Moodle News

Earlier today Martin Dougiamas posted on Moodle.org about the upcoming Moodle Research Conference on 14-15 September 2012 in Heraklion, Crete.

“The purpose of the conference is to support networking and sharing among those who are researching Moodle and thinking about ways to improve it for different learning scenarios.   It will also directly inform the development of Moodle in the future.”

This is going to be interesting aspect which was not apparent before but makes sense to learn from successful case studies of implementation of Moodle.  Martin went on to explain:

“We’ve had a good number of papers already submitted for the conference, so it’s looking pretty exciting!  Submitted papers range from in-depth case studies of how Moodle can be applied and used in various environments to interface design experiments and the development of whole new modules to introduce new techniques.

(Personally I love detailed and rigorous case studies.  There are so many ways to apply even a stock Moodle but it’s important to understand what patterns best achieve our goals of improving education and why they work)”

They have extended the submission date until the 28th May, so if you have a paper to submit, go ahead! You have two more weeks to do so.

Conference link – > http://research.moodle.net/

Although for my plugin reviews I do not do a comprehensive analysis, this is something I use in my consulting and training and recommend to people to think about these type of issues when considering implementing a 3rd party plugin.

There are many great 3rd-party plugins available for Moodle. However, it is important to assess the suitability and reliability of the plugin before adopting it. The list in the linked document is not exhaustive as there may be more or fewer questions depending on the individual installation and organisation.

Some hosting providers may have already have audited the plugin and publish a list of ones they approve for their hosting platform - Remote-Learner for example. However. as although something may be technically okay, the suitability and cost implications may be something to make you think.
The list is basically something that one could use to assess the risk related to implementing the plugin. Each question could have a few lines to describe what it means, but you should get the overall picture. To give some context I will explain the reasoning behind three of the questions here:

Question: Has it got a Moodle Docs page.

Even though a plugin may have extensive documentation already, if someone is in Moodle and clicks the Moodle Docs link at the bottom of the page in a plugin that’s where they end up. So having a page, or even a stub page which has the links to official documentation is a good thing and helps people getting lost.

Question: Do they (the author)work for an established Moodle development team (Moodle partner, the OU, or HQ for example)?

This is an assessment of business risk. If someone is a freelancer, the ability for them to provide ongoing support for a module is sometimes (not always) less than where it was built-in an established development team where it may be in use by many clients or installations and thus maintained for business reasons. This is not always the case, but it is just one of the many things that one coud consider.

Question: Does it impact performance of Moodle in normal or high traffic usage?

How complex is the solution? Is it using a lot of slow database queries constantly, are they optimised? are the server resources being heavily used by this and reducing the overall performance? Does it encourage more synchronous activity or is it asynchronous? Understanding what the impact of the usage of the plugin, especially if it is heavily adopted by courses is important.

Download Some Criteria for reviewing plugins (pdf) - 409.64 kB

Please feel free to add any questions or sections that you think should be added to the list

As you may remember I released a Moodle 2 version of Moodle Tool Guide which was created by Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz).

Ralf Hilgenstock of eLeDia and Susanne Gebauer and Gerald Hartwig have now completed the German version of the Tool Guide which can be downloaded from Slideshare.

Moodle2 toolguideforteachers v2-de

There is also a Spanish translation of the Moodle 2 Tool Guide by  Alfredo Ruiz.

If you want to create your own version of the Moodle 2 Tool Guide I have added the powerpoint to the original page.

Just one request, if you can send me a copy of the changed one for an archive – that will be great!

The conference season has really kicked off now, and they are coming quite fast over the coming months.

1st Moodle Research Conference – Sep 14-15
The call for papers on the 1st Moodle Research Conference being held in Heraklion, Crete-Greece is nearly up as 14th May nears, so if like me your have your submission nearly done, time to finish it!
For information on the Conference check out http://research.moodle.net/

EdTech 2012 – May 31, June 1
Although not a Moot, this Ireland based EdTech conference is being held in National University of Ireland Maynooth has a focus on Digital Literacies. There are some very interesting keynotes (Martin Oliver and Lesley Gourlay , Martha Rotter and Doug Belshaw) and there is also a workshop session on Moodle 2.
For more information check out http://www.ilta.net

Here are some of the Moodlemoots in the coming 2 months:

iMoot 2012   May 26-29
This is an online Moot, focused on Communication, Collaboration and Community.  There will be a good number of presentations from Practitioners around the globe. The 4 day ticket is only 80 AU$ – which is great value so this is one not to miss.
For more info check out  http://2012.imoot.org/

Mountain Moodlemoot  May 30, June 1
This moot is held in Helena, Montana and features a rich schedule over 2.5 days with a nice range of pre-moot sessions from Tammy Belgarde, Michelle Moore, Floyd Saner, a keynote from Laura Pasquini of the University of North Texas, and presentations from Helen Foster and Tim Hunt.
For more info check out http://www.mountainmoot.com

MoodleMoot Oklahoma – June 4-6
The Moot will be held at the Metro Technology Centers, Springlake Campus. The first day is a selection of training sessions and then the main days will be broken into four/five tracks on Curriculum, Hands-on, Technical and Business.
For more info check out http://moodle.metrotech.edu/

Moodlemoot Croatia – June 13
This Moot will be held in Zagreb, Croatia. The topics will include Implementation and development of the Moodle system

• Teaching and Learning with Moodle
• The technical side of Moodle
• Moodle 2.x

The two named speakers are Joyce Seitzinger ( New skill of digital curation ) and Susana Leitão (Moodle and SIGARRA IS – an integrated environment).
For more info check out http://www.srce.unizg.hr/moodlemoot

