Moodle Forum - JISC RSC SE at Alton College

A last minute email to those of us outside of the Hampshire region with an invitation to attend their Moodle Forum, galvanised me into action - especially when I saw that beginners and advanced users were going to be catered for.  Going there turned out to be a great decision (and no traffic problems on the A34).  I saw and heard so much that was helpful.  Here's a summary of the points I picked up:

 .  It is possible for the RSC will do some training for us
· Check that our courses don’t have or do have guest access. For example, anyone can log onto any other course – or self enrol. Do we want this?

· Check exactly what we can expect from ULCC – what do they provide and what don’t they?

· Download the Moodle e-safety course from RSC.  Upload to our Moodle

· Teach staff to upload PDF files, which can be read by anyone using a Smartphone to look at Moodle…or Blackboard

· Southampton Solent College using Mahara

· Some colleges are putting bronze/silver/gold emblems on the front of their VLE course

· Make sure that the Mahara theme is a fixed width or else when people create views and then send a link, it will depend on the viewer’s screen and they may miss some of the information.

· Mahara Lite allows mobile (Smartphone) use of Mahara

· Does Mahara always draw from Moodle and continuously overwrite changes made in Moodle to Mahara?

· Ideas for getting people to use Moodle –

        o Upcoming events in a large box

        o For sale area

        o Lost and found

· Alton allows messaging box because student at the event said that’s how he met people and also if he was at home and saw a colleague online, they could message each other. (but Alton is a smaller college and only one campus)

· 'Postit' style add on to front page.


There was talk about setting up a course using a Project View (instead of topic or week view). This allows uploading of multi-files instead of one at a time to central area. This needs looking into before we start mass migration!

So, as you can see - lots of stuff.  I came back and added the Events box to the front page and added information about the upcoming college development days (college closed to students) plus half term opening hours for the library.  Small things, I know, but it felt very positive.  Thanks!

A bit of our intranet - linking to the Moodle PDP and our new wirelss access form

Early adopters

The e-ILP (we're calling it a Personal Development Plan - PDP) is working very well and staff have taken to it quickly.  There are some questions which I've been compiling and will upload here later so that you can see what people want to know and how they want to use the PDP.  More interesting is that Mahara is being used and there has been no mention of it from us.  It sits there within the Moodle interface but we've been so busy keeping up with the front page and trying to sort out the PDP, that we haven't considered introducting Mahara.

I am really happy that people have found it, thought about how to use it and have set up their own networks with their students - or found that their students have set up THEIR own networks and invited them to join.  I shouldn't be surprised - times have really changed and the college is now full of people who don't have to be convinced that technology is a good thing.  On the whole, things work so why shouldn't we have early adopters? Now all I have to do is find the time to learn to use Mahara well so I'm off to YouTube to get started. 

I may not yet love Moodle but I really, really like Mahara.  That is certainly another story.

St. Ives (keeping that sunny feeling going a little longer)

Did you miss me?

It's been frantically busy and I haven't had time to do much other than run from meeting to teaching to .......
However, I have been to an inspirational conference, run by ULCC, called The Future of Technology in Education.  The format was 3 speakers talking for 20 minutes each followed by a panel of the 3 speakers answering questions.  This happened 3 times and the audience stayed put, didn't have to make any choices and there was just enough time for questions, followed by discussion as you queued for coffee, lunch, tea or a drink after the event, paid for by Microsoft.  Aside from the fact that none of the speakers were women (come on, folks, I can think of 5 women who would love to speak on the subject without hesitation, deviation or repetition), the conversations on and off the podium were truly energising.  If you didn't like a speaker, you could tweet or check your emails.

Back to Moodle.  Staff love the PDP (personal development plan = eILP) in Moodle and are very keen to have a go.  We are slowly drawing the information from the MIS system but this hasn't gone as smoothly or as quickly as we thought originally.  Lesson 1:  A key player in getting the systems to talk  only works 3 days a week and is allowed to take a holiday so this needs to be factored in.  It does seem to me that this key role probably needs full time cover but I'm not a senior manager.  Lesson 2:  The administrator needs to be up to speed and available, as well as trained.  We're advertising for a web developer who will take this role and the advert went out on Friday.  At the moment, I'm the administrator.  Thanks to Chris Miles' excellent staff development for OCVC booklet - How to Use Moodle (thanks, Chris), I'm learning how to add tutors to courses so they can see their students PDPs.  It's been an interesting experiment putting course codes and tutors together.

Introducing this has made us re-examine all of our systems which is probably a good thing. I think we were warned that this might be the case.  So Lesson 3 - there is NO replacement for project planning though I'm not sure that we're very good at this in FE.

I have now created a Moodle course for staff and added some people who are coming for PDP training tomorrow.  Fingers are crossed.

PS - I still don't love Moodle.  When will I learn to love Moodle?  I got an iPhone (giving my Nokia 95 which I loved to a needy son) at the same time as we started with Moodle.  I now have learned to love my iPhone but I haven't got there yet with Moodle.  I guess we don't know each other well enough yet.


I love Inspiration.  Truly, deeply and madly.