Day 2

The opening session on Tuesday was a panel session discussing 'the future of online learning'

Martin Dougiamas view is there is a future for online learning but we will always need a teacher, even though we have a lot of social media out there these days he believes there will always be a place in the world for moodle. One quote he said during this session was "before we had moocs we had books" (A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aiming at large-scale participation and open access via the web)

Other panelists had their own points of view, the audience also joined in with questions and comments.

First session of the day was with Gavin Henrick - Using files in moodle 2 - how it helps...
I loved the way you can now drag and drop files straight into moodle and not only does it put it straight into the course area it also gives you a choice of whether you want to embed the file or just add a file link, fantastic.....I need 2.4, not just files can be dragged in but whole directories as well. Another fab thing is as well as dragging straight into the course topic area, moodle uses the file name as the link name but you can change the name without having to go into edit settings, a lot less clicks, which my teachers will love! When you drag in a zip file it gives you the options to unzip and create folder, create file resource or add as scorm file. With the central repository you can upload a file to one area and you can create a link to the file from another course as long as you are a teacher on all the courses.

Chris Meadows was taking the next session I was keen to go to as I was hoping to find a solution to allow our students to upload their online assignments from skydrive, unfortunately Manchester Metropolitan Uni don't seem to use it this way.  All their students have Live@Edu accounts, so within skydrive as I understand it, there are folders set up for each curriculum area and permissions are given via moodle to the cloud storage so some teachers can edit files but most just read, students have read only access as well. This allows the staff to upload various documents, including individual feedback forms for the students, to the folders via their iPads or by emailing and adding tags to ensure it gets into a specific folder.  Students can access the folder where the feedback form has been sent to from the gradebook within moodle.  Students can take pictures or videos on their mobiles and upload to Facebook but when tagged will go into the relevant skydrive folder.  MMU use a block on the moodle page which allows documents to be downloaded and then uploaded again.  They also embed documents from skydrive so the students don't have a need to download or wait for it to open.  How I see MMU using skydrive is as a shared drive as only certain people have certain access to certain folders, not really the sort of solution I was looking for, we need skydrive to be one of the repositories in the file picker.

The next session was of interest to me because of my role in helping people understand how to use moodle, both staff and students.  Lilian Buus from ELSA, the eLearning unit at Aalborg University, was showing us how they have introduced a support concept based on the philosophy of people helping to help themselves.  They have got screencasts and guides within moodle and depending where you are in moodle and what role you have depends on what help you can see at that particular time and in that particular area of moodle.  The challenges they are having at the moment, or going to have is the upgrade to 2.4

Catherine Wasiuk from Manchester Metropolitan University - Using the activities in moodle to present difficult concepts and new vocabulary - eLearningathollings blog - I was hoping to see a new innovative way in which we could offer these concepts to our FE students, but the glossaries are being used the same way in which I explain to our teachers how to use them here at Gloscol, put words or acronyms into the glossary with the definitions, use autolink so when they see the word elsewhere in the course page they will be able to click on it and moodle will take them to the specific entry in the glossary.  They are using quizzes, small quick quizzes that can be done numerous times, to check the students have understood what they have read in the glossary.  Forums are being used as well so students can share ideas for each topic area.  The example Catherine showed us was a course for the student to learn how to do their research for their uni course.

Vegetable soup and sarnies for lunch......no cheesecake!! :-(

The afternoon session began with Pecha Kucha, lots of interesting subjects.  Pecha Kucha is a method of presenting in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each, therefore the presentation doesn't run for longer than 6 mins, fantastic if you have lots of presentations to get through, they all did fantastic, although a few did seem out of puff at the end!!  Some of the presentations that were of interest to me were Helen Foster's 10 useful things a teacher can do with roles, give students rights to create questions for a quiz, let them grade assignments - peer to peer assessment, but what I really loved was the idea of a naughty student role, if a student abuses the privilege of extra access and rights, they have them taken off them for a certain time.  Next was Wiris.com showing us how we can add questions into moodle for Maths equations etc, but unfortunately not free, I know a teacher that would have loved it!  Mid kent showed us how they use their PLP with flight plans so the student can have a visual of their targets and successes.  Unfortunately the 2 presentations I was really looking forward to didn't seem to happen, the auto linking: not just for glossaries and ePortfolio option for Moodle.

We then had another panel session using a new 'fishbowl' concept, talking about achieving efficiencies through the use of moodle, four chairs with four people sat on them, they start talking between each other, there is a spare chair so anybody from the audience can join the panel and the conversation, when a 6th person wants to come up to talk someone has to leave.

Happy New Year with moodle was the next session, again I was hoping to find a solution for our end of year tidy up of moodle courses, but it seems we have the same issue of teachers wanting clean courses to start a new academic year without any students in from last year, and who can blame them.  However, we need to keep the data for the next x amount of years!  We back the courses up individually with student data, move them into an archive area then restore as a clean course, no user data, into the original 'curriculum' category, then problem with this is if students have populated a glossary the data will be lost, so we will need to export and import the glossary, we tried to get the teachers to backup and restore last year but not wholly successful, so this year I think we will do it for them.

What a fab day.....quick bus ride back to my hotel for a quick freshen up then off to the Gala dinner at Clontarf Castle Hotel, couple of glasses of wine, a lovely 3 course dinner and lots of dancing to Spring Break  - Europe's 1980's supergroup.....allegedly! A good night was had by all.  Sorry no pics, phone ran out of battery :-(