MoodleMoot Euskadi June 15
This Moot is held in Txorierri, Spain and looks to be a very interesting day with a number of key presentations and then three parallel sessions.
For more info check out http://mooteu12.moodlemoot.net/

French MoodleMoot  June 20-22
This 8th Moodlemoot in France will be held at the University of Nîmes. There is a wide choice of case studies, round tables, and Technical and training sessions including quite a bit on Moodle 2 and on Mahara.
For more info check out http://moodlemoot2012.unimes.fr/

Hungarian MoodleMoot – June 28-30
The Hungarian Moot is held at Szent István University in Gödöllo, Hungary. The first two days are presentations with the 3rd day of practical work. The presentation themes include elearning content development, ePortfolios and Moodle integration among others.
For more info check out http://moodlemoot.hu/

One new setting that I think many people will like is the new Course Setting called  Course layout. This is set by editing the course settings. This is taken from the Moodle 2.3 Dev branch.

This setting determines whether the whole course is displayed on one page or split over several pages. The setting has no effect on the SCORM format however works nicely on topics and weeks!

The Options are

• Show all sections on one page
• Show one section per page

So what does it look like?

The following images show the course page as it is at first with just the section Name showing in a list, and then as the user moves through some of the sections.

The things to note are

1. The main page is now an index for the course
2. There is basically a next section / previous section above and below the section area but using the name of the section
3. Section 0 is still there (like using the old  &section=  option, so you need to be aware of what you put in that section).

Index of the Course page - "One section per page" option on

 

Looking at the databases section

 

Looking at the forums section

 

Looking at the last section

 

So as you hopefully can see this provides a nice section by section experience.

Of course now, make sure your section 0 is just 1 line of text/graphic in size to get best use of this and that your topic fits on one screen!

Nice improvement!

 

I saw that the new Assignment Activity code was in the development stream today, so I installed it on my test site to play.

I like it! It is super cool.

So here I have added two short vidcasts of the assignments settings and one of an example from teacher and student point of view.

Hope you find them useful.

Assignment Settings Assignment Example

This is a bit of a different review to module reviews I have done, so please excuse me!  Normally I go through the following process when doing a review:

• Background to Module/Author
• What does it do?
• Is it simple to install?
• Is there documentation for it?
• Is it easy for the teacher/admin to use?
• Is it easy for the learner/student to use?
• Does it do what it promises?

However this is going to be the first post of a series which together will be my review of ELIS – Remote-Learner’s Enterprise Learning Intelligence System for Moodle. It is a system designed to tackle some complicated processes and organisational challenges, and my normal review structure wouldn’t really suit a review as it is not just a plug ‘n’ play module.

Background

I used to work for Remote-Learner, so became familiar with the suite of add-ons. It was made publicly available through their GITHUB repository – https://github.com/remotelearner/ over 10 months ago. Initially released for 1.9 it was upgraded earlier this year for Moodle 2, so it is about time I did a review.

So what is ELIS?

ELIS is a suite of tools that add some very specific and useful features into Moodle. Here I go briefly into each aspect:

Program Management
Whilst native Moodle provides category-course structures for Moodle, and some level of interlinking with meta-enrolment, these are not interlinked as a program. ELIS provides a hierarchy structure for courses, providing the ability to group them into programs, build in dependencies, assign credits or certification for completion and also to easily roll out new iterations of the whole program as a track of classes. One nice aspect is to expire a completion of a class so that they have to re-take, useful for yearly compliance type training, or CPD.

User Management
All users in out-of-the-box Moodle are managed by the admin centrally. There is ability to provide a hierarchy for organisational structures with manages, owners and so on.  THe ELIS Users feature enables the creation of user sets where viewing the users is dependent on your role within the ELIS system, so that a user can only see their users and not others. Being an admin of a user SET in ELIS does not mean you are an admin in Moodle.

Reporting
So with the extra course/program aspects and user structures and permissions, a lot of new reports can be built to provide an overview on the system. I won’t go through them all here, but it includes things like program level reporting across all the classes for a user, by himself or a manager of his user “SET”, be it a company organisation or a university course, and user Set report across all the programs, and classes in them, giving a very wide view on one or all people taking the programs and classes. However more later on this.

Notifications
Some of the events in Moodle prompt emails to users, such as self-enrolment in a course, however if someones tutor, manager, HR department wants to also get a copy that is not normally possible.  The notifications aspect of ELIS provides a decent suite of event based notifications which can go to the user, or people with a right to get them for that class or user, on events such as:

• Class enrolment / completion / or when they have not started by a given time
• Program completion / or when they have not completed  by a given time

Repository
ELIS has an interesting Alfresco integration that goes beyond the repository API. I didn’t have this set up for the review with Moodle 2 so I won’t be discussing this beyond here.

Summary
So to properly review this solution, I will break the review into a few different parts.

The next post in this review series I will start with the reviewing the User Management.

As you may remember I released a Moodle 2 version of Moodle Tool Guide which was created by Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz).

The English version is available on SlideShare and can be downloaded locally:   - Download Moodle 2 Tool Guide here -

Alfredo Ruiz has now completed a Spanish translation of the Moodle 2 Tool Guide. You can find it on his site and he has also added it to scribd.

View this document on Scribd

If you want to create your own version of the Moodle 2 Tool Guide I have added the powerpoint to the original page.

