Moodle Tool Guide and open resources: when the crowd goes “Oi!”

Jan 112012
 

Hand Stop Sign_1724Many of you will be familiar with the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers which has been doing the rounds in the Moodle community since 2010. It’s been tremendously exciting for me to see the guide I released under a Creative Commons license, being used, re-used and re-developed by so many people for so many different purposes.

Why should you share an Open Educational Resource?

Besides being a staff development tool for me, the Moodle Tool Guide  has  taught me so much about what it means to be an open resource contributor. Until the MTG went viral(ish), as an ed tech I would often encourage teachers to share their resources openly. It was always a logical, practical argument around the benefit for the community. I don’t think I articulated the personal rationale for providing an open educational resource with passion.  Now I can speak from experience, when I say that sharing your teaching resources openly can: Continue reading »

Moodle Course Design: a high-wire act #mootnz11

Jul 282011
 

Zippos Circus UK, 2008I was very pleased to be one of  a number of presenters talking about learning design at this year’s New Zealand Moodle Moot. Stephen Lowe talked about learning theories and Julian Ridden did an epic session on Game Theory which unfortunately I missed but he’s uploading an open course about it to MOOCH soon. But what was even better is that all of us were almost accosted by #mootnz11 attendees wanting to talk about this topic more. Learning design is back, baby! And it’s hot!

Below you will find the slides for my MoodleMoot New Zealand presentation with tips for the course design process, as well as our templates. Continue reading »

#iMoot – Moodle Course Creator Challenge – The Rubric

May 022011
 

I’m greatly enjoying the #iMoot international Moodle conference (Moodle conferences are called MoodleMoots). Over the course of 4 days, a veritable “who’s who” of Moodle experts are sharing their  case studies, experiences and work. Topics cover all aspects of Moodle: teaching, course design and development, tools, Moodle development and the future of Moodle.

Swiss Army Knife

One of the great activities as part of the iMoot is the Course Creator Challenge. It’s the brain child of the amazing Gavin Henrick and I think we’ll be seeing these kind of competitions popping up at other Moodle events. Participants in the challenge have 4 days to create a Moodle2 course on Climate Change. They can get as creative as they like, and choose their own audience, but must adhere to a few requirements. How exciting!

Gavin has kindly invited me to be part of the star-studded panel assessing the courses which includes, Tomaz Lasic, Julian Ridden, Michelle Moore, Mark Drechsler and MoodleFairy herself, Mary Cooch. Haven’t felt worthy of that company, but boy did it rock to be part of the Panel discussion on Saturday (midnight til 2 am for me in New Zealand). It was well attended, wonderfully facilitated by Gavin and the topic was “What makes a good Moodle course?” If you missed it, it’s well worth going back to the recording…

A recurring theme was “horses for courses”, you choose what uses for you, for your students and for your course. And as @moodleman remarked:

#moodle is a “Swiss army knife”. Don’t try and use all the blades. Just pick the ones that meet the tasks you are trying to achieve.#imoot.

And as someone in the backchannel then added, if you try to use all of them at once, you’ll end up stabbing yourself.

Rubric

Although the Course Creator Challenge is limited to registered attendees only (and at AU$65 who could resist) and is still ongoing, I did want to share this rubric we’ve created to help us with the judging. Moodle course designers and teachers may find it useful, even when not part of the competition. Continue reading »

Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers

May 242010
 

A few weeks ago, a Social Media Cheat Sheet was doing the round. A nice visualization of the pro’s & cons of each social media channel, but with a business/marketing focus. I thought I should do one for social media use in education. However for most of the teachers I work with, our Moodle (EIT Online) is still their primary online teaching environment. So instead I set out to create this poster size guide for teachers, allowing them to compare the functionality and pedagogical advantages of some standard Moodle tools, adding a column to indicate how tricky the tool is to set up.

Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers (icon)

Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers

Hope you find it useful. Would appreciate your feedback.

Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers (PDF)

Online Facilitation: An email too far?

Mar 262010
 

Speed Bump Sign

A few weeks ago, I ran an online facilitation workshop with a group of teachers & their managers. Together they run a programme that is taught entirely online. As part of this, a draft of some online course protocols was on the table. Most of these had to do with the updating & editing of the courses, but one of the protocols had to do with teaching the courses. It proposed that teachers should use the Course Announcements forum (a News forum in Moodle, our LMS) at least once a week. In the past, some courses (certainly not all, don’t want you to get the wrong idea…) had underused the Course Announcements (and other forums). A rather heated discussion followed this proposal.

