To be? (A Moodle course) or not to be? (A Moodle course) That is…
Choices...a design question.
…a design question discussed at the March 5th FLN meeting which continually comes up from teachers in Moodle training.
“What format should my Moodle course be?”
The answer is it depends, what teaching need do you want to use your Moodle course for?
For flexibility Moodle courses should not be locked into any particular format so the SWSI ITEL sat down and examined the pros and cons of the formats we advocate to teachers namely:
- One Moodle Course = Individual UOC
- Moodle Course = Whole TAFE Course i.e.. contains all UOC’s in one place (Cert 1, 2, 3, 4 AQF etc)
- One Moodle Course = Focused Content (i.e Class)
- Moodle Course = Network Hub, an Emergent (Dominant?) trend.
At the moment we sit in two camps working within the limitations of Moodle 1.9.7 and the promises of new Moodle 2.0 functionality to fix all those bug-bears, the pro and cons .ppt covers these variables and some design solutions.
View: Moodle Course Format Pro and Cons .ppt (This is a Collaborative Powerpoint, contributions welcome).
Long story short SWSI has different approaches to strike a balance between flexibility and maintenance of learning design and quality control in Moodle 1.9.7 administration, I’ve added these to the FLN wiki for feedback, input is welcome.
View: Moodle 1.9.7 master course administration and learning design cycle wiki page.
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.
Copy to Sharing Cart
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.
Copy to Course
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).
Setting up Moodle Hub Connection
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
Moodle Community Hub Interface
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!
A conversation on Alfresco Repository, Mahara, Mediawiki
Vicki and myself caught up with David Gilchrist, Dianne Van Berlo and Don Tainsh of New England Institute in Adobe Connect this morning to have a look at Alfresco - The Open Source Repository to which Dianne’s feedback on it’s features were along the lines:
Gosh this makes me excited for a Monday morning!
Yes Alfresco is well worth a look and integrates with Moodle 2.0 out of the box. I easily installed the application on my computer to show during the meeting, check out the recording you’ll have to fast forward to 17 min to see the demo though. Some things shown and discussed where:
- Alfresco’s easy to use clean interface
- Smart Spaces with Alfresco Share
- Auditable Content, Simple Check-In/Out and Version Control
- Easy Workflow Management
- Categories including tagging
- Permalinks to files
- File format conversion to Flash format (.swf) of uploaded media files to solve bandwidth limitations
- Easy File management (like Windows explorer) to upload files
- Tight integration with Moodle, Sharepoint and Microsoft Office.
- Ability to manage public private digital rights and licensing for different types of content.
- Federated search capabilities, ability to search simply across multiple
- Alfresco repositories and external wikis (Including Mediawiki), blogs and news feeds
Based on initial feedback I think it would be interesting to get teachers to trial the product as part of the Virtual Learning Environment project.
SWSI Update
Development of an actual e-learning Unit - “Innovations & Technology Based Learning Unit” being formed for 2009. Julie Collareda from Sydney Institute has been appointed as the manager of the Unit and starts on the 9th February.
Development/Branding/Training of Sharepoint sites for all Institute teams are in progress with many exploring the possibilities for sharepoint to meet the various team needs.
Moodle hosted externally has now been branded and setup in preparation for classes in Semester 1. Training of staff and development of courses have been in progress from November and those involved are very excited and have built courses from toolboxes, CD’s Janison content and directly into Moodle. All faculties are involved in some capacity and we have over 520 users and 50 courses currently and this is before students have even started.
Podcast Server being reviewed to have similar look and feel as Teacher tube.
The unit has been working on having systems and workflows that are simple and have had some positive feedback from staff as to the effectiveness of this new system. These workflows will be reviewed regularly and adjust as improvements are identified.
All 83 Smartboards from the ANT2 Project have been installed and are ready to be used by staff in Semester 1, 2009. Training will be ongoing in the use the smartboard and the related software and peripherals through L & D Unit.
New England Rockets into the 21st Century
New England Institute has ventured into new territory, setting up its three Moodle LMS servers. Since then we’ve been busy testing modules, playing with very nifty plug-ins (eg. Audio recorder, podcast manager, menu block, flash media player, video conferenicng by Moodle, SMS via Moodle), and transfers from Janison.
David Gilchrist (astronaut extraordinaire) and Dianne Van Berlo attended Moodle Moot 08 which confirmed we were heading in the right direction in our Institute travels and only excited us more about Moodle’s potential. We’re also about to start f2f training after developing a self paced course for Moodle course creators.
Course Creator's Guide
Audio recorder topic
CLI have been travelling with us as we link to the LRR, after we consulted with our Institute passengers – through user and technical forums.
We’ve also been providing some in house entertainment and learning opportunities to our 21st Century Institute travellers including a Virtual Worlds presentation to demonstrate innovative use of learning technologies, appearing “live” at AgQuip for three days, spreading the vision for the Institute through vodcast, our Learning Technologies Road show online, and Toolbox customisation and ARED workshops.
Throughout our journey we’ve also chatted to students, the community and industry, with many wanting to join us in our journey.
Like any good trip we’ve enjoyed the opportunities as well as the challenges that we’ve encountered.
To make the trip as smooth as possible for our travellers, our EDU Learning and Assessment team tour guides have:
-
needed a team wide EDU approach to change management, supported by the establishment of strong cross functional relationships
-
needed to influence in different ways with different approaches- up down across
-
many and regular conversations with ICT, Institute Executive and visible presence across Institute
-
spreading use of learning technologies to other functional unit’s daily activities
-
overcome resistance to change.
EDU Learning and Assessment Team- Sphere of Influence
So here’s to sharing the excitement as more and more people join in our travels through the 21st Century.
-
Subscribe
·