Just one request, if you can send me a copy of the changed one for an archive – that will be great!

At the Ireland & UK Moodlemoot we presented on the Google-Analytics reporting we had implemented for the Moodlemoot.ie site. In this post I will go through what the challenge was, and what reports we were able to achieve. As the implementation requires some changes to Moodle Bas Brands on his blog will focus on what we code we used and how it works to achieve this type of reporting

The challenge

Usually the standard Google Analytics code logs the url of the page. Now for my blog that url is meangingful in its naming:

http://moodlemoot.ie/programme/online-presentations/

/programme/ is first level and indicates the page is within that area
/online-presentations/  is the page name and indicates what it is

These urls are easy to understand when viewing in a report, however as with some other applications Moodle does not have these clean URLs (or SEF urls).

A url of a course in moodle could be : http://moodle.moodlemoot.ie/course/view.php?id=15
Or a section in a course: http://moodle.moodlemoot.ie/course/view.php?id=15&topic=2
Or a resource in a course: http://moodle.moodlemoot.ie/mod/resource/view.php?id=146

In a Google report the friendly url makes the report instantly meaningful, whereas the normal Moodle url adds the challenge to go back and see what it is.

So the challenge was to address that in a way that takes advantage of the incredible reporting power or Google Analytics.

I have had this idea for some years, just never had a particular reason to implement it. I have seen others do something similar, but this approach here had a specific reasoning behind it.

Anyhow, on with the show.

Pretty Pictures

Before the pretty pictures, let’s explain what we did. It is a simple approach and it is not a solution for everyone. (yes, better get this in now this is an approach to the solution which may or may not suit you). So with the code implemented for yourself, you can do what we have but you may want different things. We do, just did this as a conceptual demo of the approach.

We had Google Analytics log  this url http://moodle.moodlemoot.ie/2012/general/Pecha+Kucha/What+is+Pecha+Kucha/Page

instead of the normal one which would have been  http://moodle.moodlemoot.ie/mod/page/view.php?id=69

It logs /$category/$courseshortname/$sectionname/$activityname/$activitytype

This is our 1st phase of the development we hope to do, we will plan to have custom variables stating role (student/teacher) and other aspects as well, but more on that another time.

The reason for the / in the url is specifically to available of the Page path depth analysis in the Analytics.

I will add later what we intend to do next, hopefully collaboratively with people.

The stats reports here run from the date before the Moot, till the day after. April 1-5th.

Here is a quick overview of the visitor traffic that Google Analytics tracking provides.  In this case the top report is Page Views  vs Visits, with some summary stats below it.

The bottom demographic report shows Operating system in this regard.

It is also possible to show time spent, so the image below is of Average Visit Duration.

URLS dont matter here, just that the code is everywhere on your Moodle site – so within the Theme. This is important and it is why the code solution we went for was a theme change, not a block or mod.

Visitor Flow

Another very handy report, for seeing how users flow through your site (main page, login, course page, forum, view post, etc…)  However you can see from this image that the URL is important here and becomes meaningful.

That red bit is user dropping off at that point. You can also use this kind of analysis to explore your navigation labelling and so on.. but enough on that for now. As with most of G-A you can play with the source item which in this case was Country on the left. It would not surprise someone looking at this to know that the Moot was held there. But it could be many things like city, or operating system filtered for Returning Visitors only..

That was audience standard reporting, what about content (pages etc) reporting? Well, now it gets a bit fun!

Now we see the Page urls in the results below. And you can see what we have done with urls and that the report is instantly readable.

Then you can get more info on the Pages

So I can see that The glossary in the best practices course has an average of 2 minutes on a page. 337 views, 84 unique.  Hmmm Michelle will like that I am sure.

We can look at referral traffic (where the person came from when clicking a link to the site) – I have doctored image to remove some person info. So we can see most came from the main Moot website, then twitter links, and mostly afterwards the email alerts. But 71% was direct traffic who type in the URL or had a bookmark.

Custom Reports and Dashboards.

Thats all well and good for normal reports, but when you build custom reports and dashboards the fun really begins.

There is a number of widgets on the dashboard which show specific information. Like the pageviews/traffic for a specific course over the 5 days.  These widgets are configured easily as below:

This only counts the traffic where Page Page level 2 contains /workshops/  which is the unique course shortname.  This is the very reason we went with this approach.

So how about a whole dashboard on one Moodle course only?

These widgets all filter on the course level for /game/ and show different aspects.

But there is more. Path level rocks.!!

With this report, I can then dril down a category (in this case 2012), into one course and then see a list of the section names that people spent time in the items within that section. and could also dril further to see the usage of the items within that section alone

Custom Report with option to drill down

Custom Report Drilled down 2 path levels

 

Access

Now of course if you were (for some, or maybe all courses) want to give this info to each teacher or school/faculty admin you would not want to give them access to the main G-A login, so you can either

a) download the PDF of the report – [attach pdf]
b) Have it email them the report, daily, or weekly, monthy etc.

So by setting up a dashboard for each course that you want to the overall usage can be fed right back to the people who want to know.

Future Development Ideas ….

This was just the first implementation of the solution as a visible proof of concept and approach. Although I have a clear idea of how this “could” progress what would be better is to get a group of like-minded people together to collaborate on this going forward, or at least that is the idea. Get in touch!

So, what are the possible future roadmaps bits?

- Using Custom Variables in G-A to track visitor used related aspects such as

• the main role of a user from a hidden profile field (staff vs student or Job Title, or work department)- useful for breaking down activity by a new visitor option
• perhaps even an anonymous hash which correlates to a user within Moodle, just g-a does not know it.

