VLE

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|

EduCampLondon: an ‘unconference’

A few weeks ago now I attended my first unconference. For the uninitiated an unconference is a conference that is organised & delivered by the delegates. For example, take the programme, it was complied in this Google Spreadsheet with the delegates simply adding a title to a slot. No submitting of abstracts 6 months before the event and still a great quality & variety of sessions. Other than that EduCampLondon felt pretty much like any other conference/event. The format of unconference sessions is supposed to be less chalky-talky and more discursive or off-the-wall but in practice many sessions, including my own, were fairly traditional.

March 30th, 2010|Conferences, Syndicated|Comments Off|

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|

Google Wave for e-learning

Something that’s come to my attention very recently is Google Wave – Google’s reinvention of e-mail/instant messaging/collaborative editing/blogging/discussion boards etc. into one combined platform. The name still sounds a bit ominous to me, you’ll know what I mean if you’ve seen the film “Die Welle” – I was initially concerned that Google would be trying to route all forms of conversation through its servers for advertising targeting purposes. However, my fears are tempered for now as it seems that Google Wave will be a completely open source platform that can be installed on any server. Apparently no messages need to go near a Google server, but I guess we are still at the early stages of its development and implementation.
Looking at the announcement video (embedded below or available from the Google Wave website), the concept does look very impressive and I can see all sorts of potential benefits for elearning and academic research. Especially, if the server side technology can be hosted in house. The first 30 minutes of the video are enough to get an idea of what it does and how it works. Alternatively, Wilbert at CETIS provides a more thorough description of the technology and its potential applications, advantages and disadvantages.

June 11th, 2009|Blogging, Social Media, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

LSE Teaching Day – book your place

LSE teaching day logo As you may have heard, the first LSE Teaching Day will take place on Tuesday 9 June. School director Howard Davies will open the proceedings, which will include a programme of workshops, seminars and panel discussions including innovative approaches to teaching and the latest technologies and resources for staff.

The main speech of the day will be given by Dr Jonathan Leape, senior lecturer in Economics, on ‘Thinking Like A Social Scientist’. Professor Janet Hartley, LSE pro-director, will close the event with a presentation of the Teaching Excellence Awards at a wine reception.

Response has been good and there are a limited number of places left. To book your place and view the full programme, visit www.lse.ac.uk/teachingday. Registration closes on Thursday 28 May.

May 15th, 2009|Events & Workshops (LTI), Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

Plymouth e-Learning Conference Report

Snorkle a Turtle at the Plymouth Aquarium The 4th Plymouth e-Learning Conference was an excellent event and for once I made good decisions in choosing which of the many parallel sessions to attend. I’ve not had a good track record recently!

The best learning technology tool I discovered was Marginalia. It’s an open source annotation tool which can be plugged into Moodle discussion forums. You can try it out – on it’s own or in this Moodle course. I don’t have an immediate use for it but it’s always good to have an answer when you hear: it would be great if Moodle could… If you [LSE staff!] are interested in finding out about or using Marginalia please let us know.

There was plenty of discussion over home-made flapjacks in the well-planned E-pedagogy: Emperor’s New Clothes or New Directions? and I thought the format of the session worked really well. Prior to the session the flapjack baker had elicited thoughts from a wider audience (via Twitter) on “What promotes learning?” resulting in 42 responses. The session itself was a good mix of presenting, discussion and feeding back as we worked towards how (if) technology changes or enhances learning. Participants were invited to post an answer online afterwards: “Does ICT really change what good learning looks like? And if so, how”. Unlike the pre-session task this has not been answered yet! I suspect it was never tweeted 😉

May 8th, 2009|Conferences|3 Comments|

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|