging, more control over logs, and event-driven actions.
New text editor: Atto. This has been built from scratch, so it’s very tightly integrated with Moodle. It uses HTML5, is very accessible, and has a built-in maths editor based on MathJax, so no server binaries required.
Bootstrap-based themes only, by default, so Moodle works properly on mobile. The old themes will still work, but are deprecated.

Also, this Moodle will be an LTS (long-term support) release, with fixes being published for 3 years instead of the usual 12 months.

Martin also previewed plans for 2.8:

Complete redesign of gradebook and grading plugins
Improved, usable forums (led by Stuart Lamour, of whom more later)
Simpler navigation
A new “element” library, to make development simpler and more consistent

One common theme this year was responsiveness on mobile devices, and a frequent contributor was Bas Brands, the creator of the Moodle Bootstrap themes. Bootstrap is a CSS/Javascript framework, developed for Twitter, that has been used to create responsive themes for Moodle. Since Bootstrap uses the JQuery javascript library, and Moodle is committed to the YUI library, Bas had to do a lot of rewriting of functions. Furthermore, the new Bootstrap 3 framework is a complete rewrite of Bootstrap 2, so a lot of the work will have to be done again…

Now Moodle works well on mobiles, why do we need an app? This was the question asked at the mobile discussion panel. Martin’s view was that an app should allow for offline use, and should facilitate the collection of data and pushing of those data to Moodle; not that the app does either of those things well at the moment, so there is a lot of work to be done on that front. Furthermore, Moodle only have one FTE developer assigned to the app at the moment, so unless the rest of the community steps up, the app is likely to remain limited. On the bright side, it will soon work with CAS authentication, so we’ll finally be able to use it at LSE.

Another major theme was usability. Stuart Lamour, who was behind the unique look and feel of the University of Sussex Moodle, popped up all over talking on this subject. He quoted research done by Brad Frost, which showed that users of websites ignore everything on the page except the central content they are looking for – in other words side blocks are pointless. Elsewhere he argued for an approach to course design whereby teachers are encouraged to ask “what do my students need?”. At Sussex they surveyed students to this effect and found that they wanted a clear, logical layout that corresponds to the teaching that goes on in class and that reflects the personality of the teacher. They therefore started using a single-page layout, with all content inline where possible; they moved all updates and messages to the top, so students see what’s new as soon as they arrive at the page; and they made profile pictures larger, to make the content and discussions more “human”.

Later on, a panel session on usability brought out the following points:

A general agreement that students want different systems to look different, so that they know where they are. Glasgow City and Dublin City both said they had found evidence to this effect.

We debated ‘Theory X vs. Theory Y’ approaches: should we prevent teachers from doing anything dumb with HTML, or should we let them do what they want and they clear up their mess afterwards? The consensus was that we use interface design to encourage them to take a clean and simple approach, but allow them to do more complicated things if they need to.
The use of tables for screen layout is still common, and text editors still encourage this approach. What is needed is a text editor that allows teachers to easily do layout properly, using div tags.
There was some debate around on-screen descriptions. These are needed by first-time users, to be able to understand the context of each item on the page. But thereafter, does it just become clutter? No clear agreement emerged.

Finally, “Moving Moodle Forwards” was another panel session with Michael de Raadt and the ubiquitous Bas Brands, discussing how the community can help developers via the Moodle Tracker. Some useful nuggets here:

Votes are only really relevant for improvements; bugs are prioritised on the basis on severity, not votes.
Fixes are welcome in any form – the gold standard is to provide a github link for the fixed code, for each active Moodle branch. But the silver standard (uploading a patch as diff files) or bronze (posting the fixed code as a comment) are also welcome.
Process for bug fixing is as follows: Triage (is it a bug?); Development (assigned developer does the fix); Peer review (different developer checks the fix); Integration (developer adds it to active branch); Testing (automated and human)

Another good Moot overall. I was impressed, as ever, by the developments being made and by the spirit of sharing and mutual support that pervades this conference.

May 2nd, 2014|Conferences, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

Moodle User Group

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

March 24th, 2014|Conferences|Comments Off|

Does winning a quiz really merit such a trophy?

Last week I attended Moodle Moot in Dublin, which was an interesting, enjoyable and very well-run event. The major highlight was my team, The Sugababes, winning the quiz and the ridiculous trophy you see opposite.

Some other highlights are below:

Michelle Moore (RemoteLearner) presented her Moodle course for teaching teachers to use Moodle, and giving them the tools to continue learning about it. This course (“My Moodle course – an experiment in social constructionism“) is available for download from the MoodleMoot site. We’ll download this to see how it compares with our own design for an online Moodle course.

Features include:

Course review glossary (where teachers post reviews of each other’s courses)
Best practices glossary
A single “how to edit Moodle” lesson
An assignment in which teachers have to update their own profile
Tasks where students use existing online resources to investigate Moodle’s capabilities
Teachers are put into small groups with specific roles: e.g. project manager, reporter, spy (to go and see what other groups are doing)
A weekly web conference, in which the groups report back

Elsewhere, there were several presentations about using IMS LTI to connect Moodle with external tools, for example WebPA, and exhortations to developers to build LTI into their software. A big list of applications that use LTI is available on the LTI website. This is an area we should probably be looking into more. There was also a presentation on LIS (Learning Information Systems), which is a data interchange protocol for integrating with student record systems, but which doesn’t seem to be very mature or widely adopted.