- Using page related variables to track certain aspects of visit (category for example) instead of URL paths

- Exploring logging Event tracking for activity completion or completions

- Building a settings page / config to control which variables are logged in the various parts of the implementation as no two sites would probably want to same data

- Build an email messaging scripts that takes the PDF sent via email by Google-Analytics for a report, and inserts it to a course for the teacher.

- build a plugin which replicates moodle logging calls into analytics calls as a more 1-1 outsourcing of the inbuilt statistics

- Exam using the analytics API to extract data and produce reports in Moodle using Google-Chart rather than report via email or the Google Analytics interface.

Well, that is some ideas, I am sure that there will be many variants to tackle all the use cases that people want to implement, but perhaps we can get a group to work through some of these together.

Technical Implementation

So for the technical aspect, I suggest you pop over to Bas Brands blog.

Over the last two years, there has been a great online Moot, powered by a willingness to shared experiences and learn from others in their practice and implementation of Moodle. These fully online practioner conferences had a large number of virtual presentations from people around the globle. This year it is taking place at the end of May, so I had a quick chat with the organiser Julian “@moodleman” Ridden about the iMoot to ask him to explain what the iMoot is all about. What is the imoot?  Julian – iMoot is a Global online conference that aims to unite the best speakers from all over the world in one place to share their knowledge with the global community. Having been in a lucky position to visit Moodle Moots all over the world, I have heard from a wide variety of passionate and knowledgeable Moodle speakers. I realised however that sadly they are often only heard by people in their regional locations. The idea of iMoot was to provide a central online space where these local experts could get their voice heard by the community at large. The second goal is to charge as little as possible to ensure these voices can be heard by as many moodle users as possible.
When is the imoot? Julian – The next iMoot is coming up on May 26th. It will run for 24 hours a day over 4 days. The reason for the non-stop schedule is to allow for presenters from all over the world to present in their local timezones. It also allows us to have a very active, dynamic and diverse program.
What are the strands at this years imoot Julian – Well first I should point out our theme. This year we have gone with Moodle C3 - Communication, Collaboration, Community. We saw these three “C’s” as being the cornerstones to Moodle’s success and of those who use it. We are keen to hear stories that reflect on that theme. The iMoot itself is a working case in point of these very same C’s in action. More information on the theme can be found here – http://2012.imoot.org/mod/book/view.php?id=31&chapterid=11.  As the event is global and has an intentionally loose theme, the streams themselves are simply slit up into presentation types. These are “How To’s” or instructional sessions), “Case Studies” and “Academic Papers”. This last one has been added by popular request from the community.
If someone wants to present, what should they do? Julian We are currently seeking submissions for this years iMoot. If you have already presented, or will be presenting, at a moot somewhere in the world, we would love it if you also submitted your session online at our website. If you are not presenting at a moot but still have a session in mind, we would also love to hear from you as well. In return for speaking at the conference you receive free admission to the event and access to all sessions. What we require from our presenters is the ability to present at least one live session delivery via our Moodle website. We use Adobe connect for the live delivery. Support is provided to presenters who have not used the tool before. If a presenter can, we ask that they present at two different times of day to allow more attendees to hear them. But while a request, this is not a pre-requisite. After a presentation time is also given for some Q and A. If you are interested in submitting a presentation, a direct link can be found here - http://2012.imoot.org/mod/data/view.php?id=10 So have you got some experience to share? Then pop over to the iMoot site and submit a proposal.

Nearly 40 presentations from the Moot last week are now online, so  I thought I would include a selection of them here. These selection is random-ish, with no real preference on any. Hopefully the videos will be available in the coming weeks to upload as well!

For the full list check  http://moodlemoot.ie/programme/online-presentations/

Enjoy.

Accessible Audio: Fusing Moodle with Soundcloud on Prezi

Helping moodle users with print disabilities

View more presentations from Dominik Lukes

Tracking student progress with course completion on Prezi

I have been thinking some time about the announcement nearly two weeks ago of the Blackboard acquisition of two Moodle Partners.  My focus has been elsewhere so I have not had the chance to blog my thoughts until now.

As most will know, for the past few months my focus was the organising of the Ireland & UK Moodlemoot which ran last week April 2nd-4th, and from feedback so far people were happy with it. It was the first event that I have run with my new business (http://www.lts.ie), so hence it was a big focus. But as that is now over, and moving into the wind-down phase I have the time to put my thoughts to paper so to speak.

My Initial thoughts

I admit that I was surprised by the move on a few levels.

Firstly I was surprised that Blackboard would acquire any Moodle service provider at all, as I think many were. Up until then it did not fit within my understanding of their planned business model; however business focuses can change and plans have to adapt. When you have a core product like an LMS, the Value Added Services (VAS) is where the incremental profit can be coming from. And looking at it now, those behind Blackboard have certainly laid the foundations for this area with virtual classrooms and learning analytics.

Virtual Classrooms

The acquisitions of WIMBA and Elluminate platforms for virtual classrooms demonstrated a good understanding that the LMS is one part of the ecosystem and they wanted to have other value-added services to augment the LMS service income.

In some ways you can see this as the first move towards diversification of LMS service provision. When you have clearly good products (like Elluminate) which can work with many LMS, it makes sense to actively sell into all of the different LMS customers which is only made easier through supporting the multiple platforms.

