Moodlerooms' Blog

Ignore the Baloney. Check the Facts

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 13:52:00 +0000

Our recent advertisement in the EDUCAUSE Quarterly probably has you wondering... “Who’s serving up a bunch of baloney?”

Their baloney has a first name. It's "truthiness"

Here’s the backstory...

Late last year, an LMS company that was fairly new to the scene published a comparison matrix measuring themselves against their competition (we were included). At first, the comparison gave us a good chuckle... Why? Because the claims made within the comparison were simply not true. But rather than respond, we had better things to do with our time: like concentrate on providing the best possible Moodle experiences for our customers.

But a few months ago, customers started asking about this comparison matrix. Apparently, they were noticing that "truthiness" had now entered the LMS marketsphere.

We love our customers, and we value reality over rhetoric. So, we created a little comparison matrix of our own to set the record straight. It’s in the same format as the original, except the information about Moodlerooms is factually correct.

So go ahead.... Take a look and see how we stack up. We invite any of the other companies to create matrices of their own, if they felt they were in any way misrepresented.

Thanks for reading,

Brad Schleicher

Marketing Manager

Best Practices: Choosing the Enrollment Method that’s Right for You!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 17:14:00 +0000

By Janelle Giseke, Moodlerooms Senior Trainer

Sometimes as course designers, we put all our efforts into building stellar content, and fail to think about how students are going to take advantage of the course. Determining the best option for enrollment into your course will lessen administrative work time, and allow you more time to focus on course facilitation.

Accessing the choices you have for enrollments is easy! All you have to do is navigate to the Settings block, and head to Course Administration > Users > Enrollment methods. This area of Course administration allows an instructor or site administrator to choose applicable enrollment methods, or create individualized enrollment instances with specific guidelines. All enrollment options are available to utilize individually or simultaneously to work with every organizations enrollment needs. It’s important to note that some enrollment instances are not available by default and may need to be turned on by a site administrator if you don’t see them available in the course. In today’s blog, we want to take a look at several of the most popular enrollment methods including how you would use it, and why it might be the right enrollment method for you!

Manual Enrollments

What are manual enrollments?

The Manual enrollment method allows for selective enrollments, per user, created by the site administrator or course instructor.

Why would I use it?

Institution A has created a new employee course where a few number of users are enrolled into a course each month. Since the enrollment is small and sporadic the site administrator has decided to manually enroll participants on an individual basis.

How do I configure manual enrollments?

Decide the default options for role and enrollment creation in the Manual enrollment settings.
Select Enrolled users from the settings block, then click Enrol users to choose users to enroll in the course.
The default user role and enrollment duration are listed in the settings pop up window, but can be altered as needed.

Note: If choosing to use group enrollment keys set Allow self enrollments and Use group enrollment keys to Yes. Enter an enrollment key in the self enrollment settings to block users from enrolling accidentally in the course. Use group key, created in the group area, to send to the users to enter as their enrollment key when they self enroll.

Self Enrollments

What are self enrollments?

The Self enrollment method allows users with the proper credentials to enroll themselves into courses of their choosing, at a time of their choosing.

Why would I use it?

Organization B has multiple types of users that enroll in their courses and would like to control the duration of enrollment and user role type. For these reasons they have chosen to use the self enrollment method and give out the corresponding keys to each user to self enroll in the course.

How do I configure self enrollments?

Create one or many self-enrollment instances per course, allowing for either the same settings for every instance (one user type) or different settings for multiple instances (multiple user types).
Customize enrollment settings.
Send enrollment keys to participants for self enrollment.

PayPal

What are PayPal enrollments?

The PayPal enrollment method allows users to complete a payment authorization through PayPal to gain entry into a course.

Why would I use it?

Academy C requires payment for enrollment in their courses and would like to remove administrative overhead costs. By setting up a PayPal account and enrollment method they allow participants to enroll in their courses once the payment has been completed.

How do I configure self enrollments?

Create a PayPal account.
Configure PayPal settings at the site level.
Create a PayPal enrollment instance by determining the settings at the course level.

Cohort-Sync

What are Cohort-sync enrollments?

