e-Learning projects to go

It was a while ago now that I was asked to head up an e-learning project initiative here at the college. Just this week the proposal finally received that seal of approval, funding. The idea, is that now teaching staff are beginning to make more use of the vle, which after all is really little more than an e-Learning delivery platform, they should now start to think in terms using it deploy and track learning activities rather than just as a means of distributing course notes, which so often is how these systems end up. The set-up that I have proposed is that we start with a staff wide email advertising the service, if you click-on the accompanying image for this post you will get the full draft pdf. I feel certain that there are plenty who would like to give the whole idea of e-Learning a try, but where to start. Well, they start by making a request for a short meeting at which we discuss what they would like to see happen and what the preferred outcome will be; I actually have a detailed form for this, that I will complete with them at the meeting. Of course there will be the need for some training in new applications, but that is something that we equipped to put in place. As you can see from the flyer, projects will fall into three categories of short, medium and long, each attracting a payment in the form of paid hours, that’s the sweetener. In all this my task is going to be to manage the various projects up to the point of their go-live date and then to collect feedback at completion. I am looking forward to this, and will be posting findings on this blog, so if you are interested then please keep in touch for that.

Bye for now best wishes Barry

New round of training starts

Just into a new round of vle training in Moodle. We have now completed the rollout and trials. From experience of trying to deliver the basic course in year 1 and then move on to the more advanced features in the following year though seemed to not produce the desired effect.
The problem appeared to be that if staff were slow to take up use of the vle fairly soon following the training, they seemed to loose confidence and I found them returning to the course again the next term or later. Now we are going to try and deliver the basic course over three weekly sessions and then move on to the more advanced courses in subsequent three weekly blocks. I am hoping that the idea of a quick progression to advanced features may prompt early adoption and use. In case anyone is interested in the content of the courses on offer I have listed the indexes below.

An Introduction to Moodle
System settings
Labels and headings
Editing facilities
Managing files and folders
Linking to resources
Assignments


Moodle web 2.0
Forum
Chat
Glossaries
Blogs
RSS feeds

Moodle quiz
Creating a Quiz
True or False
Multiple choice
Short answer
Numerical
Calculated
Matching
Random Short Answer
Description
Cloze (Embedded answers)
Reviewing a quiz

Any comments on your own experineces are welcome, regards Barry