Dear Dr. Pang,
The Canadian International School of Beijing is currently in its third year of operation. However, the student population has more than doubled since its opening in the 2006/2007 school year. Should current enrollment rates continue, the school will be at its maximum capacity of 1,000 students in two years. Also, many of our students are currently living with legal guardians or are boarding. Their parents are living in other cities or abroad. As such, I propose we start moving our courses into a Learning Management System (LMS)/Course Management System (CMS). Such a system will allow for students to enroll in our courses beyond the physical limitations of space and it will also provide parents with access to course materials so that they can monitor the progress of their children from abroad.
Furthermore, as we are a school that prides itself on its use of educational technology it essential that we “continuously improve [our] professional practice, model lifelong learning, and exhibit leadership in [our] school and professional community by promoting and demonstrating the effective use of digital tools and resources (Nets for Teachers, 2008).”
Rationale for LMS vs. traditional Static Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
All of our teachers currently maintain and update an HTML website using Adobe Contribute on a daily basis. This website allows students, parents, and guardians to see what they have for homework and the notes that they took that day. However, they do not allow for any interaction between students, nor do they allow parents or guardians to track their child’s progress in their course(s).
A LMS will allow all of the above. In addition, a LMS will also “allow students to participate in online discussions and chats and turn in assignments online (Perkins & Pfaffmann, p. 34).” Giving parents access their child’s online progress also allows for better and more seamless communication in which students are held accountable for their due dates, assignments, tests, and grades (Perkins & Pfaffmann).
The LMS that I propose for our school is Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment). The rationale is simple: moodle offers the same features as other LMSs, however, while other LMSs such as Vista are costly, moodle is open source and free. Furthermore, there are at least two other schools in the Beijing area (Western Academy of Beijing (WAB) and the International School of Beijing (ISB)) that currently offer Moodle based courses and have informed me that they are willing to provide professional development in setting up and maintaining a Moodle course.
Moodle features
To gauge whether or not Moodle’s feature set meets the requirements of our school, I have applied the SECTIONS model (Bates & Poole, 2003):
- Students: almost all of our students have home Internet access and computers. As part of our one-to-one program, our high-school students each have their own laptop. Students also have access to five computer labs before school, during nutrition break, lunch, and after school
- Ease of Use: having tried Moodle’s demo site I have found it easily navigated by student and instructor, intuitive, and user friendly. Please feel free to follow the link provided and try it for yourself.
- Cost: Open source, free software and our current hardware meets all of the recommended specifications (see below for details)
- Teaching and Learning: Although much of the content will be based on what the instructor chooses, it should be noted that Moodle lends itself to exploratory, constructivist, and cooperative learning
- Interaction and Interactivity: Moodle has many built in features such as blogs, live chat, wikis, and forums. It also supports embedding flash documents, MP3s, PDFs, and various video formats.
- Organizational Issues: as teachers/students will not have access to computers for each class, teachers will likely have to have their lessons available both in Moodle and in another format such as Power Point or Smart Board for in class use. However, as we plan on filtering our laptop program in grades 1 through 8 over the next two years, this will become a null-issue.
- Novelty: having been created in 2001, moodle is relatively new. However, in terms of statistics, moodle currently has 56, 795 registered sites, 3,012,594 courses, 32,631,104 users, and 1,892,503 teachers. As moodle is open source, there are many forums dedicated to educational and technical support.
- Speed: Updating our infrastructure to host the LMS should take no longer than a week. Please see the timeline for a breakdown of specific times. Once the courses are up and running, updating the courses can take place in real time. That is, changes made by the instructor or student will be available immediately after saving.
Cost & Resources
As already mentioned, moodle is an open source LMS, that is, the basic installation package is freely available to institutions who wish to use it. There are hardware requirements: 160 MB of free web space, 256MB of RAM 1GB and a PHP enabled web server. Both our student and staff servers currently have more than 4 TB of free space which far exceeds the minimum, 8GB of RAM (which roughly equals 400 concurrent users (installing Moodle, 2009). The server does not currently have PHP capability, but this can be configured in approximately 8 working hours (based on personal experience).
We currently employ one network technician and one full time programmer. Their experience will be vital, however following the initial installation, the amount of work hours dedicated to the Moodle platform will be minimal. I suggest that the setup take place between July and August when students are not in school. Given the timeline below, teacher hours will be worked into regular prep periods (approximately 2 hours/week).
As this plan envisions students enrolling in our courses without physically being present, it will also be essential that our library expands its current online journal database to one more substantial such as EBSCO or JSTOR.
Timeline for implementation
2008/09 Summer – One week of network technician/programmer to install PHP capability to staff and student servers and setup Moodle Site
2009/10 School Year
- August – during the in service, have two teachers from WAB or ISB provide one day of professional development
- Term 1 – have four teachers from our technology integration team migrate their HTML web sites into a moodle shell (approximately 2 hours/week of their prep time)
- Term 2 – have the four teachers offer their Moodle courses to students
- End of term 2 – have students and teachers evaluate their experience with Moodle
2010/2011 School Year
- August – split experienced teachers into 3 groups (2 for elementary, 1 for middle, 1 for high) and provide professional development for teachers who would like to setup their own Moodle courses
- Term 1 – teachers develop their own Moodle course
- Term 2 – all developed courses are offered to students
- End of term 2 – have students and teachers evaluate their experience with Moodle
2011/2012 School Year (school should be nearing maximum physical capacity to hold students)
- Open Moodle courses to international registration (numbers will depend on available teaching staff)
If you require any further information, please do not hesitate to contact me.
I look forward to your comments and thoughts.
Sincerely,
John Stringer
References
Bates A. W. & Poole, G. (2003). A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In A. W. Bates & G. Poole, Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education, (pp. 75-108). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Moodle. (2009). Installing Moodle. Retrieved June 9, 2009, from http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installing_Moodle
Moodle. (2009). Moodle Demonstration Site. Retrieved June 9, 2009 from http://demo.moodle.org/
Moodle. (2009). Moodle Statistics. Retrieved June 9, 2009, from http://moodle.org/stats/
Moodle. (2009). Multimedia Documents. Retrived June 9, 2009, from http://docs.moodle.org/en/Multimedia_plugins
Perkins, Matthew & Pfaffman, Jay (2006). Using a Course Management System to Improve Classroom Communication. The Science Teacher. 73(7), 33-37.
The International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). Nets For Teachers. Retrieved June 9, 2009, from http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_for_Teachers_2008.htm