A site administrator can create a cohort (or group of users) and then that group can be enrolled into a course with one click by selecting the cohort you want enrolled.

Why would I use it?

Foundation D has groups of new volunteers that must complete a series of courses. By creating a cohort, the volunteers can be quickly added to each course as an entire group all at once.

How do I configure cohort-sync enrollments?

Site administrators will first need to combine a group of users into a cohort.
Select from the predetermined cohort groups to enroll the course from the Cohort-Sync enrollment method.

Note: Site administrators must create cohorts unless the default settings for another role are altered.

If you are a site administrator wanting to learn more about enrollment options, consider enrolling in the Effective Site Administration online course. Alternatively, if you are an instructor wanting to learn more about enrollment enroll in the Course Building Fundamentals course.

~Janelle Gieseke

Best Practices: Creating a Moodle Course To-Do List

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:10:00 +0000

Best Practices: Creating a Moodle Course To-Do List
By: Rebecca DeSantis, MSIT, Moodlerooms Instructional Designer

Did you know that in Moodle you can create a course To-Do List for your students and customize how they experience a course based on conditions? You may have noticed some completion tracking options when adding resources and activities into courses, but perhaps you’ve just glossed over them. It is also quite possible that you’ve never enabled activity completion in your course settings, and you don’t even know it exists! In today’s post, I’m going to explain how you can start using the completion tracking features and how it can be powerful when used with restricted access.

Tracking activity completion

Activity completion allows students to track their progress visually as they complete activities and resources in the course. As students complete items, they can mark them as complete or Moodle will mark is as complete based on conditions that you set. If you want to use activity completion, you’ll need to enable “Completion tracking” in your course settings. As a best practice, enable this before you start building out your course content so that you can set activity completion settings when first creating resources and activities. This will save you from having to go back and editing each item later.

When you view the settings for resources and activities, you will see activity completion options. Set the completion tracking method and select any of the conditions that you would like to use for each. Be consistent with the tracking method you choose to use. The available conditions will vary depending on the type of resource or activity.

Restricting access based on completion conditions

Conditional access allows you to release content based on certain conditions (e.g., date, grade, completion status). In order to restrict access, the criteria must be set in the restrict access settings within a resource and activity. The restrict access settings are located directly above the activity completion settings. Your site administrator must enable this feature at the site level in order to use it.

To set the conditional access based on activity completion, set the completion conditions. If you do not see an activity listed when trying to configure the conditions, the activity completion settings have not been set yet for it. You can easily go back and modify these as needed. You might want to consider setting restrict access conditions at the end of the course building process as this can get complicated, depending on your design.

Course completion tracking

You will see a “Completion tracking” link within the course administration area after enabling completion tracking in your course. The completion tracking feature allows you to set what must be done in order for a course to be considered complete. As a best practice, set up all of your activities and resources (with activity completion) before you configure this area. Then, before your course goes live, delete all user completion data and set all course completion settings. Once a course is live and tracking begins, you can NOT alter this information without removing all completion data. So, be sure to set it up correctly before students begin the course!

Course completion status block
You can use this block in conjunction with the course completion tracking feature to see how students are progressing in a course. It also serves as a course To-Do List for students. They can view the set criteria for the course, along with the requirements, completion status, and date of completion for each item. This block can be added at the end of the course building process, as it is not needed to set up any completion conditions.

Summary

In order for you to make the most use of the completion tracking features in Moodle, make sure you:

Enable completion tracking in the course.
Set activity completion requirements for activities and resources as you build them.
Set conditional access for activities as desired.
Set the course completion tracking settings when you are finished building the course.
Add the Course completion status block to the course to track progress.

You can learn more about these features and other activities in our Course Building Fundamentals online course.

Thanks for reading,

~ Rebecca

Moodle and joule: Beyond the Classroom

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:53:00 +0000

Moodle and joule: Beyond the Classroom

By: Tara Thompson, Instructional Designer and Trainer

Moode is based on the social constructivist pedagogy, founded on the ideal that a learning environment needs to be flexible and adaptable, and that if we can come to understand others, we can teach in a transformational way. Using the idea that we are all potential teachers, that we learn from creation and expression to others, and by observing the activity of our peers, this article will explore ways Moodle can add systemic benefit beyond the classroom.

