So first a round up of what I have been doing.

I have been setting up my own hosted domain and a Moodle installation which has been very useful experience. (I got the Moodle on a stick thing working ok for my coursework submission.)

I have a number of purposes in mind for my Moodle. To archive my MSc work, and other courses I have developed at work over the past couple of years. To continue to develop my admin skills for Moodle. To keep a record of ongoing e-learning project developments at work.

My original plan was to also host a Wordpress install and transfer my blog to there. That’s a possible project for the summer, however I am getting as much personally out of writing and recording in Moodle as I did out of keeping this blog. The only difference here was the aspect of posting into a community. That seems to have run its course.

So barring finding another community to join,… all suggestions welcomed,  and probably popping back to read one or two blogs I still follow. This might be the last post so to speak.

If so goodnight and thanks for all the fish, if not see you next time.

 CompendiumLD maps of the second stage course design.

Recent developments have continued the stone gathering speed metaphor from the last update.

I have continued to gradually develop my “pet” test areas on Moodle, notably the Eco schools course. There is a lot of activity in this area in school and plenty to write about and update content little and often. This in turn has helped feed the ICT co-ordinators dogged campaign to make all the pupils log into Moodle each ICT lesson. One of the reasons for this is to help the children learn their username and passwords.

Needing a some regularly updating content for the pupils to check up on in these short activity sessions, the Eco schools course has been a useful target.

Moodle made the agenda of a recent management meeting and for the first time some targets were set for development. The results have shifted the school into the next gear. Yesterday the teaching staff were given the staff meeting time to go and work on their subject courses. This morning I arrived at school and by 10 am three different groups of staff had approached me for either refresher training or basic training in Moodle.

By lunchtime we had booked in two training sessions for admin staff and I had decided to go ahead with a germinating idea for a “Moodle club” for staff to drop into a weekly workshop.

After school I met with a small group from local schools working on our first collaborative project on the main LEA Moodle site.

In addition I am getting a steady trickle of parents applying for their moodle log ins. This in turn will mean that once the admin staff are trained and start to feed and update public facing courses further momentum will be generated.

The pace has definitely picked up and the significance of the management team setting an agenda cannot be underestimated. The workload connected with Moodle has shot up for me since Christmas, but I can also see that “ownership” of different areas is growing. 

I must make some backups of different areas at this point and compare them in say six or twelve months to see what stages we go through as the learning community grows and finds it’s feet.

 I had two hours to introduce the course to the target group. Half worked in the ICT suite on computers the other half on laptops via a wireless connection in the room next door. We began the session with some introduction and explanation of the project for the benefit of new staff.

 The school has a 2Mb Internet connection.

Testing

I was not able to test with an inexperienced user before the training session. This would have highlighted some of the issues which arose on tne night. In effect the training session became a usability test by the target group. I now have data from a wide range of users in terms of ability, age and experience.

 Logistics

 The group of over 20 was too big to manage on the night working in two rooms, and I could not keep up with the number of issues that were going on simultaneously.

One new laptop was missing software needed for the activity. 

One person attended unexpectedly and did not have a log in.

 Bandwidth

It is not clear if the Moodle server is correctly setup for streaming video. Testing prior to the training night revealed widely varying download results. With multiple downloads on the night the alternative smaller flash movie was needed. More info needed to follow up further.

 Moodle

Found an unexpected (untested) aspect of the chat room that the participants were identified by initial not name, leading to confusion.

Course Content

I had way too much material for the 2 hour session and did not need any of the extension exercises I built in. I think there is scope for dividing the material up in to a beginners and advanced course.

 On the whole the group worked much more slowly than I had anticipated. Over familiarity with the content had led to an underestimate of the time needed to complete different topics. Failure to achieve the first assignment objective, was mainly due to lack of time.

The journaling reflective activity seems to have been useful.

There was positive feedback about the interactive tutorial which was a novel learning experience for the group. The group saw the benefit of active learning in that activity.

More basic instructions were required on navigation and orientation in the Moodle environment. (too much for the 2hr training but to be developed further for the course ongoing.)

 It is too soon to make any judgements about how the training went overall until the data is analysed. There is a wide mixture of experiences and feedback. There were bugs or technical hitches in almost every area of the course on the night and the materials were thoroughly tested, pretty much to destruction!

It was an exhausting experience, and not an easy one for the subjects, but I do belive that I can see ways to solve most if not all of the issues which arose. 

