Ian Reid :: Blog

Thanh Le

 

-          actually presented by Rebecca Hawkins, the business leader for the e-portfolio, while Thanh was the developer

 

For:

-          showcase

-          assessment

-          reflective practise – lifelong learning, enabling students to keep resources between courses, which may be a long time

 

all integrated with Moodle and the OU assignment system

 

students can manage their own material and share it as they wish

 

it has a range of wizards to guide students and organises information through areas like overview, spaces, tags, compilations, items, sharing and ‘pinboard’

 

www.open.ac.uk/mystuff 

 

Quite good, but probably needs to have some OU specific structures taken out for us.

Sam Marshall - OU

 

The title is enticing – and the room was overflowing!

 

These are in the contrib. area and are available for download but are not part of the moodle core. The range of options here is evidence of a vibrant OS community.

 

This session is about those from the OU

 

The OU plugins may require postgreSQL

 

• Resourcepage

List of files or links on one page – with lots of nice features

 

• Newsfeed

Can create and publish news feeds – can limit to a course or make them public

 

• Study calendar

Like a weekly course format but it is highly configurable, including progress ‘ticks’ and modifiable numbering and naming

 

• OUwiki

This is better than the native moodle wiki. It is well featured and has some good teaching features – like the ability to create and replicate wiki templates.

 

These were demo’d – including the installation processes – and all look terrific!

Martin Langhoff

Scalabilit is always an issue! The OU is probably the best testbed you could have, but the theory is also important.

The focus has been on making database calls as efficient as possible, followed by disk access and memory use.

This ended up being of most use to developers, but it was still good to see the discussion going well.

 

Martin Langhoff 

The aim is to allow Moodle installations to share content etc

Currently there is SSO for Moodles, Mahara, enrolments, and roaming themes 

This would be useful for sharing courses between institutions, separate cohorts (eg alumni) accessing hosted courses, etc

It is hoped that over time network effects will increase the usefulness of the moodle network, but it has value without that.

Coming:

• LAMS
• Moodle client from OU
• gradebook grades
• multiple languages: .NET (C#), python, java etc
  
• student management systems

This seems well worked out and a nice way to make the most of Moodle's large take-up

 

Mahmoud Kassei

 

My interest in this session is not so much the functionality of the quiz – I am already happy with that – but instead to look at how the developer process works and how it interfaces with the community in improving the tools.

Improvements were:

• Summary panel
• Navigation improvements
• Adaptive mode implementation (this is similar to formative assessment in Australia)

 

Its clear that some excellent work has gone on here. With the possibility of conditional branching coming, this was quite impressive, and well received by the audience. The feedback and testing from students at the OU was also another big benefit!

 

 

 

 

Martin Langhoff

 

‘hole in the wall’ experiment in India showed the possibilities of Internet access for education in developing countries – sometimes called ‘minimal intrusion teaching’ which relies on children’s curiosity

 

The one laptop per child project has a similar aim – to support individual discovery learning by providing internet access and e-books via a laptop

Features:

• Screen is readable in sunlight
• Discoverable interface (called sugar) rather than a windows interface – zoomable between task, applications, network
• task centric
• web access
• network-centric applications rather than desktop centric - eg – sub-ether edit is a concurrent editing application that is a network centric word processor rather than a desktop centric application like Word

 

The children in India came to be highly proficient when:

• they worked in groups
• the laptop was in a safe public place like a playground (not a classroom)

 

The $100 laptop is linked to a schoolserver and will cease working if it is away from the school server for too long. The School server will have

• Moodle (will manage access with OpenID)
• Wikipedia
• Internet access
• Storage of student data and backups
• Software updates
• Enables offline use – eg with googlegears

 

We also had a demo of the computer and software built for it.

 

This presentation was more about the OLPC project than Moodle, but it was still interesting to see where this may be heading.  It seems to me the requirement to have a school server is a fatal flaw, unfortunately.

 

 

 

 

The VLE is dead. Long live the VLE

 

Niall Sclater

Director, Virtual Learning Environment Programme, OU

 

This is an interesting topic for us – Niall addresses the question – do we need a VLE at all??

 

PLE – personal learning environment – what is it and what use can it have?

Can a VLE be as engaging as Web 2.0?

Is the VLE under threat?

