And the big question is?

Moodle is certainly being used by staff and students now, I took a quick look at the logs beginning from the first teaching week and we have some 14000+ records, not bad considering we are still only running at 260 users in total. The thing for me now is to begin assessing the impact of content. Its Ok to upload your class documents but that’s not in itself going to exploit the potential of a VLE with respect to addressing the issues of widening participation and extended classrooms. For that materials need to be more engaging than those static handouts, and so I am preparing some questionnaires on the new material for students to complete, and its the outcome of this that will ultimately separate the VLE from a Course Management System; my distinction, and I guess cred.

I had a check of the Moodle user accounts today and we now have 66 staff and 150 students registered; some students seem to have problems getting their email accounts correct, this could become an admin issue for us. The course status at the moment is 52 with 288 modules. I have eight more staff for the Moodle Induction training tomorrow 22/09. On Tuesday I introduced students to the CourseGenie-PageFlip e-book (featured earlier on this blog), have to see what the feedback is and will publish it.

A good week for Moodle

It’s been a good week for the Moodle rollout, printed off and personally delivered this month’s newsletters to staff mailboxes; about 300. I did think about email, but I really want everyone to see this and emails are to easy to delete and its gone forever and looking around my desk there seem to be pieces of paper that have been here forever, QED, or is this just me I wonder? Anyway that was Wednesday, today, Friday, went to arrange training times with Staff Development for both morning and evening sessions, only to find that enquiries have already begun, the newsletter is being read!!!. Macromedia Flash arrived for the VLE Content Development team, and the Support Workshop requested a support course in Moodle so they can carryout demonstrations for users!! Everything seems to be falling into place.

Changing times

Recently I started to record the time I spent running my side of the VLE operation. And apart from the obvious use, I realised that its going make an interesting chronicle of how my activities change with the rollout. At the moment I have a reasonably good monthly estimate for the following

• Publishing the monthly Newsletter 2 hours
• Course creation & account management 4 hours
• Email activity 4 hours
• Awareness, training & accounts 12 hours
• Liasing with Moodle support workshop 2 hours
  or 28 hours per month

However as of yet I do not have reliable figures for:- Material, resource & Moodle development, support for the Content Development team, the numerous telephone enquiries, maintaining the support websites (including this blog). So if you are running a VLE how do these compare, please let us all know by replying if you have time.

Two systems, one login

Ran an extra training session this morning, which went well and spent most of the afternoon creating courses for everyone that had attended. While I had the candidates in class, it proved to be a good opportunity to try out the common authentication between the college Windows network and Moodle, where Moodle can validate against an account in Active Directory using the RADIUS plugin, this means a single login for everyone, including students!! as long as they have a College network account first, bye the way, it worked.

Where did that file go?

As a VLE user, you are becoming increasingly reliant on the availability of digital content, OK you save it in Moodle or maybe a content repository and thats OK right, well maybe not,did you kmow the census population data for 1951 got itself lost, along with a significant portions of the 1961 and 1971 census data! Well it was a surprise to me, but its not just the safe storage of material how about format, according to an Article by MacKenzie Smith (Associate Director for Technology- Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries) "In an era when the ability to read a document, watch a video, or run a simulation could depend on having a particular version of a program installed on a specific computer platform, the usable life span of a piece of digital content can be less than 10 years". Recently I came across the DCC,(Digital Curation Centre), The DCC provide HE & FE with future-proof best practice on digital content preservation: harmonised with available content storage. Their mission is to "support and promote continuing improvement in the quality of data curation and of associated digital preservation". They are looking for participation and feedback, DCC are well worth a visit so click-here and feel free to post your views here.

Growing demand for Moodle

Its looks as if I may need to revise one of the earlier posts where I expressed the view there would not be many more takers for Moodle training before September start, when today's calls to our admin office resulted in us having to arrange two training sessions for next week. I have been thinking about ongoing support for Moodle and have approached our Open Access support team, who are keen to be involved by the way, to provide a regular drop-in workshop for anyone wishing to develop their ideas following initial training, thereby providing a more personalised service, all very encouraging.