1. Student Support Services

Today’s students often juggle course work, class attendance, work, families, and extra-curricular responsibilities. Student Support programs provide personal and academic services designed to motivate and support students on their journey toward success. Using Moodle to support these programs can increase contact with today’s busy students, invite participation from those unable or unwilling to attended onsite services, and extend access to additional resources and support opportunities. Below are two examples on how Moodle can support student services:

Online Writing Labs: Enrolling tutors and staff as teachers, institutions can use Moodle to deliver these, whether completely online or technology supported onsite services, using features such as:

Assignments to provide feedback to students on writing assignments,
URL to link to web sites such as MLA and APA style guides, common grammar mistakes, etc.,
Glossaries for collaborative work in which students can place questions and answers to each other, and
Calendar for organizational purposes.

Advising/Retention: Creating a course for Advising and Retention services, organizations can use:

Groups and Groupings to control access, visibility and availability, assigning staff to monitor appropriate groups,
News forum to deliver importance announcements forwarded directly to students email inboxes,
Calendar to house important dates such as drop/add, registration, withdrawl, etc.,
File to upload frequently used forms,
Journal to support at risk students, and
Databases support the creation of internships/jobs classifieds.

2. Student Organizations

Student organizations connect students with a sense of community, provide opportunities for the development of leadership skills, and serve as an outlet for self and group expression. Consider creating Moodle courses for these organizations, enrolling student officers and staff mentors as teachers in the course with all other members enrolled as students. The following example highlights a Moodle environment designed to support a student organization:

Student Council: Student Council could use Moodle activities such as:

Forums to discuss different topics, either amongst themselves or with the entire student body,
Book to publish committee and meeting notes, creating a chapter for each meeting,
Feedback to get a sense of where the whole student body stands on an issue,
Calendar to keep themselves organized,
Lesson to educate the student body on issues, and
Choice to hold elections.

3. Technology Integration

Consider creating a Moodle site as a one-stop shop for technology support. Below are two practical scenarios using Moodle to support technology integration:

Tech Support: Empower users with resources designed to engage them in the support process using Moodle for a Tech Support Course using:

Groups to differentiate student resources from staff resources,
Forums to publicly record tech issues and resolutions moving resolved posts to topic specific forums building an FAQ resource,
Lessons to create troubleshooting guides,
Feedback as a technology and media checkout system, and
URLs to link users to our Product Manuals and Clickables tutorials,

Communities of Practice: Consider creating separate courses for initiative specific community of practice sites such as differentiated instructions, Moodle adoption, PLCs, etc., designed to support members on their exploration by housing training and support materials as well as on topic discussion and resource sharing, using features such as:

Glossary to house participate shared resources,
Forums for focused and open discussion,
Lesson for guided exploration,
Calendar to publish meeting times and locations as well as related events, and
PLD to encourage participation.

4. Organization Intranet

Why invest in a separate system when staff are already familiar with Moodle? Consider the following example when creating courses for internal use:

Human Resources:

Lesson to provide video and text based instruction with checkpoint assessments for required training such as Blood Borne Pathogens, Sexual Harassment, Anti-bullying, etc.,
External Repositories and Moodle Resources to provide access to frequently used forms such as vacation request, payroll, W2s, etc.,
Choice with limited response enabled to form committees, and
Feedback to gather data regarding staff culture/climate.

The list above is far from exhaustive so consider the needs of your organization, be creative with your application of the LMS, and have fun Moodling!

~ Tara

Best Practices: Creating Calculated Questions for Math and Science Courses

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 16:03:00 +0000

Best Practices: Creating Calculated Questions for Math and Science Courses
By Marcelo Mendes, Moodlerooms Trainer

Last week, Rebecca DeSantis provided tips for creating Quiz questions in Moodle. Today, I am going to talk about Quiz but will focus on calculated questions and the best practices for using them in your math and science courses. Moodle has a powerful quiz engine with a variety of question types, which are stored in a question bank and can be re-used within and between courses. Multiple Choice, True/False, and Matching are definitely the most popular question types; however, if you teach math or science, you’ll want to spend some time exploring the calculated question types as well. These question types offer teachers a way to use wild cards (variables) that can be substituted by random values inside a quiz question.

