moodle

Moodle Moot 2010

Moodle Moot 2010 logo

On 13-14 April I attended Moodle Moot 2010, hosted by ULCC at the University of London’s Senate House.

I didn’t find it as enlightening as last year’s Moot at Loughborough, but it had its moments, and I believe my colleagues were luckier in their choice of parallel sessions, as further posts here may reveal.

The first keynote was by Sugata Mitra, speaking about his “Hole in the Wall” studies. His presentation was excellent and inspiring, and can be seen on the MoodleMoot videos page, but as he’s done it many times before and much has been written about it already, I don’t really need to add. Later, Martin Dougiamas, on Skype from New Zealand, gave his now-traditional “What’s in Moodle 2.0” presentation, which was pretty much the same as last year’s as far as I can remember.

As for the parallels, not a lot to report, but a couple of presentations caught the eye. Eoin Campbell highlighted the clumsiness of the Moodle question-editing interface, and introduced a way to allow teachers to quickly and easily create quizzes by entering the questions, answers and feedback into a table in Word, and then converting that to Moodle questions at the press of a button (http://www.moodle2word.net/).

Pieter van der Hijden talked about the potential of Moodle for running educational games and simulations. It was surprising how much of the scaffolding required to build a simulation could be supported using basic Moodle features, but what’s missing at this stage is the ability for users to store variables within Moodle, and a simple scripting language to allow those variables to be processed. These are pretty fundamental to simulation, and it doesn’t look like they will be native to Moodle any time soon. I did wonder, though, whether one couldn’t just use JavaScript and cookies to get around this limitation.

Overall: not bad. ULCC did a good job of running the show. I especially liked the no-nonsense approach to the evening entertainment, consisting of canteen-style tikka masala, a pub quiz and a free bar all night.

Steve

April 26th, 2010|Conferences|1 Comment|

Txting Moodle

We have recently added a text messaging service to Moodle called moodletxt (powered by txttools) . The primary use for this service is to receive text messages (SMS) in Moodle.

Using Moodletxt in Teaching & Learning

In some respects moodletxt is just an alternative communication channel to existing ones (office hours, email, Moodle forums etc). Two key differences are that texts are anonymous and can of course be sent from all mobile phones. Some suggested uses:

‘Muddy’ points – after lectures or classes students send in points that they are unclear about. This is being trialled on LSE100.
Administrative Queries
Feedback – students’ comments on any aspect of their studies

It is recommended that responses from staff are delivered through other communication channels. Although moodletxt can be used to send messages these texts must be paid for by the LSE so there is an additional financial cost (if you are interested in this then please do contact us). As some students may not wish to pay for texts it is also recommended that moodletxt is always used in conjunction with other Moodle communication tools to give an alternative option.

How it works

Students send a text preceded by a keyword (usually the course code) to a dedicated mobile number. The keyword acts as a filter directing the texts to an Inbox within the Moodle course. This inbox is only accessible to Moodle ‘teachers’ on the associated course. If you are interested in adding this feature to your LSE Moodle course or would like to discuss potential uses then please contact clt-support@lse.ac.uk

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/87913776@N00/305425495/

February 18th, 2010|Teaching & Learning|1 Comment|

Our survey says….

….95.7% of LSE students are very satisfied (45.3%) or fairly satisfied (50.4%) with Moodle.

By Brockvicki licensed under Creative Commons

The results from our survey carried out in June 2009 are finally revealed. We found in terms of whether they were satisfied with Moodle, there was no significant difference between postgraduates or undergraduates or with students whose first language was English.

Most students used Moodle either weekly (49%) or daily (43%) and 90% were encouraged to use it by their teachers. 84% of students said they would like to see more of their courses on Moodle. As with previous surveys, reading lists with links to full text material were one of the most popular features of Moodle. Many students now submit their assignments online using Moodle, and a growing number have some form of multimedia (recorded lectures or digitised audio /video) in their course.

