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.