notes from the Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference

The final presentation I attended at the Moodle Moot was presented by a couple of year 12 students. This was an extremely well prepared presentation, for which the two students had made a short movie interviewing other students for their feedback.

Here’s what the students said about Moodle;

• Let us customise our environment, we liked having the ability to change the themes ourselves, it engages us, we want more themes! “Finally, some choice for us!”
• We love having continuous access to support from our teachers in this environment
• We love getting instant feedback from the Moodle quizzes
• We sense the resistance from teachers to tackle new technologies and we feel limited by this
• Our teachers don’t know enough about the capability of these systems, which frustrates us, let us help!
• We like having extended deadlines (that is, we have up until 11.59pm to submit our assessments)
• Online exams in Moodle had problems, need back-up plan in case the system crashes
• We loved that our extra curriculum activities were accessible from the Moodle front page (e.g. notice boards, sport areas (courses) with timetables, etc. We felt this added value

… and what they said about Social Networking & learning;

• We don’t want to use Moodle like a Social Network, we already have the tools for that and we prefer to do that outside of school hours.
• We don’t want to communicate with teachers in these spaces, we don’t want them to know too much about us
• The tools we use (Facebook and myspace) have features that allow us to choose our audience (friends) and our own privacy levels
• We abused the chat functionality, so it got taken away, which was good. It’s back now with strict rules, we don’t bother using it now

… and what they would like to see improved

• More customisable layouts
• Access to our school files remotely, through this platform
• More warnings when there is going to be system downtime/ maintenance
• Most of our issues are not with Moodle, they are about the fact that the teachers are not able to use the system to its full capability – skill up!
• Lead by example, be competent with engaging us in this environment and create learning networks for us, or we’re disengaged

notes from the Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference…

Another interesting presentation I attended was from Dr Danial Woo – University of New South Wales.

This session presented the outcomes of Moodle usability evaluation sessions using the eye-tracking software. The sessions were to determine ease of process and use of Moodle and a teaching and learning tool.

This software showed us (via Infrared) exactly where teachers were looking for information and buttons to click when creating a course in Moodle.  This provided me with a valuable insight into how teachers use Moodle and gave us some ideas on how we can incorporate the results into our own training at NCTAFE.

Moodle usability evaluation session

The Moodle founders and developers were also present in this session and keen to collaborate about some of the user results, some of which are listed below.

• Tendency to focus on the big blue headings in the middle of the screen, which didn’t look click-able, wandering eyes indicated confusion as to where to go next, so user became engaged with the search box
• Users unaware that they were logged in
• Much confusion for teachers on the course setting page about what ‘Roles’ are
• After course creation, you are directed to assign people to a ‘role’. Once you do this, there is no submit or ok button, so users get confused, finally realising they need to use the breadcrumb links to go back to the course
• The link to/attach files dialogue is confusing, where does it actually upload the files? Note: this feature will be improved in the new version
• Limited to choosing one file at a time to upload
• Some confusion about how to add participants to a course
• No explanation of adding a hidden ‘teacher’ when you Assign Roles
• Some confusion of the editing icons, e.g. indenting a resource icon not that clear

There were also some great tips for Usability Testing;

• Use a quiet space to conduct usability testing
• To create true user-centered design, work with your users, get them involved early (it expensive to make the changes later)
• test early, test often (this will result in cost saving)
• Start designs on paper
• Treat it like a science experiment
• Start simple and then build on your course
• Don’t give instructions to users by using the exact language e.g. “click this button”. Give users a more generic goal, e.g. “Here are some files, upload them to the course”
• Track trends, not just one lot of results
• Analyze findings and create solutions
• Use a note taker, don’t be distracted by taking notes yourself
• Check out the Apple Human Interface Guidelines

What are the implications of this testing?

