Administrating Moodle - the Challenges

ULCC Moodler was invited to sit in on the first of ULCC's 'Webimoot' series last Tuesday, 6th November. Facilitated by ULCC for their customers, 'Administration: Assessing the Challenges' brought together moodle administrators to focus on a number of objectives:

• defining the role of 'site' administration
• update on what's new (especially with upgrade to 1.9)
• Identifying what delegates feel are key issues
• identifying solutions and next steps

It was great fun, and everyone said they enjoyed the session:

"I think the most enjoyable part for the first moot was just using the technology. I really enjoyed the session, especially after my intial disappointment when I was told there were no working headsets available! It's now that I know the questions to ask. I think we have come a long way in a short time and thanks for the support you've given so far." Maria, Newcastle.gov.org

What was particularly interesting, and very informative, was a presentation by James Ballard, the notable ULCC Learning Technologist, which outlined the challeneges facing site administrators along with an introduction to some of the new tools being made available to them in the 1.9 release. Some of this I'd never thought of before, so worth having a look at it:

• Technical

Whilst ULCC maintains server and Moodle installation, there may arise issues with incorporating external data (such as user accounts and offered courses) that need to be accurate in order for Moodle to utilise them.

• Quality

Having resources online can allow increased monitoring of quality, however it can also raise expectations for user experience, particularly those familiar with current trends in web technologies. In some areas you may also be competing directly against online training providers or other institution's websites.

• Curriculum Delivery

How well does your Moodle site support Curriculum activities? Often these are kept separate rather operating hand in hand. Are online activities tied into syllabus and learning objectives?

• Value added

There are a number of areas where Moodle can be used to provide resources and activities that add value to teaching and learning: libraries, key skills, extra-curricular, events, support, advice.

• Diversity

Moodle is compliant with accessibility standards, however any content added to it by users may not be - how are these monitored? Moodle also provides opportunities to cater to different learning styles through various activities and you may even find that your potential student enrollment base is increased by the ability to cater for things such as direct or mobile learning.

• Assessment

Online assessment is becoming increasingly popular and will develop hand-in-hand with the growth of e-portfolios. Moodle has a variety of tools to support this which are greatly improved in 1.9. Moodle may also need to communicate with other systems to cater for this.

• Staff Development

A whole topic in itself (mentioned in a previous blog),so not mentioned in great detail during the presentation. However ULCC are looking at ways to incorporate, track, and manage CPD via Moodle.

Moodle training is a particular area where community resource sharing can benefit all. Comments?

Another impressive resource is launched by JISC

ULCC Moodle Blogger apologises for the late arrival of this blog. Encamped in a Bedouin settlement somewhere in the Moroccan Sahara, I had dispatched it with a passing spice merchant by camel train, and hoping for a westerly wind to take it up the coast to Tangier and onto Europe.

On Monday 22nd October, I attended a launch at the British Library of JISC's digitisation project: British Newspapers of the 19th Century. The resources displayed to the assembled guests were impressive indeed:

10 billion words and 2 million pages are being digitised from complete runs (or the majority) of 19th century local, regional and national British newspapers.

Iconic historical events will be amply represented from the Battle of Waterloo, the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the opening of the Suez Canal. Read the factual reporting of the Battle of Trafalgar in the Examiner and the gory details of the Whitechapel murders in the melodramatic Illustrated Police News to name but a few. Many famous authors of the 19th century period wrote for newspapers, and their work is represented, Dickens and Thackeray included

Opened by the respective heads of BL and JISC, it was certainly a grand affair. We're now able to celebrate another excellent resource made accessible that weren't thought possible a few years ago (details of licensing and accounts will be made available shortly - watch this space).

One thought that struck me was that, in an age where a keystroke brings thousands of resources to the desktop, this can be as much a problem as having access to only a few. Sitting around the Bedouin camp fires, I was reminded of a story I presented to a JISC conference a couple of years back, illustrating one of the key issues ...

A group of English teachers, attending a 'Subject Day' organised by RSC London, were demonstrated a JISC resource by LION (Literature Online) and were all impressed. Everyone present demanded to know how they could get hold of this fantastic resource. The JISC representative said that he would check and get back to them after lunch. He returned to say that all their colleges already owned the licence for this resource. This highlights a problem of how we ensure that we're able to break down the internal organisational barriers so that these treasures are actually used effectively by the people they were designed to support?

Answers on a postcard to ULCC Moodle Blogger, c/o Sahara Desert

Lies, damn lies, and Moodle Stats!