Calculated questions are fun because they allow students to enter the results and the system provides them with instant feedback. Teachers set the formulas and parameters for these questions. To create a calculated question, you just need to create a formula and adjust the range values of the wild cards. Then, students will be able to see the same question with different numerical values. It also supports the creation of questions with units in the answers, allowing teachers to create problems to promote the appropriate application of scientific units. It is even possible to use calculated questions in the creation of multiple-choice alternatives that change according to formulas and the selections available in the wild cards.

There are many creative ways to use calculated questions in your courses. However, the process to create those types of questions is not trivial. Here are six best practices that will help you master calculated questions in Moodle.

1. Start simple

Resist the temptation of using complicated formulas. Instead, start simple by creating a Calculated simple question type with simple operations and a couple of wild cards. This exercise will help you understand how the mechanism works, and it will give you confidence to create more elaborate and complicated formulas in the future.

2. Select wild cards appropriately

Wild cards are variables replaced by a pre-defined set of values. These variables are created by placing letters between braces inside the question text or the formula field (e.g., {a}, {X} ,{height}). When setting the parameters to generate the values in each one of the wild cards, pay attention to the number of decimal places. It will be easier if you match the number of decimals present in the range of values with the drop-down menu.

3. Make sure you use the correct formula syntax

A common mistake teachers make is to add an equal sign before entering the formula; this is not necessary in Moodle. Make sure you write the desired formula syntax. In general, you will write formulas in Moodle as if you are typing on a scientific calculator. You can use the four basic operations, parentheses, brackets, and functions. Click here to learn more about formula syntax.

4. Use the same wild cards in multiple questions

Moodle allows you to use the same datasets of wild cards in multiple questions. You can even synchronize the data so that you use all datasets of {x} consistently among a collection of questions. If you decide to use the same wild cards across questions, then I recommend synchronizing and displaying the shared datasets name as the prefix of the question name. This will give you a visual reference of the wild cards in use within a Quiz.

5. Change the order of operation and/or signs to produce new questions using the same wild card

You can easily create new questions or multiple-choice alternatives just by changing the signs and the order of operations among the wild cards. The same wild cards can provide you several types of questions or alternatives. Here is an example:

          • {a}-{b}*{c}
          • {a}+{b}*{c}
          • {a}*{b}*{c}
          • {a}*{b}-{c}

6. Create a practice drill by making copies of the same question an adding them into the same quiz

You can copy the same question multiple times and place all the copies inside the same quiz. In this case, you do not want the wild cards to be synchronized; you actually have to generate new private sets of wild card values for each copied question. This will allow you to create a quiz in which students respond to the same question with different numbers. It is a perfect type of quiz to use as a drill or for warm-up exercises.

These are just a few tips to improve your quizzes and make your courses in Moodle more interesting and dynamic. I hope you are now excited to start using calculated question.

Sincerely,

Marcelo Mendes

Best Practices: 30 Tips for Creating Quiz Questions

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 19:53:00 +0000

Best Practices: 30 Tips for Creating Quiz Questions

By: Rebecca DeSantis, MSIT, Moodlerooms Instructional Designer

Assessments are critical because they allow teachers to evaluate how well students are doing in a course, and they help identify key areas in a course where improvements are needed. However, creating assessments in your courses isn’t always an easy task. In Moodle, teachers often use the Quiz and Assignment activities for assessing knowledge. They may also use Forum, Glossary, Database, Lesson, and Workshop activities. In today’s post, I’m providing 30 tips for writing Quiz questions.

