Emerging Technologies for IT in Libraries

1
Introduction to Moodle

• Can Tho University
• Can Tho, Vietnam
• June 3, 2008
• Terry Plum
• Assistant Dean
• Simmons GSLIS
• terry.plum_at_simmons.edu

2
Agenda

• Introduction to elearning
• Introduction to course management systems
• Introduction to Moodle
• Exercise 1. Installation
• Break
• Using Moodle - Setup and Resources
• Exercise 2. Getting Started with Resources

3
Agenda

• Lunch 1100 100
• Using Moodle - Activities
• Exercise 3 - Getting Started with Activities
• Break
• Demonstration of other Moodle courses
• How to teach effectively in an elearning course
• How to support an elearning program
• Wrap-up
• This workshop uses the framework and some of the
  slides provided by Martin Langhoff of
  Catalyst.net as found at http//moodle.org/mod/fo
  rum/discuss.php?d66854

4
Online learning modes

• Face to Face
• Paper based, but could have some elearning
• Blended learning
• More elearning than face to face
• Synchronous and asynchronous
• Online or distance education
• No face to face, all elearning
• Synchronous and asynchronous
• Self-paced asynchronous
• Online tutorials and simulations

5
What is different about online education

• Learning environments have very specific goals
  for students.
• Feedback is critical for students to monitor
  their progress as they pursue the course goals.
• Difficult to read materials because of low
  resolution
• Make online content printable
• Publishing is immediate
• Participation around published documents or
  projects
• Expectation of immediacy
• Interaction is different
• Can foster or discourage interaction
• Not just teacher to students
• Students to teacher
• Students to students

6
Blended Learning

• The definition of blended learning is a
  combination or blendof different online
  learning modes, or of online and in-person
  learning. Blended learning is becoming
  increasingly common with the availability of both
  synchronous and asynchronous online learning
  options.
• Variety of learning styles
• Convenience and flexibility
• Interaction and f2f attention
• Reduces class time
• Higher accountability

7
Blended Learning - what is needed for the student

• Technology support
• Technology skills in the participants
• Quiet uninterrupted space
• Responsibility for independent learning
• Instructional design

8
Content strategies for elearning

• Reading materials
• Core readings
• Supplemental readings
• Respond to the course
• Expand or contract the readings as necessary
• Include links to internet resources
• Etextbooks

9
Writing for the elearning course

• Lists
• Highlighting
• Graphics
• Simple displays of links
• Brief simple sentences
• Navigate

10
Interactivity in the elearning course

• Some students would rather write than talk.
• More time to think and reflect
• Minorities might contribute
• Written word should be better than spoken word
• Must have rules about the discussions
• Interaction not as intense as face to face
• Engagement and intelligent discussions

11
What to do with the lectures?

• Lectures on the web - written out, word for word
• Not appropriate for blended with much face to
  face.
• Powerpoint lectures with audio content
• Download audio or podcast
• Video recording of face to face lecture with
  audio recording

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Course/Learning Management Systems

• Blackboard
• http//www.blackboard.com
• WebCT Vista - now Blackboard
• http//www.blackboard.com
• eCollege
• http//www.ecollege.com
• Desire2Learn
• http//www.desire2learn.com
• ATutor
• http//www.atutor.ca/
• Sakai
• http//www.sakaiproject.org
• Moodle
• http//www.moodle.org

13
Course/Learning Management Systems

• Users
• Courses
• Course page
• Resources (content)
• Activities
• Tools
• Users relation to course

14
Why Moodle?

• Mature
• Dynamic
• Flexible/Open
• Feature Rich
• Community
• Critical Mass
• Project leader - Martin Dougiamas

15
Exercise 1 - Moodle Installation

• Exercise 1 - Installation
• Follow the instructions for installing a Windows
  version of Moodle,
• We will use a XAMPP version of the installation,
  which installs the required environment of PHP,
  Apache, and MySQL.
• See
• http//docs.moodle.org/en/Windows_installation_usi
  ng_XAMPP for more information about XAMPP
• XAMPP is not a production install.
• The complete install packages are found at
• http//docs.moodle.org/en/Complete_install_package
  s
• Break up into groups and follow the instructions.
  