In the Pecha Kucha session, Mike Hughes from City showed some usability testing they had done, which was mostly interesting for the approach used – i.e. to have an academic sit in front of a computer and talk out loud as they did things on Moodle, while being filmed on webcam and with their mouse actions captured. This seemed like a good way to find out how staff really use Moodle.

Helen Foster proposed some ideas for custom roles for students, to give them specific responsibilities: such as, forum moderator, assignment grader, question creator and ‘naughty student’ (a way to withhold forum posting rights from a student who has posted inappropriately!)

In one of the plenary sessions they used a format they called ‘fishbowl’ (but I would call it ‘party’). The initial setup is a familiar one whereby 4 invited panellists at the front hold a conversation around a theme. However, a 5^th chair was available for anyone from the audience to come forward and join in. At that point, one of the panellists would retire from the panel but remain on hand to return if the audience participation dried up. I didn’t attend this session but I gather it worked well.

Tim Hunt (OU) demonstrated two question types, STACK and Pattern Match. The STACK question is a way to allow students to submit equations as their answers, using a simplified text format. The question converts their text into a Latex equation and asks them to confirm that this is what they meant, before submitting. Multiple correct and incorrect answers can be predefined for a question. Pattern Match uses a sort of simplified regular expression that is optimised for matching natural language answers to questions. By accounting for different phrasing and synonyms, the question can assess the students’ free-text answers. In extensive testing, the algorithm achieved 98-99% agreement with human markers.

Martin Dougiamas’ keynote was the usual look forward at where Moodle is going. He stated up front that “the tools can be much better, and they will be”. What’s coming up (some of this already in 2.4):

“Universal cache” which will greatly improve performance
SVG (vector-drawn) icons throughout
An improved course format framework, making it easier to design new ones
Blind marking
Fast and complete logging of all actions
A new Moodle app, using HTML5 and getting its data through secure web services. He showed a prototype and suggested that perhaps in future Moodle should look like this (i.e. like an app) on the web as well.
New RWD themes
Survey 2 – a consolidation of survey, questionnaire and feedback tools
Ability to install plugins directly from the interface

Alex Walker from Glasgow City College gave a primer on theming with some useful tips about inspecting CSS. Particularly nice is the 3D element viewer in Firefox, which shows you the web page as a contoured map, with nested elements laid on top of their parents.

Pieter van der Hijden did his review of using gaming in Moodle. He does this every few years, and the conclusion always seems to be “Moodle’s not a lot of use for gaming”. LTI seems to be the best hope for using Moodle as a front end for educational games.

Davo Smith (Synergy), father of drag-and-drop upload, showed some new developments:

Realtime quiz – a sort of PRS within Moodle, with questions, a timer and results displayed immediately. But it seemed a clumsy way to do PRS to me.
PDF annotation assignment – allows a PDF to be uploaded and then students or teacher can annotate it with comments and scribbles, much as you can in Acrobat.
Drag-drop images and text – an extension of drag-drop, so images dragged onto the interface are displayed inline, and text dragged on becomes a label.

Paolo Oprandi and Stuart Lamour (Sussex) demonstrated some of the interface redesign that they have done in Moodle 1.9 (and involves some core hacks). Stuart is a user experience expert, and bases his design on the idea that a web application needs to have a “call to action” that makes it clear to the user what they are expected to do. In Moodle, a new course is just a blank page with no obvious call to action. Their version presents the new course editor with a text editor so that they can start by adding a welcome to the course, and more or less forces the user to add images. Their course format is like the “Pages” format where each section is on a separate page. Some nice touches, like in-browser resizing of images using the canvas element. They also have tight integrations with other systems, so reading lists and lecture recordings are displayed inline. The reading lists are brought in from Talis Aspire by simply scraping the Talis pages, but there is hope that future APIs will make this process more robust.

Finally, a team from Cass Business School at City presented their work on obtaining student feedback on Moodle. They made some good points at the start about student surveys, which:

Focus on satisfaction, not learning
Focus on modules, not programmes
Focus on teaching, not learning

Their approach therefore, while it did include surveys, also included a team of student participant-observers (but details of the research method were a bit sketchy). Some findings:

A tension between the need for consistency and the need for innovation
Need for a notifications system to alert students to new content
Need for drivers of forum use: e.g. teachers must use them, participation must be expected.
Students preferred tools for groupwork are, overwhelmingly, Facebook, email, Google Docs and Dropbox. Moodle doesn’t compare. This is because the former are seen as more user-friendly and are more familiar to them.

I think Moodle Moot is my favourite conference. It’s so focussed, everyone is very positive and moving forward all the time with new things, and there’s a distinct absence of ego.

February 28th, 2013|Conferences|2 Comments|