• Develop Moodle – we can all contribute to the Moodle community. Vote for issues that as teachers, we would like to see fixed first (you can do that here).
• Train more effectively, incorporate these issues into our training
• Continuous Improvement results in happier users, increased performance

notes from the Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference…

After the Keynote from Professor Erica McWilliam, I went along to the Moodle theme workshop, presented again, by Julian Ridden - St Ignatius College.

This session was a very in depth look at some different ways to set your Moodle themes up, some schools allow their students to choose their own theme, which judging by the feedback from the learners I heard later in the day, was a very engaging and popular option.

There were a ton of tips and tricks discussed by Julian and I took loads of notes. Luckliy I don’t have to retype them because Julian has provided his presenation here. (sorry, it’s on YouTube, you’ll need to watch this outside the DET network!)

I did find out about some great tools in this workshop;

• mamp - MAMP installs a local server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac OS X computer
• cssedit - CSSEdit is a fast and powerful little application for your mac, it allows you to easily design beautiful, innovative and fast-loading standards-based web sites.
• Flock - new browser, based on Mozilla Firefox and allows you to organise your media, social networks and even blog from your browser. Watch the demo.

Also got some great ideas on how to minimise the text at the top of each course using labels (in which images are placed and linked to the actual resources). here’s an example…

Cool huh?

notes from the Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference…

The Keynote from Professor Erica McWilliam, Assistant Dean (Research), Faculty of Education, QUT. Was so inspiring that I had to do two blog posts about it.

Here’s the first part of this post, with the engaging presentation linked in there for you to have a look through…

And here are some of the notes I took…

Teaching & Learning

• Promote Peer-to-Peer feedback. Kids give great (honest) feedback to each other. These days, kids get rewarded for their first attempts at any task (this needs to change), because of this, they can’t accept negative feedback from elders. So using tools to promote peer-to-peer feedback is a really good idea!
• Promote errors - we need to make errors to learn or we will become a very ignorant society. Help students fail without shame.
• Balance - Too little or too much computing is NOT good learning, there needs to be a balance.
• Create self managing learners – In a more temporary environment, learners need to be able to assemble and edit their learning world. With technology everything is editable/ temporary.
• Passive teaching is bad. Don’t teach rope learning, don’t care about the answer, care about the learning. Our highest achievers aren’t always our best learners!
• Team work – The value of a networked community must be explored. Typically, kids hate group work. So, we need to explain the advantages of group work clearly, i.e.
  • A group of bike riders go faster than one
  • A Flock of birds fly high than one
  • Systemic randomness
  • Small groups working together look like one large group (bio-teams)

Attribution:   Image: ‘Flock‘-www.flickr.com/photos/86817324@N00/1752254341

Leadership

• Diversification – We need to build on our capacity to employ ‘co-habitate’ with people that aren’t like us
• Clear role definitions
• Incubate roles – everyone is good at one thing, utilise this in your teams
• Brokering – Across ’structural’ roles, making connections between departments, student groups etc

Attribution:   Image: ‘me on delicious network explorer‘-www.flickr.com/photos/26325011@N00/352439602

The future

• Let Go! - There’s too much information out there, we don’t need to know it all. We need to get experience, involvement in the communities based around our chosen field sooner. Let go of old ideas. Scientists don’t need to know the entire periodic table by heart before they are released into the science community, yet we still insist that they do.
• There is always room for improvement – we may master the functionality of things, but there’s always room for improvement aesthetically.
• Build Learning Communities - link people in powerful ways
• Find comfort in being ignorant, things are moving so fast, we can’t know everything. The place for ‘knowers’ is Noah’s Ark!

Attribution: Image: ‘Pony Disaster Diverted‘-www.flickr.com/photos/35468159852@N01/103897400

High Flying Learning Environments

• • Connective and Diverse
  • Co-Intervention/ Creation and Separation
  • Leading and Following

How do we get there?