I have not seen a better collaborative whiteboard than the one in Elluminate (now Blackboard Collaborate), although it is just one aspect of the overall virtual classroom solution. Right now, I see Adobe Connect as being better for mass-delivery (for webinars/presentations) and there is a variety of solutions that can perform small class tutorials. The one I am watching in this regard is BigBlueButton. However, time will tell how this area plays out. The battle is still ongoing.

Analytics

Also Blackboard have made good inroads with the analytics side of learning and if they can make this work for Blackboard why can it not also work for Moodle, and other systems. Analytics is going to be one of the service battlegrounds in coming years. Stats are king. So limiting the market for a good learning stats focused application does not make sense in the grand scheme of things.

When I worked with Enovation Solutions they used Jasper Reports to build BI reports for Moodle. These were kind of cool and the power of an external tool analysing Moodle was clearly one way forward. I have also seen the great reporting that is possible with Moodle when you enhance it with a system like ELIS (from Remote-Learner when I worked there), these reports were compelling. Joule from Moodlerooms also had enhanced reporting. So it is clear that reporting is being pushed as a priority.

The two community contributed modules in Moodle which can enhance reports are configurable reports and the Ad Hoc SQL reports, both of which enable report design however within the confines of Moodle database structure.

So if I was a betting man, I would expect a version of Blackboard analytics to be available within Moodle in Joule soon, and perhaps even a community block released.

So..

So if these are some of the business reasons behind the push to support multiple platforms, what is the impact on Moodle the product and Moodle the community?

Well, to understand the potential impact one has to look at what Moodle is but before that let me add a quote.

Martin Dougiamas made a very clear post on Moodle.org explaining his view point, these were two of the points

Moodle itself has not, and will not, be purchased by anyone.  I am committed to keeping it independent with exactly the same model it has now.

I think it’s prudent to wait and see how it works out.  There are a lot of strong Moodle supporters involved inside Moodlerooms and Netspot, and they all have the best of intentions towards the software and the community.

This is very important and his comments lay the groundwork for my thoughts.

What is Moodle?

Moodle is an open source application, where anyone can use it without a license fee. They are free to install it as many times as they want, use it however they want, to customise it however they want, to integrate it into any system as long they provide the source to others; not modify or remove the original license and copyrights, and apply this same license to any derivative work. The full license is available here – http://docs.moodle.org/dev/License

So what is the risk to the software itself?

Well, not a lot, or at least this change of ownership of two Moodle service providers has no major change or any risks that I can see.

Moodlerooms already had a version of Moodle so to speak, with the Joule system as they had wrapped extra functionality around it but as they only hosted Joule and did not distribute it some of those features are not publicly available. That said, they have released a number of of their changes to the community over the years including flexpage, googleapps integration and other code directly into HQ.

Moodlerooms contributed the IMS LTI consumer (External Tool) and the IMS Common Cartridge import and export for Moodle 2 both of which are great additions and Netspot are currently working on the re-development of the Assignment for Moodle 2.3.

There was also another corporate distribution of Moodle, and some open source enhancements such as ELIS from Remote-Learner, but core Moodle still exists and grows stronger with more features and, most importantly, more integrations with other systems.

I firmly believe that Moodle, as with all LMS, is one part of the full learning eco-system. In this light Moodle 2 having out-of-the-box integrations with Flickr and a wide range of other systems is the road forward – this is where things in general are moving especially considering the future impact as IMS LTI becomes widespread.

There is a large number of contributors to the Moodle code base as can be seen here – > http://moodle.org/dev/  So from where I sit, there is no increased risk for Moodle code base from the acquisition of the two Moodle Partners.

How about the community?

The Moodle community is the backbone of Moodle. The community is made up of so many different groups around the world:
•    Moodle users (teachers, trainers, course creators, admins)
•    Moodle developers
•    Moodle integrators (with other systems)
•    Moodle HQ
•    Moodle Partners
•    Moodle partner clients
•    Self hosting institutions
•    Other Service providers
and so on.

Although a lot of the community interaction happens in the Moodle HQ provided forums, ticket system (tracker), Documentation Wiki (Moodle Docs ) there is also a lot of interaction elsewhere including Moodle User Groups, Moodle support e-mail lists, support blogs, help videos on Youtube and other systems, Twitter, Google+, Events like Moodlemoots or Moodle streams in other conferences.

• The community is strong.
• It is cross sector.
• It is global and it is growing quickly.

Last week’s Ireland & UK Moodlemoot showed the strength and depth of the collaboration and sharing that is going on and will continue to grow. One thing that struck me was that although the numbers from specific institutions may have dropped, that overall more institutions were attending the Moot for the first time. That is a strong and healthy eco-system I think.

So of the community itself, two of those service providers now have a new boss and a different direction perhaps, but at least from what we have read so far, the intention is still there to keep them as part of the community which bodes well.

Will this still be the case in 2 years? Who knows, but knowing some of the people involved in both companies, they are good people so as it stands I am not worried yet.

So what about Moodle HQ?

Having worked for two Moodle partners, I understand how the partner system helps funds Moodle HQ. I know it has been explained it in presentations at Moots and in forum posts but I do find that when talking to people in the community they are not always as aware of the details.

It is no secret that Moodle partners give part of their revenue to help fund Moodle HQ and that this money in addition to the donations Moodle HQ receives directly is what gives HQ the income to employ the developers and staff in HQ to work on Moodle fulltime.