Make sure your questions are valid. They should map to the level of taxonomy set in your course objectives. This will also help avoid making questions too hard or too easy.
Write assessments early in the design phase. When ready to input into Moodle, first create all the questions in the question bank. Then, create the activity and add questions from your bank.
Avoid trick questions. You don’t want to confuse your students. If students are consistently missing a question, then evaluate it and find out why.
Use scenarios to assess higher-level objectives. This could be done in a Lesson activity or in a Multiple Choice question within a Quiz.
Quizzes are a great way to assess knowledge, but not all levels. Take advantage of Moodle’s assignment activity for higher-level objectives. Use advanced grading methods for evaluation. For assignments, as of right now, there is no reporting function in Moodle to compare students’ performance at the criterion level (like you can in Quiz), but you can evaluate overall scores.
Organize your questions in the question bank into meaningful categories. You might choose to categorize them by TLO (Terminal Learning Objectives) so that you group all ELOs (Enabling Learning Objectives) together. I like to organize them by topic since I typically add Quizzes for each topic.
Weight your questions in the Quiz. You don’t need to match the total points to the maximum grade of the Quiz (let Moodle scale it for you). Instead, focus on the weight of each question. I typically weight Multiple Choice questions as one point. If it is a Multiple Choice with multiple answers, then I typically weight the total value as the number of correct answers. For matching, I use the total number of points as the number of items that must be matched.
If using question feedback, provide specific reasons for why an answer is incorrect. Feedback is not typically used in pre-tests, but is often used in post-tests.
Set review options to control when students view various information about the Quiz attempt, such as feedback. I like using deferred feedback.
If allowing for multiple attempts, be sure that you select the aggregation method that you wish to apply.
Randomize the question order within a Quiz so that it varies based on attempt and between students. Use the random question feature in a Moodle Quiz so that questions are not always presented in the same order. You can do this by changing the question order setting to “Shuffled randomly.” This is a useful tactic to cut down on cheating and when allowing for multiple attempts.
Randomize the order that the correct answer(s) and distracters display within a question. You may have a tendency to place correct answers in the same position. Allow the system to reorder these for you automatically. In Moodle, you can set each question to “Shuffle” the choices so that they display in a random order for each attempt. In order for this feature to work, you will also need to enable the question behavior setting for the Quiz to “Shuffled within questions."
Randomize questions by using question pools. In Moodle this can be done by adding a certain number of random question from a given question bank category.
Avoid using too many T/F questions. Make sure that you are assessing the intended level of learning.
Avoid having too many items to match in both Matching and Drag and Drop questions. They can be overwhelming to students when presented with too many items at once and it can cause unnecessary scrolling, which can affect usability. Instead, consider dividing the question into two questions, or breaking it into multiple question types.
Avoid having long answers within Matching questions because that is what is placed into the drop-down menus. This can make it hard for students to read when trying to match the terms. In Moodle, the correct answer and distracters should go into the Answer area and the matching item should go into the Question area. You might want to consider reversing the two for readability. For example, if you want students to match terms to their definitions then it would be best to write the definitions in the Question area and the terms in the Answer area.
Remember that Essay questions require manual grading. If you want to make use of automated grading, then evaluate the question in an Assignment instead. Also, use the Assignment module if the expected response will be more than a couple of paragraphs.
For Multiple Choice questions with multiple correct answers, make sure that you give distracters negative points so that students are penalized when selecting an incorrect response. If you do not, then students could select all answers and review full credit even though they selected an incorrect response.
Use Multiple Choice questions as a fill-in-the-blank question type, but with choices. If you decide to do this, always use a standard number of underscores for your blank. I always use five (e.g., _____). You can even have two blanks in a sentence, but avoid using a blank at the beginning of the sentence. Instead, have the question stem appear first.
Be consistent with the formatting of your questions. You might always want to capitalize the first letter of each question option. Avoid doing this though if creating options for fill-in-the-blank questions since the options wouldn’t actually be capitalized, unless at the beginning of the sentence.
Instead of using colons after the question stem, write a meaningful question or create a fill-in-the blank question.
Avoid creating question distracters that are obviously incorrect. Well-written distracters should be plausible. This can be one of the most challenging parts of question writing.
Make the length of distracters similar to that of the correct answer. The correct answer is typically longer. Keep this in mind when writing distracters.
Don’t be afraid to add images into an assessment question. For example, you can use them in Drag and Drop Matching questions and in a Multiple Choice questions (e.g., a chart).
Beware of the use of the word “which.” Oftentimes, questions are written incorrectly when making use of it. For example, it is incorrect to say “Which is the best…” as it should be written “Which method is the best…”
Avoid the use of the word “not” in questions. For example, “Which of the following items is NOT…”
Avoid using the words only, never, and always within questions, especially in True/False statements.
Avoid the use of the option “All of the above” when using randomization. Instead, opt for using “All of these.” Actually, avoid using either of them!
If you continue to use the same phrasing in the correct answer and the distracters, then pull that text into the question stem to avoid redundancy.
Review reports to see how your students are scoring on your assessments. If students are performing poorly on a particular question, review it to ensure that the right answer is marked in the system as the correct one, review the question for validity, and review your course content to improve the quality of it. In Moodle, you can click the Attempts link within a Quiz to evaluate responses using the Grades report. You can even download the data into other formats, such as a spreadsheet. You can also access this by navigating to a Quiz activity in the Navigation block and expanding it to view the Results link. Also, try viewing the Responses and Statistics. I bet you didn’t know how easy it is to find out the average grade of attempts, standard deviations, standard errors, and more!