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Using Moodle -Set up

• Any problems with the installation.
• Now on to the setup
• Photo
• Friendly description of your scholarly interests
• Options
• Required fields
• Optional fields
• Visibility
• Contextual help

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Course Home Page

• Teacher documentation
• http//docs.moodle.org/en/Teacher_documentation
• Course homepage
• http//docs.moodle.org/en/Course_homepage
• Course Sections
• http//docs.moodle.org/en/Course_sections
• Course Settings
• http//docs.moodle.org/en/Course_settings
• Blocks
• http//docs.moodle.org/en/Blocks_28teacher29

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Moodle home page and resources

• Weekly or topic
• My Courses
• Resources
• Label
• Text page
• Web page
• File or website link
• Directory
• IMS content package

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Using Moodle Activities - Forums

• Group discussions
• Resource sharing
• Posting class assignments
• Benefits
• Can preserve discussions for later review or for
  new learners
• Provides learners with more time for reflection
  and creation of articulate
• Provides interaction for learners and ability to
  ask questions of classmates and instructor
• Can track and measure learner participation in
  discussions

20
Forums

• Challenges
• Time lapse between postings can slow the momentum
  of discussions and make it difficult to receive
  immediate clarification on a question or comment
• Commitment to monitoring discussions is required
  of instructors and learners
• Many learners and instructors need initial
  training on use of message boards
• Participants are unable to observe facial
  expressions, tone or body language, which can
  cause misinterpretations
• Instructors need to develop good facilitation and
  moderation skills to encourage participation by
  all learners

21
Forums

• Group discussions
• Resource sharing
• Posting class assignments
• Benefits
• Can preserve discussions for later review or for
  new learners
• Provides learners with more time for reflection
  and creation of articulate
• Provides interaction for learners and ability to
  ask questions of classmates and instructor
• Can track and measure learner participation in
  discussions

22
Exercise 2 - Getting Started with Resources

• Set up personal profile
• Go to Participants
• Set up course
• Go to Settings
• Choose weekly or topics
• Turn off guest access or add a key
• Force language
• Add an entry to the News Forum
• Turn on Editing
• Look at the Add a Resource drop down
• Create a forum
• Add two resources, such as,
• Insert a label
• Compose a text page
• Link to a file or web site
• Or another resource
• Add content to the two activities, for example,
  write a label, or upload and link to a file.

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Using Moodle - getting started

• Subscribe yourself to all of the forums in your
  course so that you can keep in touch with your
  class activity.
• Encourage all of the students to fill out their
  user profile (including photos) and read them all
  - this will help provide some context to their
  later writings and help you to respond in ways
  that are tailored to their own needs.
• Keep notes to yourself in the private "Teacher's
  Forum" (under Administration).
• Use the Logs link (under Administration) to get
  access to complete, raw logs.

24
Using Moodle - getting started

• Use many reports.
• Reports in the Administration block, Activity
  Reports (next to each name in the list of all
  people, or from any user profile page). These
  provide a great way to see what any particular
  person has been up to in the course.
• Respond quickly to students. Don't leave it for
  later - do it right away. Not only is it easy to
  become overwhelmed with the volume that can be
  generated, but it is a crucial part of building
  and maintaining a community feel in your course.
• Don't be afraid to experiment feel free to poke
  around and change things. It is hard to break
  anything in a Moodle course, and even if you do
  it's usually easy to fix it.
• Use the navigation bar at the top of each page -
  it should help remind you where you are and
  prevent getting lost.

25
Activities - Glossary

• This activity allows participants to create and
  maintain a list of definitions, like a
  dictionary.
• The entries can be searched or browsed in many
  different formats. The glossary also allows
  teachers to export entries from one glossary to
  another (the main one) within the same course.
• If glossary autolinking is enabled by an
  administrator (see Filters for further details)
  then it is possible to automatically create links
  to these entries from throughout the course.

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Glossary

• Benefits
• Can build words over the entire course.
• Students can write the definitions
• The glossary entries can be illustrated with
  images
• For example, could create a glossary of organs
  from the textbook
• Can import terms into a glossary.
• Could also export them into a quiz

27
Assignment

• The assignment module gives you, as the teacher,
  an easy way to allow students to upload any
  digital content for grading.
• You can ask them to submit essays, spreadsheets,
  presentations, photographs, or small audio or
  video clips. Anything they can store on their
  hard drives can be submitted in response to an
  assignment.
• A student can upload a single file. This could be
  a Word document, spreadsheet or anything in
  digital format. Multiple files may be zipped and
  then submitted.

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Assignment

• Benefits
• Stores the students assignments
• Can grade the assignments are return them
• Student to teacher - private
• Have a record of the comments
• Can track improvement
• Can spot patterns
• Organizes a large number of assignments
• Can forbid late assignments.
• Challenges
• Cannot grade at any time any place
• Dont write, must type
• More reading on monitor

29
Chat (and instant messaging)

• Office hours for students to ask instructor
  clarification questions.
• Informal check-ins
• Small group discussions
• Synchronous v. asynchronous
• Engage the students
• Log of interactions

30
Chat (and instant messaging)

• Benefits
• Free,easy access and simple for participants and
  facilitators to learn
• Offers the ability to preserve transcripts
• Provides immediate feedback for learners and
  ability to ask questions in real time
• Allows learners to develop a buddy list and have
  access to other learners when they are online to
  ask questions, etc.