To quote one of Martin Dougiamas posts:

As for your other question, no, Moodle Partners are not required to contribute to Moodle in any other way than by their 10% royalty payments.  However, the bigger partners all do additionally contribute to the code in some way (either by coding, or bug fixing, or specification development, etc), because they want to be (and also to be seen to be) a true part of the open source community.  It’s about respect.

Likewise, their clients often have particular concerns (eg bugs) that need addressing, and we (Moodle HQ) prioritise those concerns.  It’s a very symbiotic relationship of goodwill and co-operation.   And everybody in the world gets to use the resulting software for free.

Win-win-win.

The Moodle partner network is one of the things which differentiates Moodle from other open source applications in providing it a strong continuous income to push the product further and further, improving it, supporting it, bug fixing it and so on.

The revenue stream from the partner network, along with the depth of the community certainly are two of the pillars on which the success has been built.

What is the risk for HQ with the two service providers being purchased?

Well, my understanding from the public statements is that they are still Moodle partners so will continue to contribute under that mechanism. Over the last few years, the partner network has been expanding and is currently 50 strong so that will help provide more security over time.

From where I stand it looks like the code, the community and HQ are in a strong position for the coming years.

Last week at the Ireland and UK Moodlemoot 2012, I did a short presentation on IMS LTI.

I have blogged before about IMS LTI; what it is; how Moodle could use it; and how a custom Module enabled Moodle act as a LTI provider tool.

So for more background I suggest you have a read of those posts:

• Moodle 2.2 supports IMS LTI
• LTI Provider for Moodle 2.2

To recap the key points:

Before explaining LTI, What is IMS?

The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) is a global, nonprofit, member organization that strives to enable the growth and impact of learning technology in the education and corporate learning sectors worldwide.

The IMS name originates from the initial name of the organisation which was a bit specific – Instructional Management Systems.  Glad it changed to IMS

What is LTI ?

IMS is developing Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) to allow remote tools and content to be integrated into a Learning Management System (LMS).

So basically it is a set of standard integration methods that enable two systems talk to each other in a common language/protocol.

So with that out-of-the-way, here is the presentation I gave last week (or at least a recording of what I demoed)-

Feel free to post any questions & comments below.

As attendees will know, during the Ireland & UK Moodlemoot in Dublin last week there was a bit of Gamification at play. There were a number of things that people could do to earn points, and some of them were short quizzes.

Now as the results of the winners will be announced tomorrow, we will be releasing the questions for the Moodle 2 for people to use for fun etc. So before we do that I thought I would do a short post on the type of reports one can do with the Moodle 2 quiz using the data from the quizzes. Thinking about even releasing a course backup of the anonymised quizzes so people have ready mate reports to play with, more on that in coming days.

Format of Quiz.

There was 20+ questions in a category and 20 questions were randomly selected from the category.

People were given 2 minutes to complete the quiz. It is not a lot of time, but enough time to get surprised by the timer!

All questions were on 1 page as page reloads would just eat up short amount of time.

The questions were a mix of Multi Choice, Short Answer and True / False.

Results

About 70 people completed the quiz. No one got 20 out of 20 in the 2 minutes which would have given 40 points. The two highest were 28 which is quite good. In my test runs and knowing the questions I knew it was going to be a challenge.

The following graph shows the score distribution.

Score distribution in the Moodle 2 quiz

More stats

The following images show more of the stats available:

Quiz information

question stats report

Quiz structure analysis report

You can also report on just one question in detail, here is one of them (I wont post all would be too long).

One Question Report

All very interesting really, love the level of detail you can get to help improve your questions for next time you use them.

I will post the questions later in the week, but as I had been going through this thought I would post up some images.

So ….

How much have you used the reports in Moodle 1.9 ?

How much will you use these reports?

If you are wondering where to head to at the end of the summer, stop the presses (or the brain cells at least) …

On September 14-15 2012, there is a Moodle Research Conference taking place in Heraklion in Crete-Greece. Yup that is right. More Sea, Sun, Sand, Culture, History and Moodle than you can cope with is coming your way.

Moodle HQ and ITisART Ltd, with the support of the CoSyLlab, University of Piraeus, are organising the 1st Moodle Research Conference 2012 in Heraklion, Crete, Greece. There is an exciting list of names on the Programme Committee from institutions across the globe and the two conference chairs are Martin Dougiamas and Symeon Retalis (Associate Professor – University of Piraeus).

There is a wide range of topics proposed including:

• Research studies and case studies on teaching with Moodle
• Mobile Learning with Moodle
• Innovative Moodle plug-ins
• Learning Analytics in Moodle
• Collaborative Learning with Moodle
• Moodle communities of practice
• Interoperability with Moodle
• Accessibility in Moodle
• Adaptivity in Moodle

So if you have a piece of original unpublished research or recent developments on these areas, the call for papers is now open and details for submission can be found here -> http://research.moodle.net/ All the submissions will undergo a blind peer review process and wondefully, accepted papers will be published as a conference proceedings in an open access online-only version. +1 for the open access!

The deadline for submissions to the research conference is 14th May 2012, so get your motors running and pop over to their website to get more info.

Many of you will have used and maybe still use Joyce Seitzinger’s Moodle Tool Guide (@catspyjamasnz)  which she released nearly two years ago. As her blog mentions since then people have released twelve translations of the guide into Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Portuguese, Slovene and Spanish.  There has also been some adaptations for specific institutions and also for colour blind users and other LMS like blackboard and Dokoes.  * All of these variations are linked from her blog.

