Thanks to Bruce (hacking into the database, cleaning things up) and the wonderful people at Bluehost, things have been put back.  A large backlog in my thinking.  But I’m not really sure I need to say Everything.

Back here soon.

-Derek

Partial wish list

As to a few basic items: I’m in two minds.  I’ve been working on a few sites from scratch, and there sure is a lot of clicking and manual work that could be easily steamlined. I get really tired!!  My wish list:

1. Inform an admin if someone registers in a site.  Or have a list of recent self-registrations.
2. Inform teacher if someone enrols in a course.  Or have a list of enrolments in date order.
3. Have a button at the bottom of a participants page for printing a class list.  I know this goes against the grain for this day, but anyone who says this is silly has never tried to run a class with a significant number of people in it.
4. If you manually create an account, how do you tell the person of their account details?  Maybe a button to say “e-mail account details”
5. Bulk course upload.  Got 15 courses to create?  Provide a CSV option.
6. Disk space reports: with standard Moodle there are no basic reports to do with users and the various folder sizes, like private files, legacy course files or backups.
7. Self sign up for groups
8. ..   there area few more I’ve thought of but can’t recall now.

I’ve made some posts recently on Moodle.org on these issues to see if there are workarounds. Sometimes there are.  You will notice on my wish list the absence of things like bettwe assignments, mobile Moodle, removing MNet etc.  Our priorities obviously differ.  But these are pretty basis.  I am not for instance asking Moodle to do odd fringe things like manage birthday greetings, look like facebook or wordpress (etc).

I know most of the time there are hidden fish-hooks the moment you start to develop design specs.  Just to take one: “Inform teacher of new self-enrolments in a course”. All teachers in the course?  Just non-editing teachers? Just editing teachers?  Yet another table required.

Some of these requests have been around for over 5 years on he tracker, and even if we paid money for them to be developed, there is no guarantee they will get into the core.  Even leaders amongst the Moodle Partners have created code that has lain dormant for many many versions.  I suspect this is why the success tof a few of the Moodle versions like Joule and Totara.

What to do?

I’ve looked at the model of CLAMP: www.clamp-it.org/

Many liberal arts schools have adopted the Moodle course management system because of its low financial barriers to entry. However, supporting and contributing to the development of this open-source software project can require significant resources of both time and money. The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project (CLAMP) is an effort by several schools to support a continued and sustainable process for collaborations on Moodle development.

I’ve thought of a similar version for the sector I predominantly work in (non-profit, health, school and polytechnic).  Probably won’t happen, with there being no central body to work through and it’s just to hard to set something up from scratch, or just too expensive.

My latest thought: kickstarter.

Create specifications for some of the functionality often needed and set these up as projects on Kickstarter.  See what happens.

How do we decide on the specs for kickstarter projects?

The first step is to define the project. Maybe something like this:

1. Define the specs, maybe get some feedback on Moodle.org  I know there are easy ways and hard ways to do things.
2. Put this out for tender.
3. Once we have a dollar value for the project, then set up a kickstarter proect, and go for it.

For instance, two such projects could be:

NOTIFY ME!!  Create an teacher block purely and simply to run cron jobs to notify of new self enrolments.  Provide a way for the block to access the teachers’s details, some simple text . .   and run a cron job every hour.

EASY E-MAIL ACCOUNT DETAILS: Create an admin block that each hour runs a cron job to post out e-mail detail of all the new accounts created in the last hour.

I’ve been advocating the enhanced Moodle specs for small Moodles for several years now.  It was a sad day when I left the customised Moodle at the UoC which had some of these needs hacked into the core.  So then it became just to hard to upgrade to 2+, and along with scores of other languish in a very nice 1.9+ install, enhanced admittedly, but still lacking many goodies from 2.

We shall see.

The ideas in this post have been around for years.  What prompted this was a post from Dan on Moodle.org asking for feedback on compelling features of ForumNG, one of the projects out of the Open University.  Looks like there is a possibility of improved forums in Moodle core.  COOL!!

Philosophical preamble

Where Moodle is concerned I personally work in the areas of course design, staff development and teaching with Moodle. Staff development includes online teaching generally, helping staff become good designers and helping with setup of Moodle sites: everything except setting up, optimising and tweaking servers.

Recently I have had to work with hosted Moodle instances where it costs lots of money to get small items fixed, to install plugins or even get good themes.