• • Enhancing constraints and removal of inhibitors (creating better guidelines)
  • Recognise that low percentile groups ‘flock’ together (and consequently give and get bad/ negative advice from each other)
  • Connect low percentiles with ‘high flyers’ (online systems give us fast and accurate access to this type of information, like we’ve never had before. We can now see who’s disengaged and needs help and intervene earlier. As an educator, this is your opportunity to use your skills.
  • Creativity is now measurable, we need to model creative dispositions

The Creative Workforce

If you want to know more about Professor Erica McWilliam, you can read about her here.

or here….

She also has published a book titled, ‘The Creative Workforce’, which you can order here.

notes from the Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference…

The second day of the Moodle e-Learning Conference, MoodleMoot, attended by Tracy Young and myself, was brilliantly kicked off by a Keynote from Professor Erica McWilliam, Assistant Dean (Research), Faculty of Education, QUT.

I took so many notes during this session, SOME of which I’ll share at the bottom of this post, but I strongly encourage you to have a look at the attached presentation.

Special thanks to Erica for giving me permission to share her wonderful presentation with you.

Here’s a taste of the brilliant presentation from Erica:

1703 Complaints
Students can no longer prepare bark to
calculate problems. They rely instead on
expensive slate. What will they do when the
slate breaks?

1815 Complaints
Students depend too much on paper instead
of slate. What will they do when we run out of
paper?

1917 Complaints
Students depend too much on ink. They
can’t sharpen a pencil with a knife anymore.

1928 Complaints
Students depend too much on store bought
ink. They don’t know how to make their own.
What happens when they run out?

1955 Complaints
Teachers refuse to accept papers written with
ballpoint pens. A fountain pen is the only
acceptable instrument!

1960 Complaints
Take away students’ slide rules and they no
longer have the skills to solve a problem!

1980 Complaints
Can students even function today without a
calculator?

2000 Complaints
Students are totally dependent on their
computers. What will they do when there is a
blackout?

2040 Complaints
They have given me a mixed class of
humans, hybrids and transhumanists. How
do I deal with the various learning styles?

2023 Complaints
They have implanted the
Library of Congress in their heads. What are
we supposed to teach them now?

Are you interested?

Then check out the presentation from this session, and stay tuned for my next blog post, which will include some great notes from this session about leadership, creative problem solving, team work and diversification, teaching and learning and much more…

notes from the Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference…

The final Moodle session of the first day, Rich content for Moodle on a Budget, was enthusiastically and entertainingly presented by Rhys Moult, of BJ Network Consulting.

Rhys (an ex-bartender and sommelier who smoothly seduced his way into the hearts of his audience with a glass of Shiraz) looked at various tools (free, media rich, Web2.0 tools) that can be used with Moodle to enhance learning resources and courses.

You can view the session presentation here, or just check out some of the tools Rhys highlighted for easy integration with Moodle below.

GoAnimate!

GoAnimate is a web tool you can use to create animations (learning activities) to embed into your course web space or Moodle course. Here’s an example:

Udutu

Udutu is a tool that represents “a drastic change in online learning and training, allowing anyone to offer training through the already popular Facebook social network”.

From Udutu:

Social Networks as Learning Management Systems

To create a learning organization where knowledge is passed from experts to newcomers and where personal growth is encouraged, you need to create a social learning network. You can impose your own and hope they’ll participate, or you can leverage the one they already use. Chances are many of your people are already signed up!

Don’t fight technology, Leverage it!

Our applications can turn existing social networks such as Facebook. Into a powerful Learning Management System, (LMS, LCMS) and retain all the rich communication and scheduling tools that these applications offer.

Better yet, there’s no upfront investment in either infrastructure or software licensing. You can be up and running tomorrow in the interface your learners already know and use.

Udutu and Moodle

The myUdutu Course Authoring Module for Moodle allows you to easily insert your myUdutu courses into your running Moodle installation. You can download the module from the Moodle site here.

To find out more click here.