I think a number of principles were tested in the different activities in the course and many proved useful for further development. The discussion acitivy was the least sucessful on the night. There were too many unknowns for the participants to deal with for them to properly engage with the task I set, but hopefully an experience to build on in the future.

 More to follow… 

I have been working on the literature review for the main project and now have a draft that I can put aside while I focus on completing the work for the course.

Out of this review came two main themes which have influenced the planning of the course I am developing. Firstly the importance of situating the learning within the learners experience, and secondly the value that teachers place on collaborative learning.

It should be possible to ensure both these aspects are well focused in the CPD course I have planned.

I found the CompendiumLD planning tool very helpful for thinking through the course structure and the order and content of learning activities. I find myself constantly referring to this map now as I start to build the course for real.

I have now built the skeleton course structure, most of the instructional linking materials, and now am working on the learning objects, video, quiz modules etc.

After a very hectic time up to submission of part 1 assessment which went on over the school Christmas holidays, and an even more hectic start to the school term. Things are finally settling down enough to allow for a little personal reflection.

I am glad to have stopped juggling three different threads of course activity, weekly activity, and two assessments running simultaneously. Though there is less interaction with my course colleagues now there is so much work to do I am not feeling the loss as much as I feared.

My motivation levels have been fluctuating due to stress and distraction and the holiday season. I feel my focus beginning to return now a number of these have been put aside.

One enthusiasm which is growing is for Moodle on several levels. I see the developing awareness of the staff I am working with to the potential of Moodle. It is slow but sure and like a rolling stone I feel is gathering momentum. Apart from impact of training for the staff, my colleague and I have both started to develop courses in areas of interest to ourselves eg, using animation for social stories and a celebration of the school Eco Schools week. The ICT Co-ordinator is now getting her classess to log in and out of moodle each lesson and as more material is developed and they get to see courses which are fully functioning their enthusiam rises. The number of log ins by the pupils from home is increasing slowly as this process develops.

I have been researching  how we might bridge the digital divide for our pupils as previous posts describe. Just in the last few days I have realised that Moodle might have an answer for us there. It will be fairly easy to provide a laptop for pupils to loan, what would be much more difficult is to provide internet access to a home. Now I have begun to investigate Moodle installations on USB sticks. Such a sticky Moodle and a laptop could provide a complete learing package which replicates the on line version.

I am very excited about the potential of this idea, but still grappling with the installation in a steep DIY learning curve. However I am learning a lot and hope to have a demo implemented shortly. Watch this space for the report.

It seems that designing a Moodle course does not sit fully in any of the familiar software design methodologies. I am looking at a hybrid of Software Prototyping and Rapid applications developement, married to some form of Instructional design methodology.

It would make an interesting research project in itself building up a rationale which can be justified for how to go about the design. Figuring out the learning objectives is straightforward. The tricky bit is mapping out a learning sequence before diving in to build it so that I can document my decisions clearly and illustrate any itterations to the design.

I have found a couple of  sources for describing a sequence of learning activities such as course construction. They appear to have potential for my project.

Searching for applications of learning design related to Moodle course building tapped into the e4inovation blog post Moodling about.

On from there to look at the  JISC funded OU research programme the Open University Learning Design Initiative.

http://ouldi.open.ac.uk/index.html

Happily their ongoing research has already borne fruit in the form of a learning design planning tool CompendiumLD which I will be experimenting with.

I the course of preparing for a recent presentation came across Guidelines to construct a Learning Design Sequence Oliver (1999) at The Australian Universities Teaching Committee Learning Designs Project

http://www.learningdesigns.uow.edu.au/project/learn_design.htm

From the project overview-

Thus, for the scope of this project, a learning design comprises three key elements: the content or resources learners interact with, the tasks or activities learners are required to perform, and the support mechanisms provided to assist learners to engage with the tasks and resources.

I like the way Oliver’s Model uses a Venn diagram to explore the interactions between the content tasks and supports, and also the more linear flow charting method which clearly helps to conceptualise what is going on over the progress of a course

In the middle of all that took a few days “out” by way of a diversion to do a bit more family history research. Inspired by the 90th anniversary of the ending of WW1 and spent some late nights unravelling the amazing story of a Great- Great- Uncle who died at the Somme.

Anyway as sometime happens, when busy at work and study, a ”mental break”  renews one’s energy to get back to the task at hand.

So to week 5 and a bit of excitement the first tangiable object resulting from the project, the results of my training needs survey are in.