December 18th, 2009|Announcements|Comments Off|

Moodle Conference

Martin Dougiamas Keynote MoodleMoot UK 2009 was held at Loughborough University before Easter. The conference brings together learning technologists, systems administrators and teachers from all education sectors to discuss all things Moodle. The main keynote was given by Moodle-founder Martin Dougiamas and focused on the ongoing development of Moodle and in particular the next version, Moodle 2.0. It was great to hear Martin talking about usability and openness in particular. I think one of the key factors for the popularity of moodle here is its ease-of-use (particularly when compared to our previous VLE!) so it’s always good to hear that usability remains high on the agenda. From the Moodle wiki:

Users should be able to easily learn what is there for them

Users should be able to move around “their world” within Moodle with a minimum of effort.

By openness I’m referring to the ability for Moodle to be integrated with other systems such as repositories and eportfolios but also changes that are being made to make it really easy to include other content from the ‘open web’ such as Youtube videos & Flickr photos in your Moodle course. There’s much more on Martin Dougiamas’s keynote on Nitin Parmar’s blog.

April 20th, 2009|Conferences|Comments Off|

Goodbye WebCT

I couldn’t end the day without a quick goodbye to WebCT. After 9 years of reliable service to LSE, WebCT is finally being switched off – well the licence expires at some point over the weekend. See our short account of the move on our website. All postgrad courses were migrated to Moodle last summer and now all of the undergrad courses have been migrated ready for the 2008-09 academic year.

Anyway, cheers to WebCT (well – versions 3.6 through 4.2 anyway!).

Kris.

July 18th, 2008|Announcements, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

Moodle & WebCT Summer 2008

Over the summer all remaining courses using WebCT will be moved to the LSE’s new virtual learning environment (VLE) Moodle. There are full details of this project and specific instructions for the remaining WebCT users on our website.

For staff already using Moodle there is also detailed information on the Moodle ‘rollover’ from 2007/8 to 2008/9. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us

June 30th, 2008|Announcements, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|

More MoodleMoot

As Steve has comprehensively blogged on this already: day1, day2 I’ll just add a few comments on e-portfoilos and some more stuff coming our way from the OU.

E-Portfolios
These have always been on the edge of my radar but they were highlighted in Martin Dougiamas’ keynote for v2 and again in Niall Sclater’s excellent review of the thinking on the future of VLEs / PLEs. Without really planning to I ended up spending most of day 2 looking at portfolios. The idea with regard to Moodle is that external E-portfolio systems will plugin to Moodle allowing for data to pass from Moodle to the E-portfolio.

So what is an e-portfolio and how might it be used? For me the best starting point is how the OU have named their own home-grown system: MyStuff which is an open source plugin to moodle to be released soon. It is intended as a personal space for students to create, organise & store their ‘stuff’: files, links etc and allows students to make them available to who they wish. The other system featuring highly at the Moot was Mahara (open source from NZ) which seems to go further and includes a CV Builder and social software tools. I liked the way the Mahara team were talking about developing links to other systems such as YouTube & Flickr, so not everything has to be in Mahara.

October 30th, 2007|Conferences|2 Comments|

Moodle Moot '07 – Day 2

I missed Niall Sclater’s closing keynote from the previous report, mainly because I was writing it during his talk (sorry Niall). But it was good, delving into the debate about the role of VLEs in a world of personalised learning. He outlined various possible approaches, such as:

the “small pieces model”, where a range of distributed web applications meet the student’s needs. There is a problem here with the need for multiple sign-ons which has not yet been solved, and also the problem of having to deal with lots of different interfaces.
the “docking with the mothership” model, where students’ own “personal learning clients” interact with a central VLE, such as Moodle. Here there may be ongoing problems with interoperability between the various clients and the central system.
the “PLE server” model, where personal learning facilities are provided centrally for students’ benefit. Elgg and Mahara are examples.

