RSC Moodle Roundtable

I went along to an RSC Moodle Forum round table in London yesterday that posed the question ‘What makes for a good Moodle activity’. Without looking at my members list there were about 20 of us there, so it turned into a very sociable and informative event, most enjoyable. For my own part in the day I brought along the work that I had been conducting on eLearning, much publicised on this blog, but I did take the opportunity to promote Wimba Create, which I think went down very positively.

MS Word template for making Moodle quizzes

The description of the tool makes it sound very interesting though I must admit to not having tried it out yet.

 This template is intended for quiz creators like me who do not like awkward Moodle mechanism for quiz authoring and prefer familiar word processor environment. Besides, the latter way of quiz creation is an offline activity and solves the problem of demanding continuous access to a Moodle server. The template is based on the original work of Mikko Rusama. I have almost completely recasted his code, and borrowed some ideas concerning the interface from Enrique Casto.My version do not use the GIFT format, which is not native to Moodle and lack some capabilities (for example, adding images to questions). The format used here is Moodle XML.

If you have used the tool, please feel free to comment

A blogging tool new to me anyway was Posterous. This little tool is seems to be be designed around need to support mobile blogging in that  includes the features of posting using an email, with attachments of photos, MP3s, documents, and video (both links and files. From what I managed to appreciate about app so far it would appear that social Media enthusiasts see it as a medium of choice for life-streaming, but for myself brilliant for student field trips. Well worth a look, though you may find it has been blocked by your College network!

Adobe Sticky Notes

Adobe Sticky Notes is a feature that while I had heard about, had not looked into, and as long as the Commenting tools are enabled in PDFs. If you have not tried this fpr yourself yet then basically a sticky note has a note icon that appears on the page and a pop-up note for your text message. You can add a sticky note anywhere on the page or in the document area. The presenter wa showing how they were being used as a question and answer feature, very impressive, so if you are intersed then please follow this link to the site.


Adobe in association with Econsultancy

I received an email the other day that offered the download Digital Intelligence Briefing: Digital Trends for 2012 from Adobe in association with Econsultancy report. The opening paragraph describes the document as :

Based partly on a survey of 600 businesses, this report aims to distil a plethora of data and discussion points into some key digital trends, challenges and opportunities which businesses should be paying close attention to during 

While this is of course very much a business report  it does include a lot of trend data relating to Social Media and mobile, so of more than a little interest to us using social learning.

Bye for now and do feel free to comment

 

Moodle 2.0 Making the Leap at RSC

In common with a lot of colleges, universities and institutes running Moodle 1.x, we are now beginning to consider the way forward for migration to Moodle 2, not least because it seems support for Moodle 1.x will cease this coming summer.

To this end I was more then enthusiastic to get myself along the an RSC event in London ‘Moodle-2.0 Making the Leap’ the choice of title I was informed influenced in some part by the 29th February, I didn’t see that connection I must admit.

The event was enjoyable and very much worth the trip, presenters from colleges that already made the leap were there all giving presentation workshops on the themes of Pre migration, migration and post-migration. One measure I use as to how much these events are to me is in the amount of notes that I take, and on the way home I counted 13 full pages in the A5 notepad handed out to us, say no more.

While we had not actually set a fixed date for our own migration, one thing became clear, do it early, and that running it over the summer break was not going to be an option, users need to see it, try and get used to the new features.


There did emerge though two very strong approaches and these were:-

1: Simply run the upgrade process effectively replacing old with new. Assuming you are running it very much out of the box and so with little by way of customisation and integrated apps. Of course if you decide to take this option then it should go without saying that you make a secure backup of your old site and database first.

2: Create a brand new instance of the vle, while retaining the original and transfer courses over; this can be a lengthy process however, but it would be a good time to get users to decide just what material they really do wish to take forward. One college reported that only 45% of courses were actually required for the new system! On a really important note to remember though is that users and their data will not be included as part of the transfer.


Of course the big question ticking away in my mind is, what are the dangers?

Well it seems that file names can be a cause of some concern i.e much to long, the type of thing that can happen when you just save without naming and then the whole first sentence or more piles in, its happened to me. I also picked up concern over spaces and underscores, and need to look into that. If you read this blog regularly then you will no doubt have come across my posting some time ago, where I reported developing a new lesson plan where grouped content could be copy-n-pasted straight into a block. Well now it turns out that such practices can result in the upgrade process chucking such blocks all over the place, ouch.

A speaker from one of the colleges reported that nearly a third of courses failed to migrate! Basically if things get this bad then you could be in for some lengthy work in resolving and fixing the problem.


With regard to 3rd party plugins that you already have for Moodle 1.x these will likely not be available for Moodle 2.x, so do plan for this one.


There are a number of changes to the user interface with Moodle 2.x and in particular Files and Upload options, and this along with other changes is going to generate the need for some training. Speakers at the conference had approaches ranged from 2 hour to 45-minute sessions, but I guess that is going to be something everyone will adapt for themselves.

So is it worth the upgrade, well personally I think it is, Moodle 2.x comes with a lot of new and improved features and so I for one am looking forward to it.

Please stay in touch as we make that leap