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Rethinking the LMS administration with the Moodle Sharing Cart and Community Hub

Video: Rethinking the LMS administration with the Moodle Sharing Cart and Community Hub

I really like the direction that Moodle is developing with the new Sharing Cart block and emergent Moodle Community Hub functionality.

Consider a teacher reviewing a variety of existing Moodle courses from their colleagues and browsing the content to find the good stuff.

The Sharing Cart block enables them to copy the most useful Resources and Activities to their Sharing Cart block and drop into their own Moodle course with a couple of clicks, so easy to use.

The only thing missing is the Sharing Cart doesn’t enable the copying of a complete topic in one hit; this would be really useful in significantly freeing up Moodle administrators in supporting teachers in backing up and restoring course content (Hopefully this will become available in the future development of this great new feature).

And there’s more…with the Sharing Cart, Moodle can be connected with a Moodle Community Hub. A Moodle Community Hub is a more sophisticated repository system which enables multiple Moodle installs to network and share content, the Hub has some nice bells and whistles like user rating, most popular downloads, points systems for user who upload Moodle artefacts and more… a Community Hub example has been set up at http://ept3.sgu.ac.jp

With the Sharing Cart Block and Community Hub I really like that individual resources and activities are freed up to be used between teachers no longer locked up and inflexible within a Moodle course and reliant on backup and restore. After reviewing the new features I’ve had a complete rethink on Moodle Administration with the view to creating a new administration system with Master courses for qualification stored in a Community Hub these can continually maintained and updated by a community of teachers with the best bits and pieces from their own courses using the Sharing Cart Block hmmm that would mean less grunt work for the Administrator…these new Moodle features are great!

The benefits of a closed Mediawiki for Collaboration

Mediawiki is designed for open viewing of content but it is possible to turn on a username and password requirement before users can view content. Check out Illawarra Institute resource mediawiki with DET authentication at http://wiki.illawarra.tafensw.edu.au , it works quite nicely.

All Resource Mediawiki content is now behind a DET username and password. Moodle will also be integrated with the DET Single Sign On (SSO), i.e. students and staff will log into one system to access both Moodle and Mediawiki. To top the VLE off I’d also like to see a file repository that seamlessly integrates through SSO with Moodle and Mediawiki now that would be nice!

Mediawiki has worked well for teachers and staff in developing their resources (after a bit of training in the basics). Click here for an example course (Diploma of Children’s Services) developed with Jennifer Hopkins and based on this model.

The open Mediawiki has had good traffic for marketing courses from outside TAFE (6000 + views of front page) and some positive feedback on the content model but I don’t think the cross Institute collaboration aims have been realised as envisioned.

In a way the openness of the Mediawiki resources has been a big barrier to uptake and collaboration between Institutes. Culturally the people who have put in the hard yards and contributed to the Illawarra Institute Mediawiki Resources want their great work visible to TAFE students and teachers just not on the open internet and that’s understandable, from experience this is the common viewpoint especially with management who are concerned about commercial interests.

Initially the idea for making the resources available on the open internet was based on removing barriers which seemed quite radical a few years back. Power-law distribution and openess asserts that 80 percent of productivity and collaboration within an organisation will be done by 20 percent of employees, the open Illawarra Institute Mediawiki was meant to make existing resources highly visible in one location and remove access barriers for the 20 percent of productive teachers from other Institutes to collaborate. (At least that was the plan :-)).

I’ve been asked several times why is a Resource Mediawiki needed when Wikispaces is available, so much more user friendly and feature rich? Mediawiki’s strength is that it’s designed for openness and mass collaboration between many users. Wikispaces is working well but is generally used for smaller classes and groups, many Wikispaces are private with locked up content so there are issues with visibility and limited opportunities for members only collaboration.

Working in an open internet environment is my personal preference and I’ll continue to do so for the benefits of networking but my conclusion is a closed TAFE NSW Mediawiki bridging solution is needed that affords opportunity for mass collaboration between those “20 percent” Teachers who do not want to be publishing to the open internet. A resource Mediawiki in one location is well worth investing in; resources can be used across multiple delivery platforms for example linking to Sakai as well as Moodle resolving the issues of catering for multiple delivery platforms.

Success will come down to strategic support and coordination from Management for projects where the commercial interests between Institutes are best served through collaboration, for example sponsoring the existing Flexible Learning Toolboxes and new LRR ‘How to’ use technology learning objects to be linked and categorised in the Mediawiki.

As discussed at the last Moodle User Group meeting there has also been some trial work in consultation with TELS on setting up a Moodle Community Hub for collaborating and sharing courseware in anticipation of new Moodle 2.0 functionality. I recommend Checking out David Gilchrist and Diane Van Berlo’s New England ‘Moodle for Beginners resources’.

The Illawarra Institute is just starting some “trial balloon” case study projects with CLI, North Coast and New England on cross Institute collaboration work. The plan is to create some exemplars in utilising the resource Mediawiki and Community Moodle Hub:

• Alexander Miller of North Coast Institute has contributed the QuickE Moodle resources to add to the ‘Moodle for Teachers’ Mediwiki Category
• Rory OBrien is contributing the CLI Social Learning and some of TAA Diploma eLearning Units and LRR ‘How To’ technology guides to the Moodle Hub and Mediawiki.
• David Gilchrist and Diane Van Berlo have contributed a new LAW Learning Activity Wizard course.
• I’m looking at the integration of Flexible Learning Toolboxes into Moodle and Mediawiki other resources may be included over the coming weeks.