e-Learning Stuff

I have often thought of the VLE as a portal for learners to discover new things, undertake activities, assess their learning, communication, interact, create, understand, apply analyse and evaluate.

The web, of which the VLE generally is part of and connected to has a wealth of knowledge, information and content waiting to be discovered and used.

In terms of discovery adding an URL or web link to a course on your VLE, will allow learners to make that journey to support their learning.

However one of the very advantages of the web, putting in a link, is also one of the key disadvantages. A link placed on its own lacks context and direction.

Now in some cases this may be sufficient, think of a reading list of useful websites.

However even then providing guidance to learners about not only why they should be browsing to those links but also what they should do on those web pages is important if the learners are going to get some value from them.

We sometimes think providing a reading list of books is useful for learners, but unless they have the necessary study skills to make use of those books they may find they either don’t find them useful, spend too much wasteful time looking through the books or not making the most of what could be a real valuable resource.

Likewise with a series of web links, without the digital literacy skills to deal with the content on those web pages then learners will not get the real value from those pages that they could and should.

Similarly just pasting a link into your course on the VLE without context or guidance may result in the learners not using the link or if they do browse to the web page not understand what they should do there or how to use that web page. Of course there are exceptions and sometimes it will be very self-explanatory, but generally it won’t be.

For some links, rather than adding them as they are to the VLE, it would make more sense to add them to a “page” with extra content, or maybe even more logical to put the link into a forum post with the context and suggested activity. A forum would then allow learners to ask questions about the link, or post their reflective thoughts about the link.

The VLE can be a fantastic repository of content and learning activities, sometimes though using the wealth of stuff on the web means adding links. Adding context to links is an important part to ensure that those links enhance and enrich learning and don’t just confuse the learners.

I recently gave a presentation and had a discussion on auditing your VLE installation at the RSC SW VLE Forum.

Gloucestershire College has recently undertaken an external audit of both their current VLE setup and their recent procurement process with outsourcing the VLE to ULCC. The audit process is a useful way of looking at the systems and processes an institution has in place for such a mission critical system like the VLE. This session will go through the key aspects within an external audit and delegates will discuss with colleagues how they would “fare” if they were to undergo an external audit. This may also be an opportunity to think about peer assessment and auditing.  

I have been thinking for a long time about the Moodle issue that is the “scroll of death”. I wrote my first piece on this after the Ireland and UK Moodlemoot 2012.

Quite a few people have provided me with a variety of solutions that means learners do not have to contend with the “scroll of death”. However what these solutions do not solve, is the fundamental problem, which is…

If you use Moodle “out of the box” and create a course; so you add a link to a page, a link to a file, a link to a forum, a link to a quiz and the odd lable or two, the end result will be the “scroll of death” and a long list of links… rather than an engaging and interactive learning experience. The learners will have a more difficult and challenging experience when using Moodle. As a result you will have disengaged learners and the complaint that Moodle is “boring”.

I also know that some of the training at my college in using Moodle has exacerbated these issues. We show people different features of Moodle and of course they then want to add them to their courses. What we don’t do (very well) is get them to think about the whole of their course and not only about how it looks, but also about how the learner experiences and interacts with the course.

Yes of course you can apply solutions, after the result, however why is it that the “out of the box” vanilla experience isn’t right in the first place?

It would be nice if the initial approach to using Moodle got the user thinking not about adding links, but about whole course design.

The problem with this is that most educators I talk to rarely think about whole course design, and are more concerned about planning what they are going to do tomorrow or next week rather than thinking about the course as a whole.

The more I think about it the more I think that this is the real problem and that Moodle is only a symptom of that issue of the lack of whole course planning by some educators. It’s not as though they don’t plan, I am sure they produce schemes of work and have a fair idea of what they are going to do over the course. However what will be missing will be the detail and the “big picture”.

So the question I am asking now, is Moodle the answer to this problem?

In my last blog posting on this, I wrote:

We might need to take a step back and work out what we actually want Moodle to do and start again.

Could we in fact get Moodle to be part of the solution rather than than the face of the problem?

In a future posting I am going to discuss the issues of Moodle UI and Moodle UX and look at some of the points that came out of this discussion on the Moodle Forums that was point out to me by Stuart Lamour, who you may recall got me thinking about all of this at Moodlemoot in the first place.

What are your thoughts?

MoodleMoot 2012 – Course Creator Best Practice Workshop

There is a wide choice of workshops available at the pre-conference workshops. I am currently in the Course Creator Best Practice workshop led by Michelle Moore.

We have gone round and made our introductions, it felt (I didn’t count) that a lot of people were corporate or private training providers, though still a fair few people from universities and colleges (as well as schools). There were lots of people who had just migrated to Moodle or were in the process of migrating.

Even though I am an hold hand with Moodle, I’ve been part of Moodle.org since Wednesday, 10 March 2004 at 3.31pm, over eight years. Gloucestershire College were using Moodle before I arrived in November 2006.

I am hoping to get some useful hints and tips from the workshop. Straight off we are talking about design and style.

“Don’t use more than three font styles per page”

and

“Do maintain consistency”

One of the hardest jobs I find is trying to be diplomatic with staff about the “design” and “look” of their Moodle course.

It can be challenging to let them know that using multiple fonts, Comic Sans, colours doesn’t make their course “look better”

“Do beware the bling”

How do you get your staff to recognise the importance of good design and style?

Working together in groups is a key part of most organisations, it makes sense from an educational perspective that learners work together on group assignments in preparation for when they will work in teams in the workplace.

The process of working together on a collaborative assignment brings a lot of challenges, one of which is where should learners collaborate when working on a document. There are various public tools such as Google Docs and public wikis that can be used. Most VLEs have a wiki built in to their functionality.

Regardless of which tools is used, the VLE can be the staging post that will allow the learners to jump into their collaborative document. Learners may choose to use the built in wiki, however as a group they may choose to use a tool such as Google Docs or a public wiki such as PBwiki.

Wikis allow multiple learners to work on a single document, you can break the document down into pages with links between the different pages.

Wikis allow learners to work on the document when and where they want to, at a time and place to suit their circumstances.

Wikis can often be edited and worked on using mobile devices, enabling easier access and collaboration when required.

Wikis are often more accessible than working together on a word processed document and will work with screen readers and other assistive technologies.

Unlike simple word processed documents, wikis also enable learners to embed rich media into them. Short video clips can be embedded, as can audio and images. You may also be able to embed other content into them, such as RSS feeds, slides from a service such as SlideShare, pages from other services.

Wikis can contain links, internally and externally to sources and other relevant content.

One nice feature of collaborative tools is the history that is recorded, it outlines not only the changes to the document, but who did what when. This feature can make it much easier to assess the final outcome. Of course when using the wiki within the VLE the assessor will have access to that history, when using other collaborative tools, access may needed to be given to assessor.

At the end of the day, wikis are a powerful tool that allow learners to collaborate together to complete a joint outcome. Whether they use the wiki on the VLE, one that offers familiarity within the interface, or merely use the VLE as a jump off point using an external tool, they provide many learning possibilities and opportunities of working together.