I’ve seen a demonstration of Udutu and Moodle, it basically allows you to create and embed your own learning objects, structure the learning, easily add audio and video, navigation and much more.

Well worth a look!

Jing!

Jing is a tool that some of us have been using already to quickly and simply record audio over screen demonstrations or create screen shots with captions. It’s a free tool, with limited server storage, but you can save the instructional movie as a flash file to your computer.

What is this thing called Jing? Video tour.

I have written a blog post about how I use Jing in the past, but here’s my first attempt at a recording using Jing…

Flexible Learning Framework Toolboxes

Download Learning Objects from the Toolbox Repository for easy upload into Moodle.

You can find out more about this on our Institute e-Learning Kit’s Resources Page, or our join our Moodle Toolbox Course for a walk through How To.

Slideshare

Slideshare is a place to upload and share (if you like) PowerPoint presentations. You can even add audio to your slideshow.

Here’s an example of one we created last year for the Institute’s e-Learning Strategy project.

Videos and Voki’s

And of course there’s;

videos to embed

• teachertube
• blip.tv – here are some edu examples
• skillsone videos - search by industry categories

voki’s

• used for our blog welcome, top right
• used through various Moodle courses for course intro’s
• used with students for practising language skills

Have a look at some voki examples from our teaching staff, or visit our Web2.0 page for more ideas.

What tools do you use with Moodle?

Let me know what great Web2.0 tools you use in Moodle by leaving a comment here.

notes from the Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference…

The session follwing the session from Bronwyn Campbell of Active Learning Partners, was dynamically presented by Julian Ridden - St Ignatius College.

After a very amusing video that was meant to explain what podcasting actually is (…it didn’t actually explain much, but had everyone laughing and engaged)… Julian demonstrated some great ways of how teachers could use Moodle for Podcasting and some good reasons as to why they should!

Julian has explored two Moodle ‘modules’, the Podcast and the iPodcast module (the activities you select from the drop down box when you’re editing your Moodle course)

Here’s the presentation… (you can watch the version with audio here, which I recommend).

notes from the Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference…

The session follwing the informative Moodle Gradebook presentation, was from Bronwyn Campbell of Active Learning Partners.

Her session was called ‘Diving into e-Learning’, it was a case study about building capability and enthusiasm for using a ‘low-budget’ online learning environment, Moodle.

The course – http://elearning.adas-online.org is for the Occupational Diving Industry, the clients are mostly mature-age, time-poor and experienced in the field.

Image: ‘Jenny is taking the video’ – www.flickr.com/photos/26598370@N00/97206526

Getting divers out of the water and into a classroom proved to be a bit of a logistical nightmare and Bronwyn’s presentation explored some of the benefits, challenges and issues involved in moving the classroom online, into Moodle.

The attached PowerPoint presentation from her session is jam-packed with statistics and data gathered from students of the online course. Grab a cuppa and five minutes to take a look at their journey and statistics!

Next Moodle Moot blog post will be about Podcasting through Moodle, a session presented by Julian Ridden a.k.a Moodleman.

After the first Keynote from Martin Dougiamas, we attended a session about the Moodle Gradebook presented by Shane Elliot from Pukunui Technology.

I’ve attached the presentation here (thanks Shane) so you can see the main points covered and the new Gradebook features for Moodle 2.0.

Tip for viewing the Gradebook

One great tip I got (thanks to Kaz Madigan for asking the question), was about the fact that the gradebook is displayed in one long horizontal table. By the time you scroll to the end of the grades, you can no longer see the name of person on the left.

Here’s something that may help.

Before

Click on the cell that the person name is in (if you click there name, you’ll be transported to their profile page). It will highlight the row, so when you scroll, you can see who’s grades you’re looking at!

After

Hope that’s useful.

The next Moodle Blog Post will about about the interesting session ‘Diving into e-Learning’ from Bronwyn Campbell of Active Learning Partners.

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