Here the beauty of using Moodle comes into its own. The survey was done on line and the built in reporting tool has already done all the analysis work for me and provides the results in graphical and numeric form.

Comparing this with the effort of the last piece of research I did on the pupils on paper I recall the hassle and inaccuracy, double checking, inputting all the data into excell and then figuring out the correct equations to get a meaningful result.

Granted it took me several hours to build the questionairre, but it was a fraction of the time I spent on other recent paper based surveys. The last time this survey was issued the results were looked at briefly but never analised at all statistically.

All I had to do this time was observe the number of participents entries rising until after a couple of e-mail reminders all but one of my study group complied. I deliberately did not look at the results until they were all in having learned from my previous research that the full picture often looks different from the interim result.

Here is an example showing the way the results are presented for a rating question.

I found that by scanning through the 16 questions I could quickly identify the gaps in knowledge, and those areas where a whole topic was not well understood. For a busy teacher with several hundred pupils this must be of great benefit.

Terry King highlights an issue which affects my project in her paper “Some Ethical Issues Arising in Educational Research”. Here she describes a problem of researching in the field of education where the research subjects may only be accessible for a ‘one-shot’ opportunity to sample the target group.

The “one shot” I am mindful of is the next INSET day in January 2009. This will be my only opportunity to use some of the schools directed training time to get subjects to access and evaluate a course in Moodle.

The short lead time to this deadline means I have to look at ways of accelerating the design process in order to have some material ready for evaluation. A timely blog post by Michael Hanley leads me to The Rapid Guide- How to Rapidly Identify Training needs, by Stephen Walsh of Kineo. Here I have a perspective from industry from which I can extract some tools.

The guide outlines three methods of speedily gathering initial information, surveys, focused interviews and virtual workshops. 

I already have an assessment of training needs survey in progress. Interviews with key staff could be arranged. Virtual workshops would not be an option for me as staff are not yet in a culture of working on-line.

Having gathered my initial data I need to work out what my criteria will be for deciding which courses to implement first.

Using the survey I expect to discover a wide range of potential topics for course material, and give lower priority to those which are not of immediate use to my sample group. Some topics will obviously stand out by being relevant to a higher percentage of potential users.

The Rapid Guide identifies a number of criteria for ranking training opportunities which would be relevant to my study. These include, alignment with strategic objectives of the organisation, external deadlines, return on investment, compliance driven requirements.

I will be returning to the “Rapid Guides” again to see what perspectives inform the different stages of design and implementation.

Huge bank of free resources available at

http://www.kineo.com/elearning-reports.html

Have more or less finalised my informed consent letter, hope to get this delivered and signed during the inset day at the beginning of term. Lots of discussion and thought about all the info that the study subjects need to have to give informed consent.

In my report last term and in the project specification, are lots of questions which focus on identifying the problem to be solved. The answers are biased towards the technical, and practical issues. Work is already in progress to identiy the gaps in knowledge that the training materials need to address.

There needs to be a corresponding Why? to the What of all the above.

I want to make sure I give attention to the motivational areas, the needing and wanting area as in Race. If the teachers gain a few skills, but do not gain any concepts which they find personally relevant to their own teaching I feel I will not have served them well.

I have been thinking in general terms about the introduction areas of the courses. Here is where I think I should focus on motivation, by making sure that the relevance of the topic in question to their own teaching and learning is explored.

Christopher Sessums extensive research into teacher education leads him to this observation

“I have seen teachers absolutely panic over having to learn how an application works (unlike their students who willingly push buttons to see what happens) rather than looking ahead to see how such a medium might be useful.”

He also askes the question

“Is it possible or realistic to expect teachers who do not want to enhance their basic computer skills to be compelled to do so without any incentives? What’s in it for them?”

Cultural Implications of Social Software Teaching and Learning, Ready or Not

http://eduspaces.net/csessums/weblog/144604.html

In his blog post “Web Learning about Web Learning for Teachers”, Terry Anderson notes

But I wish we could learn to spark interest in the most exiting and revolutionary technology ever to be used for formal instruction, in ways that were just a bit more designed to fire the imagination and engagement of users – both as learners and as teachers.

http://terrya.edublogs.org/2008/09/08/108/

Here is my motivation if any were needed to ensure that the benefits of understanding how to use a particular piece of software or employing a particular tool are stated very explicity in the course materials. Now to think about the means of achieving that.