Category Archives: vle

vle

Using Moodle

1 Comment

A nice little presentation on using Moodle (the VLE).

Do you still think Moodle is boring?
Do you run out of ideas of how to use Moodle with your learners?
Do you want to improve retention and achievement?

This slideshow will give you fresh and new ideas to boost up your Moodle course.

Find out why you should use Moodle to promote learning, collaboration and communication, discover how to support and engage your learners and how to offer an interactive and rich learning experience.

After watching the slideshow, you will have an idea of what Moodle is capable of. Your next step is to learn how to create the activities suggested, such as Forums, Chats, Quizzes, internet embedded content, etc…

In the videos’ section you can find already a podcast that shows you the potential of a forum, how to use it with your learners and how to create it on Moodle.
There are more podcasts being created that will cover other activities.

Moodle is here because it saves us time and makes things much better for your learners.

If you want some more ideas, have a look at the 100 ways to use a VLE.

100 ways, vle

100 ways to use a VLE – #62 Jorum

Leave a comment

Now Jorum has lots of useful and wonderful materials in it.

Jorum hosts a wide variety of learning and teaching resources from any subject area within UK Further and Higher Education learning and teaching, ranging from simple one-file assets and links to external resources, to more complex learning objects, including content packages and open courseware. These resources are free to use, and are available for all educational purposes, for download, reuse and repurpose.

The downside is that in order to access the JorumUK materials on Jorum you need to register an account and be a member of staff at an institution in the UK. This means you can’t simply pass the URL onto your learners.

So if you are a member of staff and want your learners to be able to access the materials then where are you going to put them?

Well you can’t just place them on a website, the licensing agreement doesn’t allow for that. Nor are they designed to be e-mailed to learners.

The obvious place to put them is on the VLE.

So what about JorumOpen then?

Though these resources are open and made available under a creative commons licence.

However though freely available, JorumOpen is not a delivery platform, it’s a repository, a place to store materials.

The obvious place to put these materials is again the VLE.

It’s not always best practice to provide a bundle of resources to a learner, context is really important. Placing resources from Jorum on the VLE is only part of the process, you also need to consider how the object relates to the learning activity. What do the learners need to do prior to using the object, whilst using the object and what to do after accessing the object. There are many other tools on the VLE that can be used to support the learning activity based on any learning object downloaded from Jorum. You could for example, use a discussion forum to discuss what the learners have learnt. Using a quiz to assess what the learners now understand.

Jorum has a wealth of content from which to take and use with learners on the VLE.

Photo source.

100 ways, vle

100 ways to use a VLE – #78 Taking a vote

1 Comment

Whoever said education was a democracy?

Most of the time learning is not a democracy, practitioners tell the learners what to learn, when to learn and how long they have to learn.

However over the last few years, the Learner Voice has become more important and relevant to the learning experience of many learners.

…learner involvement covers a wide variety of practices that seek to enable, equip and motivate learners to voice their views and actively shape their learning…

Developing a Learner Involvement Strategy, LSC, 2007

One way in which you can involve learner views is through a vote and many VLE systems now have voting systems built in or can be downloaded.

One such system is EasyVoter for Moodle.

vle

Just remember teachers are like starship captains…

Leave a comment

Providing any e-learning service to staff in an institution is a challenge.

Providing a service that meets the varied needs of staff in an institution is also a challenge.

Providing a service that exceeds the expectations of staff in an institution is sometimes an impossible challenge…

…unless you manage the (sometimes) unrealistic expectations of staff.

I remember many years ago in my previous role at the Western Colleges Consortium (WCC) explaining to key stakeholders about how long it would take to process a course creation request on the shared VLE. The process was in place to remove the burden of the task from staff in the partner colleges, ensure that it was only visible to the relevant staff and learners and had some content in it! Once created it was handed over to the staff to add activities and more content.

I recall announcing that we would ensure that all requests would be   fulfilled within seven days.

But the cry came out…

“This is the internet, it’s available 24/7, why can’t you just do it there and then!”

The issue was not about doing it there and then, but managing expectations. We needed to be realistic based on the staff available to complete the requests, holiday, conferences, and levels of requests.

Usually we would complete requests the same working day, however if we said we would do a request within one day and we fulfilled that request in two days, we would have been seen to have “failed”.

By setting a service agreement of seven days, say we completed the request within three days we would be seen as a miracle worker!

It was all about managing expectations.

If your users expect you to complete something in seven days and you take less than seven days then you have exceeded their expectations. Likewise if you say within 24 hours and it takes 25 hours, you have failed in their eyes and not met their expectations.

Realistic service level agreements need to be in place to ensure that you meet and exceed expectations from users. The agreements you have in place should be based on staffing and other resources.

You can of course review and evaluate the agreements over time to ensure that they continue to be realistic, fair and working.

So don’t say within 24 hours and seen to be continually failing, set a level of five days and be seen as a miracle worker!

Why is this The Scotty Model of e-Learning Services, well….

Have a look at this video…

It should start at the correct timeframe of 2 mins into it.

Just remember teachers are like starship captains…

100 ways, assessment, vle

100 ways to use a VLE – #8 Assessment Feedback

Leave a comment

In a previous entry in this series I wrote about how the VLE can be used for assignment submission and setting an assessment.

You can of course use the VLE to provide feedback on those submitted assignments or assessments.

Feedback is important to learners, it allows them to reflect on their work, to improve the current future work and improve their potential to finish and succeed on the course, module or programme of study.

