This year's Moodle Moot UK held in Dublin, Ireland has now finished. This was my first Moot so I was eager to soak up as much knowledge as possible, mainly by attending the conference sessions but also speaking to fellow Moodlers whenever I got the chance. There were 325 attendees from 25 different countries in total which made me appreciate even more the sheer reach of Moodle. Unfortunately I don't have any statistics on the number of people I spoke to but I do know that I attended: 8 sessions and 2 keynotes, listening to more than 35 presentations from a diverse group of speakers (HE, FE, Business, Charity) across three strands of Education, Workplace and Technical. Also, as the Moot twitter feed (#MootIEUK15) was very active you may be interested in these stats: 323 tweeters, 2327 tweets with 1023 links shared (here is a bit more detailed look at the twitter stats).
Whilst attending the presentations across the two days (see full schedule here), I created the following themes, which I use here to conceptualise my reflections:
- Moodle Design (look and feel)
- Moodle as an Educational Technology
- Managing the Moodle Implementation
- Moodle Technical
Moodle Design
There were a number of presentations which emphasised that Moodle is versatile enough to be designed in many 'non-Moodle' looking designs. These presentations proved that using Moodle does not have to be ugly or unattractive to the experience of the users. One striking example was shared by Thomas Bell from United for Wildlife. In his presentation (see slides here), he demonstrated the design for their upcoming MOOC, which looked fresh and very intuitive without compromising any of the core Moodle code. Especially interesting was their redesign of the Moodle 'Completion tracking' (see image here). Similarly, the Open University of Israel, which is a distance-education institution has made a significant changes to the look and feel of their Moodle courses simply using the Elegance Theme with a number of HTML/ CSS changes (see example slide here). Ofra Haneman, Head of the Pedagogical team, demonstrated enhanced functionality such as:
- using collapsed blocks to speed up page loading;
- having a central block at the top of each course that links to most essential course information (lecture videos, course assessment etc.);
- forums subscription tracking;
- forum favourites (this is similar to developments in the Cambridge Judge Business School).
Educational Technology
In essence Moodle is an education technology; it has been created to support learning regardless of education level (school, FE, HE) or type of institution (education, work, charity). As such it was no surprise that a range of presentations focussed on the theme of Moodle as a learning technology. The two keynotes both discussed Moodle as a technology that can be used to enhance the learners experience: on Tuesday morning Dr Bart Rientes led the debated on Learning Analytics (the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). He showed how the Open University is using learning analytics to distil the performance of students. Similarly, Dr Michael de Raadt, Research Director at Moodle HQ, talked about the concept of Personalised Learning, describing how this is already being applied in some institutions (NYC Department of Education) and that we can possibly use Moodle to do this also. However, to my disappointment, no real solid suggestions were given as to how Moodle can be utilised for personalised learning.
The notion of using big data to improve the education experience of learners was further discussed by Lewis Carr, who undertook a study to look at the Moodle data from a range of FE institutions in the UK. He found that regardless of course design and approaches to teaching, the assignment activity was the most used module in Moodle (see picture here). He did discover an interesting fact which was that the Moodle messaging was the one that students engaged most with; this raises the question whether teachers should be making more use of the messaging in Moodle. Tim Hunt, Moodle developer at the OU, also used big data gathered from all OU quizzes to analyse how the Quiz helps students' learning. In the short time given, Tim presented a number of points, including:
- analysing how students use and react to quizzes is important information for the development of teaching;
- We should always be open to changing assessment types if one method does not work;
- Quizzes do enhance the course completion rates and engagement in general;
- Moodle Quiz question types (a number of these are developed by the OU) are getting better and should be used by other institutions.
Feedback was also discussed in a number of talks: Institute of Education and UCL have combined to create a whole 'Feedback environment' for their students, who are able to log in and view all feedbacks from all teachers in one portal (see image here). A group of speakers from the Manchester Metropolitan University presented their findings from an empirical study which sought student feedback on how to improve their experience with Moodle (see here). Feedback was the starting point even to Martin Dougiamas afternoon keynote, which focussed on the importance of feedback from the Moodle community and developing a Moodle Association (see image here).
I also listened to a number of presentations on the use of video in Moodle. A highlight for me was Bas Brand's demonstration of 'Don't Memorise' website, which integrates Vimeo videos in Moodle to provide free resources for children in India. The tight integration of Vimeo videos in Moodle is really different from what I have seen before; he has made a significant changes to HTML and CSS and as a result the website looks very 'un-Moodle' and the videos are made engaging through 'YouTube like' functionality.
Managing Moodle Implementation
A number of talks that I attended described how they have managed the implementation of Moodle in their Institution. Having being involved in the implementation of Moodle first at City University London and now at the University of Cambridge, I was particularly interested in these talks. The presentations covered the following areas:
- Providing support
- Gathering feedback
- Having an active user community
- Creating a Champions programme
- Awarding good practice
- Developing the best technical environment and upgrade cycles
Speaking to Jessica Gramp from UCL, she recommended this Moodle research paper that looks at how working with e-learning champions to transformed e-learning at UCL.
Moodle Technical
Again it was no surprise that many of the talks at this year's Moot revolved around the technical aspects of this open source software. Throughout the conference there were requests for members to join the 'Dashboard' and 'Forms' working groups. The dashboard working group looked at how to improve the Moodle dashboard (currently known as 'My Moodle' page) and shared a number of ideas such as having a 'favourites' block, 'overall progress' block, a 'my assignment' block and a 'feedback' block. Contributing ideas is still open to all; if you are intrested then follow the link here. The Forms working looked at ideas to improve the forms used within Moodle, such as the enrolment form. We at Cambridge University have already changed our enrolment forms significantly so our developer (Mark Chaney) shared some ideas with this group during the consequent hack fest on Thursday. See images of these presentations here.
Currently at the University of Cambridge, we have a dedicated tester, who carries out system and regression testing through out the calendar year. For this reason, I found the presentation by Dave Smith on the potential of 'Behat' to test Moodle automatically very interesting. Dave demonstrated how Behat's automatic testing allows him to test his Moodle plugins in hours rather than days.
Another technical aspect of Moodle that I found useful was the development in Institutions to better support assignment submissions. Of particular interest to me was this development at the University of Sussex, which seeks to increase efficiency and reliability in the use of the core Moodle assignment and the Turnitin plugin. Finally I found this paper from UCL very interesting as they go into great lengths to describe their technical environment set up for Moodle.
As the above stats showed (first paragraph), Twitter was lively during the conference and I have capture my favourite tweets below. Enjoy!