 I have two main interests

• Improving the effectiveness of teaching tools and processes for teaching and learning online
• Advocating a Moodle core that does as much of this as possible.

The focus of this post is getting a good forum into the core of Moodle.

What do I mean by a “Good Forum”?

Lets start with three aspects:

• ease of use (for students and teachers)
• supporting learning, dialogue, knowledge creation . .
  Don Hinkleman has a nice succinct post on Moodle.org.
• routine and random communications (Student <> student and Staff <> students)

Here a few forum features that contribute to either ease of use, improved learning or communication

I’m assuming: multiple file attachments, users can insert images, nice WYSIWYG editor, threaded views.  Using the term “discussion” rather than thread since this is what Moodle uses. Referring to ForumNG as it is a viable option for the way ahead.

1. Forum views. If you have worked with the ForumNG, with the collapsed/them expand view is great. It is a time saver, and improves efficiency. Think of a student working over several forums in their course (not to mention blogs), and trying to engage in some basic knowledge creation.
   See below: expand links, etc
   
   Also in ForumNG you can post while viewing the whole thread.
2. Permalinks. Trying to write and think over a couple of forums/discussions basically is easier with a quick permalink. See above.
   Marginalia appends a link in a Moodle post when you cut and paste from another form.  Quite nice.
3. Merge discussions (Split discussions) Obvious.  Useful tools for a moderator function.
4. Sticky discussions. These would save a lot of time in Administration type forums in a course. (These could also save a LOT of time in Moodle.org)
5. Thread closed/resolved option. 
6. Subscribe at the discussion level. [One of the oldest Moodle tracker items.
7. Clean forum search.
8. “Show all posts by person X” in this forum
9. Manage Drafts. Obvious for a busy student/teacher. (“Opps, need more info” save, then come back later with the data)
10. Social side: “Me to” button. Voting.
11.  Tagging. This is a wider issue.
    Scenario: you are scanning 35 incoming posts. Click “Read later” those you need to attend to in detail.
    Other possible built in tags: “Watch”, “Vote” . . .
12. Mail NOW option for Admins.
13. Link to show attachments. ALL the attatchments in a forum.
    Scenario: Assignments are submitted publically. Click to see them all.
    Scenario: “Where is the file I posted?” in a forum of 46 discussions and 1053 posts.
14. Romantic stuff, what we had in 2004. “Promote this student to admin of forum”.

Plus?? list abandoned for now . . comment if you want to.

The aim:

1. explore some physics concepts
2. demonstrate some teaching strategies as alternatives to teacher talk, class unison responses or individual responses
3. have some fun

This was the lesson trajectory:  Icebreakers (Role Play) > Brainstorm > Pair work on Problems, Drawing diagrams, Processes > Discrepant Event fun > Collaborative small group problem > done

1. ICEBREAKER/ROLE PLAY

As an icebreaker, a role play. Get into pairs (this was a hard concept) and one person is an eight year old and you are the teacher. Talk about the concept “What is energy?”

Then, reverse roles and talk about the concept “What is a force?” Success in some ways was noise and interaction.

2. BRAINSTORM (Pairs > Whole class)

Establish some parameters for the session.
The topic: forces. “In your pairs, list all the types of forces you can think of”
I had a set of pages with Chinese translations on them. Demonstrations, a bit of fun. We compiled our list, with as many real items as possible: falling apple (after climbing up a ladder), magnet, friction (a sliding block), push, pull.

Some formal"chalk and talk" - "consolidation"

3. MINI WORKSHEETS 1-4

1. SPEED OF A TOY CAR.
Aim: diagram drawing.  I had a toy car, and we went out into the corridor to measure it’s speed. Passed out two stopwatches.

2. ENERGY GAIN OF THE TOY CAR GOING UP A SLOPE.
Aim: diagram drawing again, and more of a full process of problem solving.

3. FOUR FREE BODY DIAGRAMS.
FREE BODY DIAGRAMS. I made an assumption that they had covered the concept of Free Body Diagrams. Started with the definition of a free body diagram (in Chinese)

Aim: FBD for Apple on a plate, Apple on a spring, Falling apple, Thrown apple

4. FREE BODY DIAGRAM OF A CONICAL PENDULUM.
Putting it together.

4. DISCREPANT EVENTS

We had a little break.

“Can you balance a coke can on it’s edge?”

The answer of course is yes, when you put a little water into it.