A Moodle 2 version

So last year I had put together a Moodle 2 version which included the tools as they were now in Moodle 2. I had not released it, but as I have given it to some people in the meantime, I thought I better put it up so people can use it or comment on it, suggest changes and so on. Everyone will have their own take on what should be in it or not, and rightly so. This is probably just another start point for 2 – perhaps.

With so many resource types and activities in Moodle, I had put it onto two pages although am trying to work a version into one page, again this is something people will debate about!

So it is now added to SlideShare and possible to download.

All feedback & corrections welcome.

For all details on the original version created by Joyce Seitzinger for Moodle 1.9 check out her website -> Moodle Tool Guide

 

Packt were kind enough to send me a copy of Nicholas Freears book Moodle 2 for Teaching 4-9 Year Olds to review. Having reviewed a few other Moodle 2 books I was interested to see what the difference was in this book. The book was published in October 2011 and had a great list of reviewers including the well-known Mary Cooch, so my expectations were high. Nicholas subtitles his book “Use Moodle to create quizzes, puzzles, and games to enhance the learning ability of your students” – so this is the theme along which I have read the book.

For those who don’t know Nicholas he works as an Application Programmer/Web Developer in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University.

The book is broken down into chapters on key topics:

1. Getting Started
2. Basic Math in Moodle
3. Telling Stories
4. Spot the Difference
5. Setting Homework
6. Fun Games
7. Interactive Puzzles
8. Stories Revisited
9. Embedding the web
10. Administration

I am going to go through two of the chapters in detail in this review.

After the getting started section, it seems each chapter can really be taken in isolation, so I jumped into Chapter 3.

Telling Stories.

Nicholas kicks off this chapter on imagination and uses this as a backdrop to introduce a way to help nurture creativity and narrative skills in storytelling, both written and verbal. He explains that one way to achieve this is using the database activity and then takes the reader through the setup of the activity touching on some of the important aspects including accessibility.

He then introduces and takes the reader through installation and usage of an audio recorder for recording MP3s to enable use of audio in the storytelling.

The chapter provided a solid introduction to the usage of the database covering all the key aspects well through a solid use case.

Next chapter I looked at was Chapter 6.

Fun Games

The chapter is focused on the use of a custom activity called Game. This is a great plugin which enables you to have games like crosswords and snakes & ladders in your Moodle course. Of course to have these type of games you need content (questions, words) and the chapter introduces how the Glossary activity is a great place to manage this content and provides a nice table of which game and which source of content is suitable.

Nicholas here introduces us yet another reason why the Glossary is such a wonderful activity (FYI: Michelle Moore will present at the Moodlemoot in Dublin about the Glossary being “Moodle’s Swiss Army Knife” ). The reader is taken step by step through setting up the Glossary, adding items and how to enable auto-linking of the entry names. The instructions are clear and the pace is good.

Once this is done, he quickly takes us through installing the custom GAME activity and then gets into creating a game of Snakes and Ladders. This was very well explained and easy to follow.  Then Nicholas brings us through creating a word search puzzle. Again the instructions are clear and easily replicated. He finishes off the chapter with a more complicated setup using quiz questions and a glossary to help create a Hidden picture puzzle.

Overall the chapter provided a thorough introduction to he GAME activity through clear examples and context.

After that chapter I felt like I wanted to try something else, so I opened Chapter 4.

Spot the Difference

This chapter introduces the Lesson module and takes the reader through creating a lesson and editing images for use in the spot-the-difference activity. The Lesson activity is a complex one, so it was refreshing to see Nicholas introduce the Lesson with some clear examples and contrasts to the quiz module. He also has a nice diagram to explain the workflow that is possible with the Lesson. The diagram is used as the reference for the activity setup and provides a nice visual to help people get back on top of things as they progress through the setup if they get lost or confused.

To find images for the activity, Nicholas uses the Open Clip Art Library and takes the reader through downloading and repurposing the SVG image with an editor to have two similar images but with a difference for use in the activity. Although knowing how to change images is not exactly part of the core Moodle skill set -  these type of skills are important to learn to fully utilise media in the LMS and it is great to see them explained so clearly. Nicholas then brings the reader through setting up the question pages using the newly altered images.  The chapter ends on introduction to student enrolment.

The other chapters in the book follow the same approach with solid instruction backed by clear examples and concepts. The book ends with a chapter on basics of administration as well as some other smaller features.

Summary

So if you are looking for ideas on how to set up some fun activities, be it storytelling or games in Moodle, this is certainly the book for you. The style of delivery and clear instructions make it a must buy. Thanks again to Packt for sending me a copy to review.

The book is available from packtpub.com in Printed copy and a range of eBook formats: ePub, PDF and Kindle.

Just noticed the Moodle 2.2.2 build was made available on the download page of Moodle.org a few hours ago as of course it is already the scheduled release day (March 12th) in Perth.

This version includes 229 tracker fixes (which can be viewed on the tracker) which includes issues on:

• 8 Issues for Web Services
• 15 issues for  Themes
• 8 issues for Scorm
• 16 issues for Quiz

The release notes are available here – http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.2.2_release_notes

I must admit that I like the new 2 monthly release cycle for the minor versions.The info for the release cycle is found here -> http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Releases#General_release_calendar

With just over four weeks to go to the Ireland & UK Moodlemoot in Dublin, the programme and the book of abstracts of accepted presentations has been published.

There is nearly 70 presentations in total throughout the three days, on a variety of topics which are covered by the following topics:

• Moodle 2
• Implementing & Developing Moodle
• Teaching & Learning with Moodle
• Academic takeup of Moodle
• Student engagement
• Organisational use

I will be presenting on IMS LTI and showing some examples.

