About a month ago I attended this conference. My priorities were:
- Moodle (in the context of the MET program and UBC’s LMS selection processes)
- Sloan C (having not been too familiar with the nuts and bolts of the organization)
- MERLOT (it’s MERLOT…pretty straightforward resource)
In addition to the 3 day conference I did one pre-conference session presented by the team at San Francisco State University’s (SFSU) experiences deploying Moodle as their LMS at the institutional level. This was, in hindsight, the most valuable session for the week.
SFSU
SFSU largely is a blended environment: few courses are wholly delivered online. Their processes have been informed by four questions:
- What to integrate
- How to integrate
- How ready is the application (for plug-ins, powerlinks, etc)
- How ready is Moodle
They found that prioritizing what already is used and making it work., as well as leveage existing tools as much as possible, was the best tack. Keeping end users experience/interface issues at the fore too.
SFSU rebrands Moodle s as “iLearn” rather than Moodle. All instructors have editing teacher accounts. They use the Quickmail Moodle 3rd party email plug-in, have bespoke text blocks with all learner’s links in their default course shell designs, and use DIVA for mutlimedia hosting, which has a powerlink. Ditto for Echo360, a lecture capture tool which they rebrand as “Course Stream”. I didn’t really see the point about the rebranding of tools: if they switch vendors they will still need to reskill users–not changing the product name seems more confusing to me!
They currently authenticate via LDAP but are moving to an open source/open access product Shibboleth. They’ve also cracked their Moodle installation so it offers a tabbed-by-year format for users. Developing scripts for managing enrollments was very challenging: currently they do one batch update of registrations overnight–a huge limitation to my mind. Perhaps Shibboleth would ameliorate this?
They’ve also cracked the grade book (simplified the interface) and are working on integrating library resources currently hosted in their Drupal CMS environment.
Taming Moodle
- Change only blocks and modules; avoid changes to core code
- Make wholesale changes; rearchitecture underlying stuctures and lose community support for open source product
- Minimize core code changes, but do what you have to do: balance between foregoing usability a core code
What DIDN’T work?
- Slow down issues when system oversubscribed.
- Moodle API bugs.
- Using VMWare two apps serve.
- Maximum concurrent users unknown but SFSU has 28,000 students.
- Import tools for other LMSs are available.
- Have had to schedule online assessments to avoid overload.
Overall, a very interesting and well designed session. Powerpoint deck can be found here.
Moodle open forum
The other session that bears drilling down into was one of the open forums for Moodle users. For quite some time I’ve heard that the user community of Moodle provides excellent support. However, my experiences with the online “community” (including social media resources, the official Moodle community forums) have been underwhelming. Yes, there’s someone who can help configure a quiz question; ditto working within the code for programmers managing an installation. But in between? Not much.
Boy did this session change my opinion. Entirely positively!
Being an introvert (!) I worked through my anxiety about speaking in public and posed the first question:
“What can be done about the ugly, painful, hideous, never-ending Moodle splash page?” For those unfamiliar, Moodle can set up course shells based on blocks (modules), weeks or other structures–though the rest aren’t really relevant to what we do. But all of them have one splash page with the details of each block (or week) listed on the splash page. That means a 13 week course will eventually (once all the contents are released to students) be the equivalent of up to 10 pages to scroll through.
Not pretty. And pretty annoying. I didn’t get a good answer to my whinge (which several others echoed) though: I got several. There are some additional course formats that use javascript to make the contents of blocks/weeks hideable with a click. There are others that move the blocks/weeks into tabs across the top of your screen, each of which can be clicked into. These were demo’d in the session and looked great. Mike up in CMS will be installing 3 of these on the MET Moodle server in September.
Another example of a good question: “why Moodle over Sakai over Blackboard?” And yes, many of us LOL’d over that one (why Catholicism over Calvinism? Mac over PC? Body wash over soap?). One very valuable response was the cost of maintaining an installation of Sakai versus Moodle: Sakai is JAVA dependent and Moodle is PHP/SQL. JAVA programmers cost more and are harder to find.
Last question of note (for me): does Moodle support virtualization. Absolutely yes.
JOLT
I also attended a session hosted by the editors of Sloan-C’s Journal of Online Teaching and Learning (JOLT; http://Jolt.merlot.org/guidelines.htm). JOLT is published quarterly and is wholly online (open access). They publish the following types of papers:
- Research papers
- Case studies:
- Theoretical conceptual papers
- Position papers describes a problem or issue. With argument. “don’t get many”
- Instructional design notes: “currently battling with this”. Few submitted. Brief paper new object, approach, design strategy.
Clearly there’s a lot of scope for us to get some stuff in there! There’s a 6000 word limit (excluding references and abstracts). APA formatting, word file formats, submitted electronically.
Unlike most journals, JOLT has deadlines for each issue:
- 15/02 for June
- 15/05 for September
- 15/08 for December
- 15/11 for March
Turnaround 2 months for peer review; revisions are usually required within 4 weeks. Very snappy, very good! Acceptance rate for papers is around 34%–so competitive. Also very good!
JOLT needs more reviewers! I’ve given them my info and I suggest some of us do too. There will soon be a special issue on accessibility called.