Traditionally feedback was written onto the handwritten scripts that the learner submitted.

We have moved along a little since then, it is now, as already mentioned, very easy to set an assessment on the VLE and for the learner to submit their work on the VLE. It closes the circle if the feedback on the assessment is also on the VLE.

Though some practitioners like to write on scripts, this can be challenging if the submitted work is electronic, I know you can say print it off, but what about if the submitted work is a poster, a website, a presentation, a video, an audio recording… quite challenging to write feedback on an audio recording!

It makes much more sense to place this feedback where the learner can access it. Of course feedback needn’t always be textual, and using audio, video or screencasted feedback means the ideal home for this feedback is on the VLE. It needn’t get lost in the pile of papers that most learners carry or in the hundreds of e-mails if it was e-mailed. Most institutional e-mails have a limit on the size of the mailbox and this can cause issues not just for the learner who receives the e-mail but also the practitioner who sends feedback (and they will send it to a whole class).

Remember they may need to access it more than once, especially if they have to resubmit for example. Feedback is not a one off process it can be useful for reflective learners to re-read feedback on not just their latest piece of work, but also past pieces of work so that they can enhance and improve future pieces of work; demonstrate that they do understand and can apply the substance of the course.

Feedback is important, it doesn’t have to be on or live on the VLE, but the VLE can be a useful place to deliver and store feedback on assessments for learners.

Picture source.

vle

Saving Office Files to Moodle

7 Comments

I have to admit I am not sure if this is a logical next step or a backward one….

The following link was tweeted on Twitter about an Office Add-in for Moodle.

Uploading files to Moodle has never been easier.  The Office Add-in for Moodle (OAM) is an add-in for Microsoft Office (versions 2003 and 2007) that allows teachers to open and save Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents to a Moodle website. Today, teachers who use Office and Moodle have to switch back and forth between their web browser and Office applications.  With the OAM, teachers can create, open, edit, and save Moodle documents from within the Office applications.  You no longer need to use your web browser when working with Office documents stored in Moodle.

So what do you need in order to start using the add-in?  OAM does not require anything to be installed on the Moodle server (but note we only tested against Moodle versions 1.X-1.X).  Anyone who is the teacher or owner of a Moodle course can install the add-in and access their documents.  Once installed, the add-in adds two menu items to your File menu (Office 2003) or the Office Button menu: Open from Moodle and Save to Moodle.  In order to browse course files on your Moodle you will need to first tell the add-in the address of your Moodle and the credentials you use to log in.  Once added you can view the list of courses you are enrolled in.  Naturally, students and others can access the content directly from Moodle as they normally would.

This makes it very simple for practitioners to add content to a Moodle course using tools they are familar with. They can  use Office in the usual way, open files…

…and then save those files direct to Moodle.

Now this is great for those staff who upload Office documents to their Moodle courses, now they don’t even need to use a Web Browser…

However I do wonder if this is a forward step in making it easier to use  VLE or a backward step with a focus on content and Office documents rather than open standards and engaging content.

What’s your verdict?

100 ways, vle

100 ways to use a VLE – #47 A gallery of images

Leave a comment

You can very easily add images to a course on the VLE, but what about a whole series of images? Also why would you do this?

Imagine that you are a catering lecturer and you have taken a series of images of a cooking technique, it could have been boning a chicken, filleting a fish, cutting carrots… It would be nice to be able to add the images to the VLE and importantly allow learners to access those images easily and simply. It’s not just catering, plumbing, electrical, construction, motor vehicle engineering, biology…

Another reason is that the learners have been on a field trip and a series of photographs was taken and you want to share those images not just with those learners who went, but those that didn’t or couldn’t.

Think about an assignment based on a particular city or town, a gallery  of images can be used to show off attractions or places in that place.

On Moodle I have been using Lightbox Gallery.

As well as creating a very attractive gallery of images you can configure the Moodle module to allow learners to comment on the images.

One of the features I do like about this, is that though it is useful to resize the images (from a disk space perspective) if the practitioner does not have the skills (or probably more likely doesn’t have the software) to resize the images. If the images are uploaded as is to Lightbox Gallery then Lightbox Gallery will resize them for the end user depending on their screen resolution.

Another attraction of Lightbox Gallery is that it can also be used to show off a PowerPoint presentation without the learner needing to download and open the presentation – also useful if that learner does not have PowerPoint or is accessing the VLE from a mobile device.

Showing a gallery of images is a nice visual way of enhancing a learning activity.

Picture source.

podcast, vle

e-Learning Stuff Podcast #040: The VLE Lives

1 Comment

It’s alive… the VLE it’s alive… Thoughts, ideas and comments from James Clay on why and how practitioners should be using the VLE to enhance and enrich the learners’ experience.

With James Clay.

This is the fortieth  e-Learning Stuff Podcast, The VLE Lives

Download the podcast in mp3 format: The VLE Lives

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes

Shownotes

Picture source.

vle

Explaining the PLE

Leave a comment

A nice video created to support a paper being presented at the Plymouth e-Learning Conference on the 8th/9th April.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r77iDP_f0NY

From here and here.

Despite the “official” title of VLE vs PLE, the reality is that PLEs have always existed and are nothing new. It is not a choice between a VLE or a PLE, students will have a PLE, the issue is whether the institutional VLE adds anything to that and whether institutional policies restrict learners in how they use their PLE.