The book of abstracts is downloadable from Slideshare ->

The programme is detailed on the Moodlemoot website

 

 

Today’s plugin for review is ForumNG and I was using Moodle 2.2 for this review.

Background

This forum plugin has been around for Moodle 1.9 for a few years now. It is created by The Open University in the UK, and is maintained by their internal team including Sam Marshall. The module had a beta-release in September 2011 and there has been no production release since. However, as there has been a few fixes and changes since then that are only available on the github site I used the code from there for the review. There has been talk on and off about this code replacing the built-in forums in Moodle a while back, time will tell.

What does it do?

This is a Moodle activity plugin which is an alternative option to the standard Forums within Moodle. Like the OU Wiki module, this can sit alongside the original forum activities as it is completely independent. There will be times you may want to use one or both systems depending on the use case.

The forum has some key extra features which make it quite a nice tool to use including:

• Easy to use  Ajax driven User Interface
• Unique discussion view, with expanding posts
• A friendly star system for ratings.
• Sticky Posts
• Discussion locking
• Multiple file attachments
• Flagging posts
• Private one to one discussions between individual students and teachers
• Draft options for posts

However, one which I particularly like (and something which Juan Leyva just made for Moodle 2 normal forum  see last comment ) is a single thread subscription rather than for the whole forum.

So enough about the features onto the rest of the review…

Is it simple to install?

There is a zip available in the official Moodle plugins database, however for the purpose of the review I downloaded the most recent codebase from Github. It does say that it is not frequently updated which is a pity! But at least github is there. It is a normal Moodle module, so once I downloaded it I created a folder called forumng in my moodle 2 site under /mod. I then uploaded the contents of the zip to this folder.

Logging into the Moodle 2 site as admin, I was prompted to upgrade to install the plugin, and all the subplugins (image below) This install went fine with no reported errors.

ForumNG install

As mentioned in the introduction there are a lot of features. As you can see, there are a lot of parts to ForumNG when it installs. There was also quite a few global settings for ForumNG but as with most of my reviews, I left them all default.

Is there documentation for it?

Unlike the OU wiki which is simplicity, this is a complex feature rich plugin. The Moodle Docs page provides good information on the different features, releases and a short FAQ. It also links to the OUs forum quickstart guide which is an essential read!

There are forums discussions and the README also provides the essential information for installation.

Is it easy for the teacher/admin to use?

When creating the forum, the teacher is given options to select the forum type. Unlike the standard Moodle forum, there are only two types available -  The standard forum or the Study Advice (which is the one to one with student/teacher format).

The teacher can also set ratings,  limit posts times, remove old discussions and limit users to a number of posts per day.

Once the forum is created you see the following on the screen.

So you need to add a discussion now.

The add discussion is somewhat similar to the native Moodle forum, however you immediately notice one change – the option to make the discussion a STICKY.

ForumNG Add Discussion

You can also save the discussion as a draft for completion at a later stage.

One feature I really like is the ability to specify the time which the discussion appears for students. So you can preload your forum with questions just as you would line up quiz or assignment deadlines. In practice this means that when it is hidden students do not see the discussion at all. However or moderators, it will show on the discussion list in grey and with a small clock icon.

ForumNG View discussion, sticky and timed image

I can think of a number of use cases where this is just very helpful. For example, a timed Sticky to provide a reminder to students of something important deadline wise. Funky huh?

Once you have created the forum discussion the first entry looks is quite straight forward.

There are quite a number of buttons at the bottom which give the teacher direct control over the discussion thread. These are:#

• Discussion option (easy access to Display and sticky options)
• Lock (enables you to post a closing post and then prohibit any more posts on the discussion)
• Merge (enables you to merge to different discussions into one)
• Copy  (enables you to copy the discussion to another forum – which is good for archiving great examples)
• Delete
• Export (enables you to export to the portfolio api options and gives you the option to choose whole discussion or selected posts)
• Forward by email (enables you to create an email to a user of the forum discussion and gives you the option to choose whole discussion or selected posts)
• Print (creates a block-less view of the forum discussion and gives you the option to print discussion or selected posts)

ForumNG View Discussion

When you have multiple discussions, you can then set a discussion to be at the top always rather than them changing with new posts. This is the sticky option, and is viewed below with the Green icon on the discussion box.

ForumNG View discussions

Is it easy for the learner/student to use?

When a student goes to create a thread it is quite straight forward. Replying to an existing thread is ever simpler. The reply box appears below the post you want to reply to without reloading the page and if the student runs out of time to submit he can save a draft until later.

ForumNG Draft

If a discussion has been deemed important to read, it has probably been stickied so will appear at the top.

The ease of use of the interface makes ForumNG quite attractive to some.

Does it do what it promises?

The forum has two nice useful use cases available for it that provide a multitude of options for teachers. The interface is easy to use and the number of neat user-friendly features just make the whole experience great for the teacher and the student.

You may use the Moodle forum still for some particular use cases and it has some options that ForumNG does not but once you have got forumNG, you will see the specific benefits of the timed posts, the nice UI and the extra options for the discussion view page.

Of course one option that some are arguing for is to have those sought after features in the core Moodle forum or have one module with the blend of both sets of options.  I can’t wait!

 

Stars: 4 out of 5 stars for this plugin

**Standard Reminder**

These reviews check out the plugin for usability not for security. If you are considering installing any module on your site you should also check that is secure and does not impact the server performance.

 

This work by Gavin Henrick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.