I hope these tips help you as you design your assessment questions in your Quizzes!

Thanks for reading,

~ Rebecca

Best Practices: Rule #1 of Course Design? Don't Panic

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 18:36:00 +0000

Best Practices: Rule #1 of Course Design? Don't Panic
By April Hayman, Instructional Designer and Trainer

Over the years, I have learned a thing or two about designing online courses. The first is, as Douglas Adams articulated so well, don't panic.

Using a design method really helps because the course, in the end, will be easy to use and understand which helps you facilitate learning. The second is, use what feels right. You've probably heard about backwards design or ADDIE or a half a dozen other design models. Don't feel boxed in by any of them. The point of course design is to help streamline and organize the instruction so that you achieve a well-balanced and effective learning opportunity. Finally, if you don't feel like diving into another career as an instructional designer, you can use the following tips to help design (or even redesign) your online course.

Tip 1: Begin at the end
While this might seem counter-intuitive (how can I know what I want when I don't know what I want), it is actually liberating. It lets you focus on the meat of the course and making sure all the activities and resources point the learner in the right direction. Think of it this way: a wedding planner wants to plan a happy wedding day. But that's a bit broad. Let's narrow it down. Instead of a happy wedding day, maybe it's a completed wedding ceremony with a well-attended reception. It's less subjective and it tells the wedding planner exactly what is expected of her.

Tip 2: Planning
The next step I like to take is to plan out exactly how I'm going to get to my end result. These simple statements always begin with an action, like apply, engage, demonstrate, create, etc. You could think of them as milestones or actions. Basically, what will your learners do to achieve the goal? In our wedding example, a milestone or action towards the completed wedding day with a well-attended reception might be "determine which caterer has the best food that fits within the budget." After all, a well-attended reception will most likely have great food and it is certainly a step in the direction of the final goal!

Tip 3: Activities
Now that I know where the course is headed and what actions or milestones I need to achieve the goal, now I can create activities that let me practice those actions. A wedding planner usually has people show up a day ahead of the actual wedding to practice the big day. That's what you want your students to do as well. Practice can take many forms depending on the topic. Try making the activities reflect how students would use the information in the real world as much as possible. I find it easier to connect learning with practical application most of the time.

Here are some suggestions for general activities (from http://www.ion.uillinois.edu/resources/otai/):

Blogging - Blogging is essentially a student monologue presented in text with a subscription potential and usually a comments feature for peer review. It is generally used for news releases and personal journals.

Group debugging - Students can use a synchronous tool and, by sharing a screen, work collaboratively to debug a computer program, just as they might in a real world situation.

Jigsaw - Students become an expert in a certain topic, either as an individual or as a group. The student or group of students then teaches the material to the rest of the class. This is usually done by having the students redistribute into new groups with one expert from each topic present in each of the new groups. The new group then takes turns teaching each other the materials for which each indivual is an expert.

Literature Review - Students research a topic and prepare a report on that topic with proper citations to literature used.

Reflection - Students summarize their learning on a weekly basis. They express the key points for that week's lesson and receive feedback from the instructor.

Simulation - Students vicariously experience some phenomena and, afterwards, they develop knowledge about a given principle.

