Introducing moodle at Goldsmiths

1
Introducing moodle at Goldsmiths

• John Phelps
• Sonja Grussendorf
• Goldsmiths, University of London

2
Introduction

• Context
• Why we moodled
• Experiences
• Issues Benefits
• Impact and the future

3
Context

• Specialist college of the University of London
  since 1904
• Creative, cultural and social processes
• Excess of 8000 students at Bachelor, Masters and
  Doctorate levels
• 300 academic staff, 500 visiting tutors

4
VLE Implementation

• Reasoning
• Learning and teaching strategy
• Integration with other systems (cultural shift)
• Resources
• Capital costs, support costs
• Demonstrate need
• Pilots and Evaluation

5
Why we moodled

• Open Source
• Less risk, no commercial lock-in
• Known and well understood technologies
• Low start up cost
• Invest in infrastructure and support
• Similar feature set to commercial packages
• Notices, discussion forum
• Surveys, quizzes, files
• Active Community

6
What do we run Moodle on?

• Twin Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz Processors
• 4 GB RAM
• 292 GB Storage (RAID)
• Two Gigabits NICs
• Red Hat Linux 8.0, Apache Web server, PostgreSQL
• Password protected, links with college
  authentication via LDAP

7
Where Are We Now?

• After 1 year
• Over 60 courses with online presence
• Over 2700 individual users
• Used 7 days a week, 365 days a yearfrom 0600
  0300

8
Cases
9
Our philosophy

• It ought to encourage and improve communication
  between academics and students
• It is created by academic staff
• It is not a glorified document retrieval system
• It should focus on student needs

10
BenefitsStudents perceptions

• Up to date information
• Notices, room changes, general course
  information, assignment dates, lecture times,
• Downloading resources
• Handouts, lecture notes, articles, web links etc
• Flexible access
• And, most importantly,
• Communication
• With both teachers and fellow students!

11
IssuesStudents perceptions

• Dependent on academic staff input
• Frustrating if not (regularly) updated
• Not all courses available
• Student (un)surprisingly expect constancy
• User problems
• Off-site access
• Moodle Classic design
• I dont really like the colours..but I dont
  really come on here to look at the colours, just
  as long as I can access the section I need to get
  to is the main priority

12
Maintenance and costs

• Low staff training overhead
• Almost always available
• Quick and easy upgrades
• Log in issues
• Users, cookies and Norton
• Intuitive application
• More focus on pedagogy

13
Impact

• Students want it
• Community Moodles for non-curricular groups
• NQTs, student societies
• We are committed to using Moodle and the community

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Contact Details

• John Phelps
• mailtoj.phelps_at_gold.ac.uk
• Sonja Grussendorf mailtos.grussendorf_at_gold.ac.uk
  
• CELT, Information Services
• Goldsmiths, University of London,
• New Cross, London. SE14 6NW.United Kingdom