31
Chat (and instant messaging)

• Challenges
• Can be difficult to keep conversations focused
• Cannot observe body language, tone or facial
  expressions during chat
• Can be difficult to know when someone has
  completed his or her response
• Delayed conversations due to Internet traffic
• Presents scheduling challenges
• Provides limited time for reflection on questions
  due to pace of chat

32
Quizzes

• Tie each question to a course goal
• Try to ask multiple questions about each
  important idea in the class.
• When writing a multiple-choice question, be sure
  each wrong answer represents a common
  misconception.
• Write questions requiring your students to think
  at different levels. Include recall questions,
  comprehension questions, and application and
  analysis questions. You can determine where
  students are having problems in their thinking.
  Can they recall the material but not apply it?
• Test your questions. After youve established an
  initial question bank, use the system reports to
  determine which questions are useful and which
  arent. As you write new questions, give them a
  lower point value and throw in a few to establish
  their reliability.

33
Quizzes - Uses

• Chapter check
• Test practice
• Data gathering
• Quiz Security and Cheating

34
Wikis

• A wiki is a collection of collaboratively
  authored web documents. A wiki page is a web page
  everyone in your class can create together, right
  in the browser, without needing to know HTML. A
  wiki starts with one front page. Each author can
  add other pages to the wiki by simply creating a
  link to a new page
• Moodle's wiki is built on top of an older wiki
  system called Erfurt wiki http//erfurtwiki.source
  forge.net.
• In Moodle, wikis can be a powerful tool for
  collaborative work. The entire class can edit a
  document together, creating a class product, or
  each student can have their own wiki and work on
  it with you and their classmates.

35
Wiki permissions
36
Exercise 3 - Activities

• Go to your locally created course or go to
  http//gslis.simmons.edu/moodle
• Login to Moodle
• Enroll as a student in the other courses
• Return to your course
• Turn on Editing
• Look at the Add an Activity drop down
• Create a forum
• Add two activities, such as,
• Forum
• Glossary
• Assignment
• Chat
• Quiz
• Wiki
• Or another activity
• Add content to the two activities, for example
  write two questions for a quiz or add five
  glossary terms.
• Go to another course in which you are enrolled as
  a student and see what is available.

37
Other tools

• Blocks
• Calendar
• Recent Activity
• Upcoming events
• Grades
• Logs and Reports
• Checking up on students.

38
Sample courses

• Lets look at some sample courses.
• Terry Plums courses
• Linnea Johnsons courses
• Other courses
• Look for the use of resources
• Look for the use of activities

39
Further Reading

• Course Teaching Checklisthttp//moodle.tokem.fi/m
  od/book/view.php?id5116chapterid256
• Teaching Do'shttp//docs.moodle.org/en/Teaching_D
  o27s
• Teaching Don'tshttp//docs.moodle.org/en/Teaching
  _Don27ts

40
Tips for Online Learning

• Have objectives clearly stated.
• Teach concepts, not just mechanics
• Initial technology check (users technology)
• Don't let the user get lost.
• Use clear navigation that is easy to use, gives
  feedback, offers alternatives and has clear
  labels.
• Most people read more slowly on the web than in
  print, and people like to scan web pages, rather
  than reading them. So make your pages short and
  able to be scanned.
• Use white space and color to make pages readable

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Tips for Online Learning

• Use linear navigation only if you allow students
  to get up and come back to the place they left
  off.
• Updated links and crash free.
• Accessibility.
• Make sure it loads quickly.
• Include tactile/kinesthetic learning styles by
  using simulations.
• Provide interactivity

42
Tips for Online Learning

• Effective use of screen shots

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How to get help

• Use the online help!
• docs.moodle.org
• Books Using Moodle (J.Cole), Moodle (W.Rice)
• Google.com also check out video.google.com /
  youtube.com
• Join Using Moodle course on Moodle.org
• Join teaching techniques forums
• Join module-specific forums

44
Further reading

• Using Moodle. Jason Cole
• http//docs.moodle.org/en/Using_Moodle_book
• Moodle Philosophy
• http//docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy
• Interpretive analysis of an internet-based course
  constructed using a new courseware tool called
  Moodle
• http//www.ecu.edu.au/conferences/herdsa/main/pape
  rs/nonref/pdf/MartinDougiamas.pdf