So, off I went to MoodleMoot day 2. Weather not as good as day 1 and troubles with public transport made I only just got there in time for the start of the keynote by Mr Moodle himself, Martin Dougiamas.
Martin started with a story about his foray into cycling (after temporarily losing his car license). This developed into a point about students and their journey into “being” and asking us what we want to help our students be and what experiences we plan for them along the way. We then started to delve into Moodle developments:
- MoodleCloud – a service providing a basic Moodle install for free. There are also paid plans available including a low cost solution aimed at schools. It has been around a little while but I only found out about it a week ago. I ran a session for students studying to be english language teachers and this provided a potential solution for those who were teaching in institutions with no VLE. Mention of schools also made me muse that there didn’t seem to be many schools present at the Moot.
- The Moodle Users Association – I hadn’t heard about this until today but people or organisations can join the MUA for a membership fee, different levels are available for organisations. Once in the association, members can propose projects they’d like to see developed, these are investigated and costed by Moodle HQ and then members get to vote on which projects they’d like to see implemented. I was a bit confused about how this might fit with the current Moodle model of the tracker which anyone can contribute to and vote in but I was assured that this model was going to continue alongside the MUA. For those wanting to know more, a meeting was scheduled for the end of day 2.
We then started to look at what is coming in Moodle 3.1 (which we won’t see until summer 2017). Things that I thought looked particularly interesting were:
- One page assignment grading. Documents converted to PDF for annotation.
- Gradebook improvements
- Global search
There were others but those were the ones that particularly stuck in my mind.
With the keynote over, it was off to the sessions. Looking back on the day it was dominated by presentations relating to the Moodle Mobile app and the Open University! I think I saw 3 presentations by the Moodle Mobile developers and more than 3 by the OU.
I started in a “Development” session. First off, two of the developers of the offical Moodle Mobile app talked about how it could be themed using CSS. It all looked fairly straightforward (if you know CSS!). How would we convert our theme for the app?
Next up was Bas Brands talking about Moodle and the user experience. Timely after our MUGGL meeting last week.
Finally in this session, my first OU presentation. They presented OU Structured content. This is basically a system which takes content in a common format, XML, and then uses renderers to convert it into multiple formats e.g. HTML, ePub and PDF. The OU have a large number of content producers, who are not the teachers. I was informed that some teachers do authoer directly but that many work with learning designers to create content. They also mentioned that they’d struggled with Maths and have found that MathsJax is a good solution.
Moving on to the next session, I was faced by two OU presentations back to back! In these, they described their recent redesign of Moodle. I have to admit that I was really impressed by their presentation of what they had done even though the dodgy projectors in the room didn’t do their presentation any justice. I thought they’d done some really interesting user interface design work with a really nice “student planner” concept at the heart of things. I really need to go back and have a closer look at what they’ve done. They do teach online so this may mean that not everything they do would work in a more blended context. An impressive piece of work.
The last presentation in this session was by someone from Strathclyde University talking about assessment and feedback policy. They didn’t talk about the construction of the policy per se but ways in which Moodle could be used to help support the implementation of the policy through e.g. selection of appropriate default settings to support policy decisions and provision of appropriate policy related information to enable staff to make the right decisions. It also reminded me that Strathclyde got a recommendation at the recent Student Ecperience Seminar at QMUL for their assessment and feedback guidance for both staff and students.
After lunch (the catering has been pretty good….as long as you’re not vegan apparently) we had a Pecha Kucha session. So we stormed through a number of interesting presentations:
- Portsmouth University talked about issues they’d had with the submission of large assessments (video). They’d found a solution using Google Classroom but felt that this was too much like using another VLE and also had concerns about using Google for assessed work. Someone suggested Mahara as an alternative. It doesn’t seem that many people have the luxury of a media server.
- The Moodle Mobile app developers were back talking about offline support. The app sounds pretty good in this respect. Pretty much all features mentioned were student focussed and I asked about teacher features. Apparently offline grading is number one on the roadmap of teacher features here so that sounds very promising.
- Talk about using Panopto in teaching. Sounds like an interesting tool and sounded very similar to Echo360 in many ways. Would be interesting to see a closer comparison.
- Next up was a talk which actually made LTI sound interesting! The speaker had come all the way from Japan and discussed how they had used LTI to join various Moodle installs together to allow students across organisations to collaborate.
- Then the Moodle Mobile app developers were up…again. This time they talked about the offline SCORM player. I haven’t actually managed to see this working yet but it’s potentially of great interest to us with our many SCORM packages. They also gave a few guidelines for developing SCORM modules which work well on mobile. Definitely something to revisit.
- Another presentation that sounded very similar to the one given by the OU about their XML content system.
- A representative of Wiris, the Maths folks, spoke about their development of an adaptive quiz activity aimed mainly at STEM subjects. Currently not quite available, it looks interesting.
Next we were back to standard short presentations with a session around the theme of instuctional design. Talk number one was about the much neglected lesson tool. The speaker, Lewis Carr, has done some really amazing work around styling the lesson to make it more engaging. It was interesting that someone in the audience compared it to the workshop tool in that they often create one, get daunted by the settings and then can’t get any further. It’s one of those tools that needs examples to give people inspiration. I don’t think we can ditch Articulate yet. Next was a talk about the use of Moodle, Mahara and Turnitin. To be honest it probably focussed mainly on Mahara but I didn’t mind that. One of the issues highlighted in this talk was how an institutional policy of all written work being submitted to Turnitin prevented Mahara being used to its full potential. Students had to export their portfolio as a PDF which was then submitted and marked in Turnitin. I think we have experienced a similar issue. The final presentation was about measuring blended learning, and indeed how you might do it. This probably has a lot of resonance for us as we look at pushing the use of QMplus further. How can we use analytics to get an overview of “engagement” with QMplus. This talk gave an interesting persective on what can be done beyond the superficial.
More coffee then led on to the final keynote of the day. It was the OU again! It’s the 10th anniversary of the OU using Moodle so we heard about the journey that they have gone through and where they are headed next. It was an entertaining journey through experiments with systems like Second Life, various user interface designs, steering away from using technology names and then returning to “calling a spade a spade rather than calling it OU Digging”, several threats of developer walkouts and more. The OU are big contributors to the Moodle community, we use the quiz questions, the blog, the wiki and the sub-page module. Not everything they do ends up back in the community though. They have 20 Moodle developers so this was a real insight into a large scale Moodle support infrastructure and what can be achieved.
I rounded off the day by going to the meeting about the Moodle User Association which I’d only just heard about in the keynote in the morning. I currently haven’t made my mind up about it yet but it has potential. Would we want to be members?
I was then treated to this lovely view on my walk back to Embankement tube. A very nice way to end the day.
Tartantastic 
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