The question then is “Why does it do this?”

5. COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SHEET

“If I climb up to the fifth step of the ladder and then jump, at what speed will I hit the floor?”

Students had to work in pairs, submitting one answer with full diagram, working, units . .

Working together got much much better.

The end.  Group photo and we finished.

So what?

More on this later.

The good old “I’m a filter, not a pump” keeping the not so good students down where they belong approach.  “I’ll just cater for the good students”.

A rather cynical comment from Bernard Pliers, actually on Maths education:

Evaluating the trial in the Weiman study had three dimensions

• Student engagement
• Post-test
• Attendance.

ENGAGEMENT

This fascinated me. So I reproduce in full from the supporting notes:

The engagement measurement is as follows. Sitting in pairs in the front and back sections of the lecture theatre, the trained observers would randomly select groups of 10-15 students that could be suitably observed. At five minute intervals, the observers would classify each student’s behavior according to a list of engaged or disengaged behaviors (e.g. gesturing related to material, nodding in response to comment by instructor, text messaging, surfing web, reading unrelated book). If a student’s behavior did not match one of the criteria, they were not counted, but this was a small fraction of the time. Measurements were not taken when students were voting on clicker questions because for some students this engagement could be too superficial to be meaningful as they were simply voting to get credit for responding to the question. Measurements were taken while students worked on the clicker questions when voting wasn’t underway. This protocol has been shown by E. Lane and co-workers to have a high degree of inter-rater reliability after the brief training session of the observers

E. Lane is referred to, but not referenced but is sure to be Erin Lane.

There is a diagram from one of her studies which is looking an Earth and Ocean Science class.  Physics is not the only discipline seeking approaches to improve engagement:

From: www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/files/Geo_Ocean/Lane_QuantifyingStudentBehavioralEngagement_poster.pdf

From the report:

In the experimental section, student engagement nearly doubled

THE TEST

The test questions for this topic were agreed after the week of teaching, both instructors agreeing it was a good test of the objectives. (Whew!!) From the paper:

The average scores were 41 (+/- 1%) in the control section and 74 (+/- 1%) in the experimental section. Random guessing would produce a score of 23%, so the students in the experimental section did more than twice as well on this test as those in the control section

ASIDE: all the questions are included in the online report. They are HARD questions.

ATTENDANCE

During the week of the experiment, engagement and attendance remained unchanged in the control section. In the experimental section, student engagement nearly doubled and attendance increased by 20% (Table 1). The reason for the attendance increase is not known

What is significant

It seems obvious: pay more attention and come to class more and you learn better.  Maybe.  There is a complex relationship between interest, motivation, effort, time on task, the right kind of task (etc)

In summary: two teachers taught a well defined subject to two groups to all intents and purposes the same.  Different approaches.  They both tried hard.  One group’s results were far superior to the other.

What does this mean? you may ask.

The lecturers: Instructor (A), a successful lecturer (who had won a teacher of the year award, and had good student evaluations) and a post-doc tutored by Weiman.
Both teachers gave it their best shot

Instructor A and L.D. had agreed to make this a learning competition

ASIDE: this in itself is an astounding opportunity: an instructor (A) with a history of good evaluations etc etc agreeing to this. I reckon his/her name and identity will emerge in due course hopefully NOT on a sleazy talk show, and we’ll learn some more about this project.

The course: traditionally, a physics course is divided into topics, with some building on each other.  The first part of the course was taught traditionally.  In the study the final topic (and the subject of the study) is a complete unit, Electro-magnetism.

L.D. and instructor A agreed beforehand what topics and learning objectives would be covered

The teaching: no formal lecturing at all in the experimental section. Instead:

The instructional approach used in the experimental section included elements promoted by CWSEI and its partner initiative at the University of Colorado: preclass reading assignments, preclass reading quizzes, in-class clicker questions with student-student discussion (CQ), small-group active learning tasks (GT), and targeted in-class instructor feedback (IF). Before each of the three 50-min classes, students were assigned a three- or four-page reading, and they completed a short true false online quiz on the reading

No new gadgets were used. Clickers has been used the whole course.
Pre-reading: the only change in the control section was the requirement to read the text in advance.

The populations (267, 271): using various statistical measures these were essentially identical eg same mean (+/- 1%) in mid term exam.

