Many 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:

• bring satisfaction of ‘a job well done’ when other practitioners in your field take your idea/resource and run with it,
• help someone else in your field, a colleague you may or may not know,
• bring you peer recognition within your country, internationally and sometimes even inside your institution (often a tougher nut to crack),
• provide you with external support for your ideas, processes or approaches (which may be controversial inside your institution),
• provide you with peer support, as you connect with other practitioners in your field. This is beneficial particularly if you work in isolation or are a niche expert in your institution,
• help you improve your resource, through peer review and comments,
• establish new connections with other practitioners and experts in your field,
• create new opportunities. I’ve had the privilege of being invited to a number of MoodleMoots and other conferences. that I couldn’t have attended otherwise,
• help you discover new resources and collections. You’ll be surprised at the many places your resource gets re-posted, re-tweeted and re-published,
• provide career opportunities. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been offered my current position at a large Australian university if it hadn’t been for the MTG.

Two new lessons learned

And then this week, the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers taught me two more new things. Here they are:

1. You may not have a leg to stand on…

In the first week of January my Tweetdeck column for “Moodle Tool Guide” started filling up with people mentioning it. I have this set up so I can see how the guide is being used and tweaked by the Moodle Community. I’ll usually get in touch with whoever’s been working on it. However upon following up, I noticed that in this case, it wasn’t our Moodle Tool Guide that was at the center of attention, instead it was a resource by a web conferencing company called WizIQ.

Moodle tool guide for teachers: How to interact with students online using Moodle fb.me/1r3qHFksv

— WizIQ Official (@WizIQ) January 4, 2012

Now I should be clear, WizIQ’s guide was very different. Other than the name, it was not similar to the original nor did it reuse parts of the original.

Whereas the Moodle Tool Guide is a poster-sized matrix tool assessing Moodle tool effectiveness for pedagogical aims, WizIQ’s resource was a How-to instruction manual for several Moodle tools with screenshots. But I was a little disappointed, thinking that having two documents out there with the same name, would detract from the now community-owned original Moodle Tool Guide.

The original MTG was released under a Creative Commons license, non-commercial with attribution and share-alike criteria. This protects it from someone using it for profit, or pretending authorship or ownership, but it doesn’t protect its name. Also, despite a Belgian judge ruling for Creative Commons to be legally binding in Belgium in November 2010, I’m not sure how much other legal precedent there is. So other than being a little sad at the guide losing its identity, there wasn’t a lot I could do. Or so I thought.

2. …But the crowd has your back.

And then I received this tweet from Nathan Cobb.

@catspyjamasnz I dropped a quick email to wiziq about their “Moodle tool guide” – Response included at link – bit.ly/wMu01H

— Nathan Cobb (@nathancobb) January 5, 2012

And he had. Someone in the Moodle crowd has stood up and said “Oi!”. Nathan had felt strongly enough to email WizIQ and ask if they were aware of the existence of the original. You can read Nathan’s blog post on his actions and reasons and WizIQ’s response on his blog. This is even more special if you know that I don’t know Nathan other than from Twitter. I’m not sure we’ve even ever tweeted each other directly. So I had to say thanks…

Dear @nathancobb, you’re a total trooper for taking up the Moodle Tool Guide claim w @wiziq! bit.ly/wMu01H Thank you!! #moodle

— Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz) January 5, 2012

I have to say WizIQ handled the incident well and swiftly. They stated that they were unaware of the original but quickly renamed and republished their guide – you can download it as 12 Moodle tools to interact with your students online. They even changed their publishing practices to include a search for a title: “the “quick google” is now part of our publishing SOP.”

This was my first personal experience with crowd intervention, although I did follow the much more serious story of the intentional breach of Creative Commons in 2010 of Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways series. An Australian company used his CC-licensed Interesting Ways to Use iPads in the Classroom as a handout at a sales event. Read more in Violating a Creative Commons License. The Interesting Ways series has a community that consists not only of users, but of contributors. Each presentation is crowd-sourced by teachers, education technologists and other professionals sharing their tips openly and freely. This community is so widespread, that someone who knew about the Interesting Ways was bound to run into the evidence of the breach of Creative Commons.

I wonder if what we are seeing is evidence of companies with pre-21st century business practices. They don’t involve themselves in their field enough, to have an awareness of the existing community and its artifacts, yet blatantly try to interact with that community. Social media should make that easier, but unfortunately many companies and organisations still seem to be in broadcast mode.

What if you don’t have a crowd?

It did leave me wondering, what happens to your open resource when you don’t have a crowd supporting it? At Online Educa 2011, John Bohannon in his keynote Without Wikipedia and Google, I’m Stupid, mentioned that only Wikipedia articles with great interest benefit from constant improvement through crowd editing. When there is no community around a page, fallacies or disproportionate importance to one aspect of an article, can exist for a long time. I suppose the same thing applies to OER’s. If a crowd doesn’t care for them, and they don’t have widespread recognition, they could easily be subverted for profit, or put to non-crowd use. And no one would ever know. Or act.

It’s been an interesting episode, providing me with more insights for when I talk to teachers about sharing their resources openly.