 

1. VLE model

–        institutional control, not student control

–        are a conservative technology

–        they restrict and control interaction and content

–        promote a culture of dependency

–        Andrew Keen – author of the cult of the amateur – popular blogs are the sensationalist ones

 

2. Small pieces model

–        Use the web to harvest services like flickr etc

–        Places a high load on student skills and knowledge to manage the process

–        Robustness and reliability are a problem

 

3. PLE client model

–        A PLE client is used to harvest services from VLEs and other services

–        ‘dock with the mother ship’ – Morrison

–        Need to invent and maintain the software

–        Not interoperable

–        A burden on institutions as well as learners

 

4.PLE server model

–        Browser is used rather than an application (eg ELGG)

–        Lack of control when hosted by a third party

–        Privacy and security issues

–        Not sound for an institution

 

5. Your laptop as your PLE

–        Browser centric but uses a PC for storage and management

–        ‘learner experiences project’ –JISC – looked at how students actually learn – they use their PC as their primary tool

 

We need to have learning management tools like calendars, assignments, learning outcomes, etc – cannot rely on personal control alone. Moodle can provide these.

Services need to be:

–        Robust

–        Integrated

–        Safe

–        Legal

–        Accessible

–        Supported by tutors / instructors

 

PLEs require a fundamental change in pedagogy and are more suited to informal learning

 

6. Moodle on a stick model (see previous session)

–        OU is seeking feedback

 

The e-portfolio as a social networking tool

–        Example –Jenny and Emma as teaching graduates from Uni of Wolverhampton – blogging experiences on practicum (video produced by HEFCE and JISC)

–        The MyStuff e-portfolio was demo’d

 

Moodle meets facebook

–        Is facebook for education a fad?

–        What social networking features should moodle have?

–        What privacy and security issues would arise?

–        Should we separate social networking from schoolwork?

–        There are Facebook to Moodle APIs, and to export moodle data to facebook, and finally to add moodle features into facebook

–        OU is trying to open up moodle to provide more web 2.0 style functionality through use of these tools

 

Conclusion:

1. VLE still needed

2. no consensus on PLEs

3. eportfolios could be a part of the answer

4. can open up a VLE for non-formal learning uses

5. we need the clickstream in order to evaluate effectiveness and to provide individual support

 

 

 

Sclater.com/blog

Colin Chambers

 

The idea is to be able to package up an entire moodle course and installation including a MySQL database and enable it to be installed on a PC – storable on a USB stick

 

This would be very useful for us in situations where bandwidth is a problem or those who cannot have internet access – eg people in prison.

 

The model shown was based on selective synchronisation of course components

 

This seems to be still at the concept stage. The OU probably needs this enough for it to put resources to it.

 

An ex OU staff member made a good point that this was tried at the OU with firstclass 10 years ago and there were many problems - so this was a good note for caution 

This is an area that we are still in need of in UniSAnet so it will be good to see where the Moodle quiz is up to

 

New gradebook is there already

Future developments:

• New question types have been produced by the google summer of code
• Improved navigation
• Adaptive mode has changed (formative assessment) to follow the approach of the product ‘openmark’ as used by the OU
• Certainty based marking (‘how certain are you?’)

 

Tim explained how the quiz works and recommended new plugins, including drag and drop types and ‘regular expression’ types. Mathematical expressions are also available.

 

The Moodle quiz has all the features currently that we would need

 

 

Steven sees Sakai more as a tool for researchers like yahoo groups and a place for content and Moodle more for e-learning

 

Looking at the concept of mashups from commercial and e-learning services so serves can he used freely by all

 

This relies on interoperability standards

 

Amazon and Google use ROA – resource oriented architectures

 

Is investigating a way for Sakai to join the Moodle RPC network. The Moodle network will remain simpler than IMS etc so it may become a grassroots standard

 

JCR – java content repository – may be useful for repositories – maybe a uni may have an enterprise Sakai system that could serve Moodle

 

Proof of concept: Camtools-from Cambridge is also a facebook plugin so he has proven that Sakai can expose resources to facebook . This demo showed that the mashup concept works

 

This also works with a number of content repositories-eg Xythos was shown

 

He also showed an example of Moodle taking content out of Sakai

 

Martin Dougiamis was at this session and he appeared to he supportive of this direction – with a moodle repository API coming