Moodleposium Notes

For what they're worth, my notes from the recent Moodle conference in Canberra. Least I now where they are!

Denise Kirkpatrick (Open Uni): Moodle @ OU

• OU is now 40 yrs old; no campuses; 220000 students; 1200 central academics; 8000 associate lecturers
• Open to people, places,methods, ideas
• no prerequesites to studt at OU (people)
• study from anywhere (places)
• students do not to have to attend any f2f event/location; ie distance ed (methods)
• Challenges for UK Higher Ed: more effective leadership
• chose Moodle in 2004
• couses at OU managed by a team of people; lecturer cannot operate independently (!)
• all tools are piloted and tested for scalability
• have developed a virtual microscope (excellent for geology for example)
• OU has all admin tools in Moodle so staff become familiar enough with Moodle to teach with it
• OU uses Elluminate

Social Networking

• strong SL presence (doesn't using SL conflict with the philosophy of it must work for everyone?)
• OU's version of Moodle is customised and particular
• OU has students in all 5 socio-economic groups (UK) ie people at the top and people at the bottom; for students in lowest gp they will supply laptop and net BB connection!
• 90% of students just enrol in the one subject they are interested in

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Group Work – Fairly Assessable? Amanda Burrell (UC)

• gets students to work fast (Thiagi like maybe?)
• Students require strategic and creative skills
• groups have private forums
• each student allocates effort 'mark' for each gp member weekly
• there is no guaranteed group grade

Kerry Trabinger – Getting them in and keeping them talking

• (Kerry used to work with Qantas College Online); currently working at FlexEd as part of the Centre of Education and Excellence at CIT)
• Context: class and community (separate)

Community Driven development towards...... (Martin Dougiamas)

• check Moodle tracker for summaries of issues being talked about in the Moodle community

Moodle 2.0

ADMIN

increased modularity; other app access – eg iPhone

CONTROL

conditional release will be added

INTEGRATION

• pushing and pulling content in and out
• test.moodle.org/filemanager
• record straight into discussion forum and post!!
• integration with Google Apps (SSO); (Google uses Moodle for its internal training)

USABILITY

• consistent navigation
• collapsible navigation menu (big tick!!!); configured as blocks

PEDAGOGY

• most people just focus on content, a passive forum, or quizzes/assignments2
• how about collaboration, sequencing activities, active forums bring in the content from the Net? Or co-create content? Use survey tools?

COMMUNITY HUBS

courses can be sent to a Hub that makes course available to others!! you could choose, download, and self-install course on your Moodle server


Julian Riddle – Communicating in Moodle

• the CHOICE tool
• St Ignatius (Sydney) use this to run student elections – great idea!!
• SPLIT FORUM TOOL try it
• J recommends we use the Dialogue tool (but it's a plug-in); t can provide private feedback/commentary within a discussion post

DAY 2

10 minute presentations

1.Glossaries (Andrew Reid)

can be used in assessment activities; students get marks for adding entries

2. Margaret Robson (CIT) – Engaging Interfaces

some really good interfaces on some courses – quite customised (we need to improve in this area); done with CSS/style sheets

3. Minh-Tam (Uni of Canberra)

have customised 'my courses' view; this would be handy for me!!!


Julian Riddle – Adding Flavour to Moodle

• “Moodle is elearning's Swiss Army knife”
• Accordeon Format – helps collapse topics
• Lightbox Gallery – image gallery/editor (like this one)
• add Skype to your profile

Derek Chirnside – Lightwork

• downloads all assignments to local PC, so they can be marked and resubmitted to Moodle
• allows inline comments in Word, (and Adobe PDFs?)
• looking for orgs to trial from October

Mark Drechsler

• Utilising Web 2.0 – Tips and Tricks
• Moodle wiki can be replaced by Ouwiki (from Open U)
• Nwiki
• no course blog currently in Moodle
• tag feature drags content sharing that tag into one place
• Mahara can be used for multiple blogs; better features and access control
• using external tools means better features but increased risk and less control
• Compare: feature set, usability, risk
  

Avoiding the Scroll of Death

• use link to directory
• use Book module
• use Label or Summary Tool to break up lists
• use Course Menu
• use Wiki tool !