If you would like to learn more about Creative Commons, I’d recommend this resource: Creative Commons, What Every Educator Needs To Know

I 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.

OTARA Course Design Template

Activity Sheet Template

Activity Sheet Example

cc licensed Flickr photo Zippos Circus UK 2008 by DirkJanRanzijn

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.

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. All feedback is appreciated…

Course Creator Challenge Rubric

The following criteria will be used by the judges to vote on the quality of courses. Of course we will also allow for a Moodle X Factor.

Criteria for your course:

• Use a variety of different standard Moodle activities (at least 4).
• Briefly describe the intended audience (age, level, interest field…), max 3 sentences.
• Briefly describe the course and the purpose of each activity, max 2 sentences for each.
• No use of copyrighted material without permission.
• Agree to have the content and course Creative Commons licensed and published on MOOCH (Moodle.org Community Hub).

Rubric created using Rubistar4Teachers. CC Licensed BY-SA-NonCommercial: iMoot 2011, Tomaz Lasic, Gavin Henrick, Julian Ridden, Joyce Seitzinger

After helping organise a staff development day about 21st C Learning (more about that later), I find myself musing on the link between feedback and encouragement as reciprocal actions.

This was a day with mixed ability and experience staff, all encouraged to take the next step up on their education technology skills ladder. They did this in groups, led by a colleague who is more experienced.

Usually what happens with these ‘traditional-style’ staff development sessions is that a survey is sent the next week to staff (the ‘happy sheets‘). Did you find this useful? That’s interesting but not as interesting as asking again 6 weeks later, are you still using your newly acquired skills? If not, why not? If yes, how else can we help you?

Now a little red cynical me, popped up on my shoulder, and said: “of course they will not still be using it in 6 weeks”. There’s rivalling priorities (research, clinical placements, marking) and suddenly what was claimed today to be a timesaver (Moodle quizzes, Flip videos), seems like just too much work.

But then I thought, wait a minute, that is my responsibility too. How can I encourage and support them over the next 6 weeks, so they will continue to use these skills?

My preference would be to run staff development through networked learning. Inducting staff into an education technology network of like-minded colleagues, would make on-going encouragement and support easy. But this is not a part of our institution (yet – give me time ).

So in traditional staff development situations (one day, 2 days, a 2-hour workshop), how do I deal with my side of the bargain? If participants are expected to continue using a newly acquired skill and give me feedback on my workshop/my work, then my side is to provide active encouragement & support (more than just being on the end of a phone or email). But being realistic about my available time too, as only e-learning advisor in an institution of 350 staff.

Options to keep my side of the bargain within current institution structures:

• Use the newly set up Faculty community page to provide links to examples and instruction videos
• Send weekly emails to the group with interesting education technology and 21st C learning news
• Send 3 surveys for feedback, 1 next week, 1 in 6 weeks, 1 at end of the year. These need to be informative & snappy, but not happy sheets
• Encourage the staff with more education technology experience to share examples of their work on the Faculty community page
• Run virtual debates via the Faculty community page. Some valid questions and worries were posed today about use of social media in education. This conversation can be continued
• Ask faculty managers to take active role in encouraging continued ed tech use (through above mentioned methods).

Any other suggestions?

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

Hope you find it useful. Would appreciate your feedback.

Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers (PDF)

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:

1. They didn’t like to be dictated in when and how they should contact their students,

2. They felt that one course announcement a week would be too invasive, as the students would receive these as an email in their inbox, adding to their “information overload”.

I find that drawing a parallel with the on-campus  situation is always helpful. In this case…

1. We are all used to teachers being timetabled in, to be in a set classroom, at a set time, to teach a set group of students for on-campus classes. This is a ‘protocol’ that teachers accept and in fact, expect. Surely this new expectation to send a course announcement, in a set environment (the Course Announcements forum), at a set time (once a week) to a set group of students (the online students) is not unduly different from the on-campus expectation?

2.  We find it perfectly acceptable to ask students to leave their home, arrange child care or time off work, drive 2-10 kms to our campus, find a parking space, then walk across campus to be in a set room at a set time and sit there for 2-4 hours in a row. But an email in their inbox is too much of an imposition?

I believe that in an online class, communications should happen in a steady stream, flowing freely & flexibly, whether through forums, chat rooms, wikis, blogs or other means, as participants, teachers & students together, come to grips with the topics. I’ve seen the differences in courses I’ve taught. When I’m communicating in a steady stream, so do the students. In cases where I flagged as I got too busy with other commitments, the entire course dynamics sagged like a soufflé when the oven door is opened. I’ve learned from this and now see a weekly email/forum post as an opening shot, rather than a bridge too far. Am I overly optimistic?

Of course it will take a while for all of us to get used to working in these new environments, but I’d like to echo Tomaz Lasic’s thoughts: “The sooner educators move beyond the point of fear & awe of Moodle [or any other tech] and see it as a tool just like a pen, desk, whiteboard, book etc. the sooner they will be used better and more frequently to reach the pedagogical goals”. Just try to picture the Course Announcements forum as that place at the front of the class where you usually stand or sit to communicate with your students.

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

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.

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.

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?