ULCC Moodle Blogger was busying away at a number of conferences over the last week - I'm afraid very little to report back on. However, one bright spot on what was a rather dull and uninteresting week was a discussion sparked by a presentation I gave at a recent LMN event. Chaired by John Stone, CEO of LSN, and held at the University of Westminster, it was entitled E-Learning Strategies: Assessing the Challenges. I spoke about how RSC London saw the key issues, under the following headings:

1. Developing e-Learning evenly across the organisation
2. Maximising benefits of existing investment
   
3. Integrated systems
4. Staff development
5. Quality Assuring e-Learning

As an experiment, I requested the assembled audience to SMS text my mobile phone what they considered to be their priority for achieving e-Maturity (Mobile Learning!?). For example, perhaps you have established e-Learning in all departments, but now need to focus on how to 'Quality Assure' what is going on, or identify how to integrate the VLE with your CIS and have fully interoperable e-ILP's, etc. Interestingly the results were evenly spread across 1-4, with most not feeling quite ready to take on the 'transformational' No. 5.

(ULCC Moodle Blogger requests that you fill out the Straw Poll so we can widen this example and tell me what you consider to be your next priority - opposite)

There was some interesting discussions that followed, with one in particular - how do we measure quality, or value for money, in our Moodle. I often hear of learning providers who boast of 300 plus courses, and hundred of thousands of registered users and, indeed, that is one way of measuring, but what about activity, or indeed, learning?

Training for Moodle

Last week ULCC Moodle Blogger was at the LSN delivering a newly designed Moodle Training session. It was a very successful day with universally good feedback (LSN mentioned that they will recommend ULCC as their primary Moodle training provider!). However, when reflecting on my own notes and that of the delegates in their evaluation form, it occurred to me that they support the concerns we have and still take lessons from:

1. Training shouldn't be in Isolation
To be effective, training has to be structured and fit within a development framework. For example, Moodle 'Drop-In' sessions may have some impact, but to be truly effective, e-Learning and Moodle has to be seen to be important and part of the Quality framework for teaching and learning.

2. Staff Development Strategy

Training should have a clear purpose to raise standards in teaching and learning. Why not think about providing some training on Effective PowerPoint USING Moodle. This means that you can have a series of training that engages teachers with e-Learning and using the learning platform.

3. Be 'fit for purpose'.

My experience is that, for most people, especially if they're new to Moodle, a whole day's training is too long. Try to organise that training is delivered in short manageable chunks, just as we would expect to deliver to students.

4. ‘Follow-up’ training should be clearly sign-posted

When undergoing Moodle training, delegates are motivated if they are shown where they will be going next, rather than just hanging in limbo where everything learned can be forgotten within a week or two.
5. Be ready to go

Using technology can be really frustrating for users, and especially those who aren't familiar with it. Be sure that everything you can do beforehand is done and ready to go, as creating accounts, fiddling with logins, and network issues will turn people off unless they are managed as part of the training.

6. Try to engage the teacher

Make the effort to design Moodle training for teachers - anyone can read what features are included from an online manual, but teachers are inspired by examples of what they can actually use them for. Ensure that everyone is clear about what the training is for (course design, course management, administration, etc.) and it’s what they want.

Another thing that really motivated our delegates was that they were enrolled as learners onto a course beforehand. This enabled them to bring their own real experiences to the training session which had an impact on how they approached the training.

So what is 'Personalisation' Gordon?

ULCC Moodle Blogger has been busy again this week, and a couple of interesting issues have bubbled to the service;

First, last week's survey results have been interesting. We were informed that no tick-box was provided for "none of the above". Apparently, many of us have yet to explore the wonders of Web2.0 as educational tools! I feel this is certainly an area that we'll revisit in the future, and we'll organise a Webinar soon, featuring the use of Blogs, etc. in teaching and learning. But the results did show that Blogs are most popular. Contact me if you have anything that would be a good case study (Barry Spencer's Blogspot has some interesting work).

Second, UMB noted with interest Gordon Brown's speech featuring 'Personalisation'. Like several others, we thought it resembled ideas from work that RSC London Moodle group has been doing over the last year or so. Some suggested that one can also find hints of Clinton too: http://www.hindu.com but I don't remember inviting him along to our Moodle RUGs.

Seriously though, I'm very interested in how learning providers can express and/or represent 'personalisation'. Perhaps we have to look to the work being done with Blogs, social networking tools, and the ILP's etc. (Like Barry, or ULCC). Certainly we see anecdotal evidence at least suggesting that learners are more engaged and in touch with their learning, meaning that they are somewhat controlling when, where and how the learning takes place - discuss? See you next week.