What is significant here

The value of pre-reading.  Other studies show this has an effect on learning.  We could say “this is obvious” but traditionally it has been hard to convince students of the value of actually doing it – and now we have ways to encourage this to be more of a regular habit.  The online testing with self marking helps.

The aim:

• exposure to a few strategies to support active learning
• practice in English
• have fun

All these students will be teachers sometime.  The hope: just to see a small demonstration in a class with interaction could trigger an interest in teaching a little differently.

The Latest Cark Weiman study
Summary: “Science” just published (May 13, 2011) a fascinating article:  Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class, Louis Deslauriers, Ellen Schelew, and Carl Wieman
Carl is a Physics Noble prize winner, now working in science education.  The article is on an experiment they did in physics education.
They waited until week 12 in a traditional lecture course, and then changed 1 week of class sessions. They used what they called “deliberate practice”, meaning: posing good application problems for students, letting them see if they could solve them individually, recording their answers with “clickers”, talking about their answers with 1-2 other students, and getting immediate feedback from the teacher.
With just 3 days of those changes, they had the following impact in the experimental groups:

• attendance went up 20%
• student engagement went up 100%
• student performance on tests was better (2.5X)
• when students were later asked if they liked these changes and thought they would learn more if they were used in the whole course, said in essence: “Of course!”

This has resulted in fascinating discussion in the HETL group on LinkedIn and following a Chronicle article with an appalling and inflammatory title:  “Postdocs Can Be Trained to Be More Effective Than Senior Instructors, Study Finds,”

Two other different coverages in the press:

www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/2011/05/12/interactive-teaching-methods-double-learning-engagement-in-large-undergraduate-physics-class/

www.nzherald.co.nz/the-changing-world/news/article.cfm?c_id=1502962&objectid=10725393

The article itself is three pages, has 12 references and comes with 26 pages of supporting material and detail (only online, not in the printed journal).

I still value Moodle as a Walled Garden.  I see this as a feature, not a bug.  Moodle 2 is a bit tough at first.  But I’ve taken a philosophical view: new users (or even old users) must experience it first.  Hence I do an EXPERIENCE  > CRITIQUE (DESIGN) > BUILD trajectory. And I think now (for my sanity as well as the good of the populace) it is actual essential for real and meaningful learning.  I try not to put myself in a position to do anything in less than 3 hours.  With snacks, pen and paper and space preferably.
How can you build a course in something using tools you have not experienced as a user?

Field trip to a Moodle course

I do an excursion to a coffee course:

It’s really nothing fancy: most people can find some strong feelings about coffee (either for or against) and you can see a few things in action  like forum posting, comments (in the comments block), watching a video, following a link, downloading a document and actually submitting an assignment.
Then glossary, wiki . .   maybe.

The critical question for my sessions has been “OK, put your teacher hat on now.  You’ve experienced a forum.  Of what value could this be in your classrooms”

Bullet points.  The value of Moodle for learning:

• Enhances communication
• Improves collaboration and interaction (providing some good tools)
• Enables file and link sharing.
• Saves time (Hmm!!)

Upcoming workshop: Monday and Tuesday of next week.  Four hours, including 30 minutes to get logged on and a really nice healthy afternoon tea. This time I think is the critical mass to prevent inoculation and actually infect.  Get some experience of good practice.  Build some relationships.

However, with the latest school project, bringing the science department and the social sciences online (with Moodle) I have made a course subject specific, and I am on the scrounge for some screen snaps of good Moodle courses.

I spent a week in Auckland in late March considering this question.  Moodle shut down on me.  Where better to work then Columbus Coffee

1. You need an awareness of adult education principles (not just theory thought)
   I love Kathy Sierra’s concepts and delivery.  One random link.
2. Y0u do not lecture.
   Huge debate on LinkedIn HETL Higher Education forum at the moment.  How can researchers in their field (eg forestry, aquatics or pi-meson theory) be so keen on evidence and process and so slow when it comes to Education Research on the basics?
3. You use video
4. You respect the knowledge already there.
5. You remember: YOU ARE NOT INDISPENSABLE. All the romantic words: facilitate, guide, mentor, model.  Do it.
6. Have hard edges where it counts. There can be no doubt about taking blood pressure, catheterisation, pill dosages, completeness and clarity in records.  (Just to name a few aspects)
7. Have fun.
8. . . .        use online wisely.

OK, the challenges of TIME, pressures of Goals not aligned with activities . . .
More will surface on this I am sure.