Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference

This month Tracy Young and I attended a Moodle e-Learning Conference, called MoodleMoot (view conference photo’s on Flickr).

The conference was held on the beautiful grounds of All Hallows’ School in Brisbane.  The Moodle conference ran over two days and was jam packed with educating and informative sessions.

I’d love to share some of the notes I took and discoveries I made with you,  on our Team blog. I’ll start with the first Keynote;

Martin Dougiamas

Martin Dougiamas – Founder and Lead Developer of the  Moodle LMS

Here are some of the main points from Martin’s presentation;

• In a truly collaborative environment, we are both teachers and learners
• We learn from the act of creating/ expressing
• We learn from observing the activity of our peers, this help to build a culture (within a course)
• Constructivism - (understanding the contexts of others)
• Learning environments need to be flexible and adaptable and quickly respond to participant needs

The Typical Moodle Course Progression

1. Used for distributing handouts online
2. Use a Passive Forum
3. Use the Quiz and Assignment functionality (= less manual management)
4. Wiki, Glossary and Database functionality (the Database functionality allows you to create your own fields – more info)
5. Active/ Graded Forums
6. Combine Activities into sequences
7. Deeper thinking about learning activities
8. Use of survey module to study/reflect
9. Peer-review modules (workshop, student review & feedback)
10. Collaborating, sharing ideas, research

Exciting new features coming for Moodle2.0

Although it’s probably a good year away, there are some great new features coming for Moodle 2.0. We saw some of them in action at the MoodleMoot;

• File Management improvements (e.g. between courses as well as within one course)
• Greater usability with Web2.0 tools. E.g; The File repository window will look different, more like the Mac finder window. E.g. When you insert an image, you will have more options, your hard drive, the file repository, Flickr and other online image sites, you will be able to upload an image from online spaces.
  
• Ajax drag and drop functionality
• Plug-ins for Mahara e-Portfolio’s, Flickr, Facebook and myspace integration and many more
  
• Greater portfolio capability – ability export your learning from Moodle to publish to your own space when you move on. Export options will be HTML, XML, PDF, etc

Did you know?

• If you have created a glossary within your course, every time you use a term that’s in that glossary, Moodle will automatically link that term to the glossary entry?
• You can download ‘Moodle Anywhere‘ , a fully fledged Moodle install for your Thumb drive ( for use on Windows software only).
• You can join the Moodle Community and vote for functionality/issues that are on the list for resolution and submit your own issues at http://tracker.moodle.org
• The most powerful technique for online education is asking questions
• http://dev.moodle.org will be released soon. It will be an online community for Moodle developers to share best practices and demo courses. If you have a great course you would like to share with the Moodle community as an example of what can be done in Moodle, the Moodle dev team will ‘anonymise’ the course for you.
• The Moodle Community plan is to eventually create a course for every subject for teachers to enrol , share resources and communicate in.
• The most recent release of Moodle is 1.9.3. It has been officially certified for SCORM 1.2 and SCORM functionality and bugs have been fixed.

Next blog post will be about the Moodle GRADEBOOK functionality, a session presented by Shane Elliot from Pukunui Technology

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