In the process he mentioned the OU’s new “Moodle on a stick” – an offline Moodle that can be synchronised with a central server. This is due to be released soon – by end of 2007 probably.
His conclusions were that none of these setups is yet wholly convincing, and that the VLE still has a place in formal learning. Future PLE clients and e-portfolios will certainly have a role to play, but probably in concert with a VLE.

So, on to day 2 highlights:

Jonathan Fine from OU ran through some applications of MathTran, his system for processing TeX in web pages and serving up the output as images on the fly. There seem to be a lot of these systems knocking about, but this one is very impressive. Jonathan admitted that jsMath is also a very strong rival, and said that where jsMath wins on layout, his system wins on speed.

In the last session of the day, Peter van der Hijden argued that the Moodle “World” was growing out of control and that it needed more structure. His solution is the formation of local Moodle associations, and used the Dutch Ned-Moove group as an example of how such groups can support users and developers. He argued that such groups should encourage personal membership, rather than having institutional representatives, to empower users of Moodle.

Steve

October 26th, 2007|Conferences|1 Comment|

Moodle Moot '07

A report from the first day of this conference at the OU.

Martin Dougiamas’ keynote began as a sort of “State of the Union” address, telling us how widely used it is etc. But mostly he spoke about what’s new in 1.9, and where Moodle will be heading after that.

The major new features in 1.9 are:

Gradebook – completely redesigned. Hard to explain briefly what it now offers
Outcomes – can create a list of standard outcomes, assign selected ones to activities, and attach them to a scale so they can be ‘graded’
Groupings – groups of groups so you can control which groups apply to which activity
Performance – problem with slowness in large installations in 1.8, now fixed
Tags – way of tagging users (and resources/activities?)

Beyond that, 2.0+ will focus on repository and portfolio aspects. There will be simple methods for bringing in resources from repositories and for exporting them to portfolios. The idea of ‘community hubs’ will develop, allowing sharing of resources between different instances of Moodle on different sites. Also there will be more conditional activities, dependent on outcomes from previous activities.

However, these 2.0+ aspects will wait until after a period of consolidation – where 1.9 will develop through 1.9.x versions to fix all outstanding bugs, streamline and tidy up existing code, so that 2.0 starts from a robust base.

My highlights from the rest of the day:

Nicolas Connault from Moodle HQ spoke about the need to build automated ‘unit testing’ (i.e. testing of individual methods, using ‘mock database objects’ where needed) into code development. So, when you write a new class or method, you write the testing suite to go with it at the same time. Unfortunately it doesn’t work very well for debugging existing code that may not be object-oriented.

Chris Sangwin from Uni Birmingham demonstrated a Moodle version of their STACK assessment system. This allows Maths questions to be created where the student can submit an algebraic answer, which can be assessed according to an algorithm specified by the teacher. For example, you can ask them to enter an ‘even function’ (one that is symmetrical in the dependent axis) and it will be able to determine whether their answer (which could be anything) is indeed even. This is all open source and they want people to test it.

A report on tomorrow to follow…

October 24th, 2007|Conferences|1 Comment|

LSE to adopt Moodle as the new institutional VLE

Following a year of evaluation, LSE has decided to adopt Moodle as its Virtual Learning Environment.

We believe Moodle has many advantages for both staff and students and these were clearly flagged up during our pilots. They include:

Easier to use (for both staff and students); courses can be developed and updated much more easily than WebCT.
More powerful and flexible with a range of new features including learning journals, blogs and wikis that can be used for teaching
Much greater flexibility over ways in which courses are organised: you can choose to organise your course on a weekly basis (probably the most common option) but also by topic or around a discussion board.
It also has much greater control and flexibility over who can be given permission to access the course.
More flexible discussion tools.

A key advantage of Moodle, is that as it is an open source system, it can be developed and customised in ways in which the School wants. Completely new tools and features can be added and we can share features developed elsewhere. The Open University for example, since its adoption of Moodle has developed a number of important new features and these are made freely available to the rest of the Moodle community.

April 30th, 2007|Announcements, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off|