The opponents to this protocol seemed to have 2 main objections:

Continue reading »

Tour de Moodle

Dec 102009
 

Last week Friday I started a fun little Twitter event called Tour de Moodle. Interested in seeing other people’s Moodle setups, layouts and themes, I asked people to share a link to their Moodle homepage.

Tour de Moodle tweetout

Tour de Moodle tweetout

I thought it would be a perfect end-of-year activity, but last weekend was embarrasingly quiet (cue: tumbleweeds). However, after a week the Tour de Moodle now seems to be getting a little traction (thanks to @adzebill, @moodleman, @moodlerific, @dafyddhumphreys and @joseph_thibault).

You can see the stops the Tour de Moodle has made so far at What the Hashtag (my favourite twitter archiver at the moment): http://wthashtag.com/Tourdemoodle

Participating is easy, just send out a tweet including:

  • a link to your organisation’s Moodle homepage
  • the hashtag #tourdemoodle
  • the hashtag #moodle
  • optional: “Pls share yr Moodle too”

Looking forward to watching your Moodles race by! Currently the yellow jersey holder is @kineoopensource.

Tour de Moodle

Moodle Wishlist (4)

Jun 252008
 

Some of the lecturers I work with have started using wikis in their courses this semester. Students and staff have reacted largely positively. They appreciate the collaborative work they can now do but don’t enjoy the usability. After doing some wiki introduction sessions, seeing the Moodle wiki in action over the semester and also supporting staff in their use of other wikis (Wetpaint, PBWiki), I have a few additions to my Moodle Wishlist, to do with the Moodle Wikis. Here’s what I wish for:

  • On Edit automatically open the enlarged version of the editor. Very rarely is a wiki page short enough to be comfortably edited in the small editor version. And it is the nature of wiki pages to grow so why not open straight into the larger editor?
  • Threads or comments function associated with a page. The current workaround is to set up a discussion forum to go alongside the wiki. But this leads to posts like: “if you go to the second page in the Tools category you can see the work I’ve done…”
  • Improve the internal linking. Add a drop down menu or button (Insert Wiki Link) with list of pages to choose from. The current  process has too many steps:
  1. Find the exact page name,
  2. Then copy its name
  3. Then find page you want to put the link on
  4. Go to Edit mode
  5. And paste the name between square brackets.
  • Improve the picture upload. The Binary File option is clunky and using it is unlike any other action students take in Moodle.
  • Allow creation of Userpage. Having your own wiki space can be motivating and a way of creating buy-in. (Could this perhaps also show overview of user’s actions in the wiki?)
  • Allow creation of template pages. Being able to set up templates would allow staff to guide students better in what is expected of them.
  • Add an Add page button. Creating a page by giving it a name in square brackets is a simple action but an unfamiliar concept that is difficult to explain.

Moodle Wishlist (3)

Jan 022008
 

Working both in WebCT and Moodle this semester, I’m discovering quite how different these environments are. More about that later. In the meantime, 2 features present in WebCT that I would like to see in Moodle.

  • Group tool, where students can self-select into groups with a maximum number of slots and based on this grouping, are enrolled in the appropriate forums/chats etc.
  • Replies to My Posts – in forum-based courses you are unlikely to read everything. But there are certain things you always want to read, the replies to your own posts. Having these grouped as you log in to the course is very handy. Perhaps this could sit in the My Posts tab?

Moodle Wishlist (2)

Dec 062007
 

I want course version control, just like you get in wikis. This would be useful when developing a site with a team, particularly when some team members are new to online learning developments. The history can show you what other team members have been working on and you could roll back in case of mishaps (“I went to move something and accidentally deleted all the files, I don’t know how it happened”).

It may give new online teachers confidence to try new things, if they knew that the previous version is always there to fall back on.

Moodle Wishlist

Dec 022007
 

As a Moodle administrator, am quite enjoying the experience of being a Moodle student. And am finding some things I would like…

1. Intuitive forum handling. My fellow students struggle with the e-mail copies and the read/unread messages. The first PD session I did on Moodle had the same results – all my participants bewildered and overwhelmed at the message deluge. And you control that in your profile where the controls have some outlandish names. Read/unread messages is called Forum tracking…

2. Ability to tag a post for future reference, or as “I must come back to this.” The USQ course is very text heavy, with a combination of the wiki, the blogs and the forum posts in Moodle to track. Sometimes I read a post but am not ready to answer yet. Wouldn’t it be good if I could tag it/flag it to return at later stage?

3. Why not a drafts place for your posts, so you can start a message but let it sit in the system until you are ready to post. Most blogs offer this functionality. Does anyone know of an LMS that does? Is there a reason why LMSs wouldn’t?