digital lifeboat

Time to update the blog on the progress of the school Moodle.

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.

Just wanting to capture a few notes on the twilight session by making some very generalised observations. I will be looking in detail at the avalanche of feedback over the next couple of weeks.

 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 a number of design documents looking at the software design and the instructional design for my project.

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

Week 4  was working on the research design. It’s been slow going and I felt bogged down and wanting to start work on the course building before I run out of time.

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.

Good start to the week as had a meeting with the Head who has now instigated a regular briefing session with myself and my collegue. This will be very beneficial to all parties.

We talked over many of the current issues including the development of Moodle.  I was pleased that this is seen to be a high priority. The head was interested in reading my strategy document and will look at how we can include Moodle training into the programme for next year. I think it may not be in the all day format that would be ideal, but any time I can get will be of value in keeping up some momentum.

I think I will create an edited version of the strategy report for the SLT I can’t see them ploughing through 6,000 words.

Still chipping away refining the courses I am working on in Moodle,  and have had one of my trainees from last week into the office to do some work on a course idea they thought of during the training day.

I have been looking at examples of using Moodle in primary education and found some  schools who are really trailblazing in this field. I think we have much to learn from them, and am using these as examples for my next training session which will be with the primary department staff. This certainly encourages me along one train of thought re final year project in taking an overview of some good practice in other schools.

Managed again to write up another 1,800 words on the report so pretty much met my target for the two easter holiday weeks which was good. Spent ages on the referencing. I do find it tough especially as almost all the references are to web pages or electronic versions of reports available on line.

Maureen has been working on the group assignment and created a powerpoint of our content ideas. Worked a bit on this editing and made up a case study and quiz exercise to demonstrate SWOT and TOWS. This worked ok for a demo. Tricky getting the relative hyperlinks in though, powerpoint not having the ability to do this. I would like to re do the whole thing in Adobe Captivate 3 once we have sorted out and agreed final content to make the whole thing integrate better.