First week of 2012

Migration, Migration
As part of the college merger project, the Christmas break has been used to migrate Orpington College Moodle vle away from hosting with ULCC and onto our own internal servers, a move that involved a change from unix/Linux to Windows.
The rationale was primarily a cost saving exercise, and given that we have the in-house expertise to make it happen, we have, and all appears to be running very well. The next stage will be the move from our current Bromley College vle
from our own Linux to Windows server. This means that we shall be running two instances of the vle from a single server with two IP's, should be interesting.


Online OCR
Thumbing through some course hand-outs the other day, I found material that I would like to post onto the vle, but after much searching and delving could not locate the original electronic version; their fate no doubt sealed by the crash of my hard drive between my weekly backups a couple of years ago. The only electronic version that I could find though was in screen shot form, Ouch. Anyway a web search turned up a very useful discovery, and just in case as like myself you have not come across the facility yet, then try the online OCR at http://www.free-ocr.com/ the reCAPTCHA was an easy also, excellent.

SharePoint Guide

If you have been following this blog then you will know that we are in the process of adopting SharePoint as part of our Moodle deployment solution. Should you be in need of a SharePoint guide then take a look at this pdf from MicroSoft. Written as a companion to the SharePoint Server 2010 Evaluation Guide for Technical and Business Decision Makers, I found it very readable.

ePolicy time

With the training now in place to support staff in moving components of programmes away from the traditional class approach and toward an eLearning mode as part of our standard course delivery. This change in practice will inevitably begin to influence those activities that we would normally associate with the more traditional expectations of class work and lectures, specifically learning, collaboration and assessment. Within a working eLearning environment these components will inevitably begin to take place at times and locations beyond the more traditional physical and time constraints imposed on both staff and students by timetables.
As part of an overall eLearning strategy, I have put together an initial ePolicy discussion document that I feel should provide us with a reasonable set of outline suggestions and proposals to address thosew particular circumstances, expectations and requirements for eLearning covering :- Student Privacy, the use of email, forum and chat discussions, submission of assignments particularly with regard to deadlines, issues regarding the provision of technical help, Student Codes of Conduct, plagiarism linked to Intellectual Property Rights.
I finally sent the discussion document off this morning and so once these are worked on and approved we can commence thinking about installing them in handbooks and course materials.

Thats all for nowbut please stay in touch for future postings.