MoodleMoot 2016 – Day 1

I’m attending all three days of MoodleMoot this year.  My journey to the first day of the Moot afforded me this fantastic view of the river Thames.  It was a bit of a shock to discover that the conference was being held in the basement of a hotel (on levels -2 and -4!). However,  it turned out to be quite a nice basement and I enjoyed the first day so much the subterranean location didn’t really spoil things.

The first day of the Moot was taken up with a number of masterclasses.  I chose to go to the one on assessment run by Mark Glynn and Helen Foster.  I’ve done a fair amount of work around assessment over the years, especially around the Moodle assignment activity and Turnitin. We’ve also had quite a lot of activity around assessment and feedback, running an event dedicated to it with staff in November last year. More recently I’ve been involved in a project to enhance access to grades and feedback on QMplus.   It’s an area that raises a number of challenges for us.  It was therefore quite timely to be attending a masterclass on assessment to get me out of my QMUL bubble and to get a view of what mght be going on in the wider world.

As is always the way with MoodleMoot, I really enjoy hearing about the experiences of others.  I feel I know the core Moodle tools pretty well but there’s always someone who’s subverted them in a creative way, or a setting that I hadn’t seen…or had misunderstood.  There’s also the seemingly neverending list of useful plugins that people make use of and custom developments that have been done to make Moodle even more useful.

Some highlights of the day for me were:

• A reminder that even although the assignment activity is more flexible than people realise, assessment on Moodle isn’t just about the assignment…or the quiz activity.  There are ways in which forums, glossaries, databases and all sorts can be used for assessment.
• Hearing that others are enthusiastic (not evangalistic!) about the use of grading forms and rubrics and that some people have managed to move to doing all grading and feedback electronically.
• Taking a little more time to look at things like letter grades and scales and gradebook calculations.  Since I don’t teach much, and certainly not in any way that makes heavy use of the gradebook, it was very useful to spend some time seeing how others use it…and how complex it is.
• Seeing a development which gives students a graphical gradebook view.  This was a slightly different take on things that hadn’t even crossed my mind and made me think about our own Gradesplus development work.
• Writing down a variety of plugins to look up.  Unfortunately, I don’t think any of them are on our hosts list of plugins that they support!
• Random thoughts and ideas floating across my head…wouldn’t it be nice to be able to specify the release dates for grades within the settings for the assignment itself?  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to specify late penalites wiithin the settings for the assignment itself?  Woudn’t it be nice to be able to mark with a rubric on a mobile device which could cope with dodgy, or no, internet connection?   Wouldn’t it be nice if the workshop activity allowed for offline assignments to allow for peer assessments of things like presentations?  Maybe, as Mark suggested, I have to get myself involved in the Moodle tracker.

I also managed quick chat to a couple of the sponsors during the breaks:

1. Ukrund – A Swedish company who have a plagiarism detection product.  Unlike Turnitin, Ukrund only does plagiarism detection. It hasn’t made any forays into the world of grading and feedback, or peer assessment or anything else.  It just does plagiarism…or rather similarity checking.  It seems to do that rather well too.  I didn’t see a demo of the tool, I hope to see that over the next couple of days but it looks very interesting. 
2. Wiris – this company provides solutions for maths education.  I’ve seen them before and have always been impressed by their products.  However, I’ve always wondered if we’d be able to get the use out of them though, would enough academics make use of them to make them worthwhile? Today I saw their handwriting recognition solution, Wiris Hand and it looks very cute. 

It was a very full day with lots of things to think about. I’m really looking forward to the next two days but I’m glad it’s a double bank holiday weekend afterwards as I think I’ll need it to recover!

 One of my Moot freebies from Ukrund.