The enrolment and induction stress should be on the wain as the teaching kicks in. Hope all is going well and things are settling down. The ULCC Moodler has been very busy with a large planning exercise (details of this will follow in future blogs), and participating in a RSC West Midlands Webinar. Incidentally, ULCC will be providing some Moodle webinars and currently organising a programme for administrators and practitioners - dates/programmes will be circulated in the next week or two.

Anyway, what caught my eye and made me smile was an article in the Education Guardian last Tuesday "Moodle takes lead in secondaries". The article outlines the exact reasons why the ULCC service makes so much sense!

Schools are moving to Moodle in a big way because it’s seen as a ‘free’ option. Ray Barker, director of Besa says "Schools see it as a way to save money, but they often end up spending much more than they anticipated due to the cost of resourcing it". Hidden costs to install, maintain and develop the Moodle software is something that requires expertise and infrastructure and, if you don't possess it, can be an enormous additional cost. In FE/HE, the expectation is that IT Departments will look after it. As a critical service, IT usually doesn't want or can't take care of it and they don't want burdening with the added responsibility.

Ray Barker goes onto say ‘Because of the nature of open source software, technical support often costs much more than with a proprietal equivalent’! Blackboard/WebCT with annual licensing costs of £15K doesn’t seem such a bad idea when faced with new staffing costs of £50K - £100K. "For a school to successfully implement an open source system, they often have to have a champion who can see it through its technical difficulties." Surely he can't be suggesting an organisational dependency on one individual is a solution? Many of you have learnt by bitter experience that this is a recipe for a future catastrophe!

He reckons that proprietal VLEs will still flourish – but then wasn’t Besa something to do with Becta's advice to schools to lay off Moodle?

http://education.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,330756020-126004,00.html

Design for e-Learning

Yesterday, I attended an event organised by the University of the Arts, and hosted at our very own Fashion Retail Academy. I chaired a couple of very interesting sessions covering the use of VLEs, Blogs, wikis, etc. However, the keynote presentation by Grainne Conole, Professor of e-Learning at the Open University (also keynote at our own Moodle RUG last November - see picture right), was what caught my interest. Some of the projects she's been working on have produced results, although not particularly surprising, are well worth restating. You can find them in the new publication by JISC, 'In their own words'

Namely, that our society is changing beyond recognition; technology and information rich, we live in a 'networked' society and becoming technology dependent. This has a massive impact on how we live our lives, including how we learn - 'distributed cognition', meaning that learning is intrinsically related to our environment.

Keeping abreast of these developments, whilst trying to cope with our own change management within sometimes overtly resistant organisational culture, is the e-Learning Manager's lot! The learning culture is shifting:

• individual -> social
• information -> communication
• passive -> interactive
• institutional tools -> personalised tools

The thought she left us all pondering, was 'How do we DESIGN learning activities which make effective use of tools and pedagogy?' Answers on a postcard please...

ILPs and Personalisation

Survey
Some interesting results in our Blog survey; we're currently split between Moodle and a new pencil case being the most important thing to have at the start of the year. Only a few hours left if you haven't voted and want to influence which clinches it!

Individual Learning Plans
For most learning providers, Individual Learning Plans are central to the delivery and support of learning and, with students provided more opportunity to manage their own learning, play an important role in our approach to 'personalisation'.

Over the summer, Ashley Garner and Redbridge College commissioned ULCC to develop a fully integrated ILP for their Moodle VLE enabling students and staff to manage targets, goals and reports online. It possesses enough flexibility to be customised, offering a variety of other
applications: mentoring, learning support, employer-based training, staff and professional development, etc.

Developed to work within the inspection guidelines as outlined by the QIA, it is now ready to be released to the wider community and you can be the first to take a look at a fully interactive trial:

http://moodle.ulcc.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=107

Username: student01
Password: ulccilp

What's New?

What’s new?

Welcome to the new ULCC Moodle Blog. I will be sending out regular bulletins as a means of keeping you up to date with latest news, items of interest, and anything else that comes up that we think will be of value. It is also an opportunity for me to keep abreast of Web2.0 to communicate regionally.

This first post is just to welcome you all back from a summer break (apologies for those of you, like me, who didn't manage to get away). I'll be posting out some items next week, including some hot news, so don't miss it. I'm starting with asking you to fill out the first poll of the year.