Tip 4: Content
Now I pull together content that supports the learning taking place in the course. Videos, podcasts, websites, journal articles can all be used. Additionally, student activities can also be turned into content, particularly if using a jigsaw type activity. In our example, the wedding planner might pull together wedding march mp3s, images of wedding cakes, fabric swatches, etc. This is the type of content that the happy couple needs to have a successful wedding.

Tip 5: Review, Reflect, and Return
Finally, it's time to take a step back and decide if everything came together like you had planned. Do the actions support the final goal? Do the activities reflect what you want your students to do to get to that goal? Does the content make sense? Is all of it practical? Can you expect your students to complete the course, challenged but exhilarated?

If you can answer yes to all those questions, congratulations! You've done a great job. If you can't answer yes to all of them, it's time to reflect on what isn't working and give the process another go. This time, though, keep in mind what you discovered during your reflection and apply it as you return to the beginning of the re-design. And as always, accept feedback from students and others as you will always be updating or changing your course.

Remember, course design takes time, patience, and a method. Whether that method is more organic than the one I just outlined or more formal like ADDIE, what it does is help you create a learning experience that can be engaging and fulfilling.

~ April

Best Practices: The Top 10 Administrative Settings for Saving Instructors Time

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:04:00 +0000

Best Practices: The Top 10 Administrative Settings for Saving Instructors Time
By: Laura Lea Rand, M.Ed, Moodlerooms Instructional Designer and Trainer

As someone who has been fortunate enough to serve many Moodle roles (student, course facilitator, course builder, and site administrator), I’ve been asked many times… what can I do as an administrator to help my instructors get up and running quicker? It’s a great question, one that I’ve pondered often. In today’s blog post, I recommend configuring10 settings so that you can save your teachers valuable time and peace of mind in the long run.

Advanced Features

Settings > Site Administration > Advanced Features

Moodle and joule provide instructors and students with a plethora of optional, but enhanced, features. Most of these features, including completion tracking, outcomes, conditional access, RSS feeds, and messaging, are found in the Advanced features area. Make sure to weigh the pros and cons of each of these advanced features before enabling, as some have implications you may not be aware of.

Course Default Settings

Settings > Site Administration > Courses > Course default settings

Teachers need to configure every course that they teach. Moodle makes this easy for administrators to set the default settings at the site level for all new courses. Poll your teachers so that you better understand how they configure their course settings, including items such as the course format and student progress settings. Aggregate the poll results and set the defaults based on your findings.

Backup Settings

Settings > Site Administration > Courses > Backups > General backup defaults
Settings > Site Administration > Courses > Backups > Automated backup setup

Ensure that your teachers have security in putting all of their hard work online! Make sure to configure the General backup defaults so that when teachers choose to backup their own courses, they don’t have to worry about what all the options are—they just have to backup. Also, make sure to carefully configure your Automated backup setup. This gives you peace of mind in knowing that you are backing up all of your sites’ courses with user data, on a regularly scheduled basis! Once you set it, you can forget it!

Grade Settings

Settings > Site Administration > Grades > General settings
Settings > Site Administration > Grades > Grade category settings

Grading can be one of the biggest headaches for teachers in an online management system, but it doesn’t have to be! Help teachers by pre-determining settings to make their lives easier! In the General settings area, make sure to enable both the tab and drop-down menu navigation options, as well as items like the Static student column. In the Grade category settings area, reduce the number of available aggregation methods to only the most commonly used choices: Mean of Grades, Simple Weighted Mean of Grades, Weighted Mean of Grades, and Sum of Grades.

Scales and Outcomes

Settings > Site Administration > Grades > Scales
Settings > Site Administration > Grades > Outcomes

Today, most schools and organizations are driven by desired outcomes. In addition, they typically rate those outcomes on some type of non-letter grade, competency scale. Save your teachers time and effort by taking on the task of creating Scales and Outcomes that all teachers will need to use, no matter what they teach.

Location Settings

Settings > Site Administration > Location > Location settings

It may seem like a simple or unimportant task, but making sure to configure your Location settings has far more implications than you may think. Your site’s time zone setting reaches into even the smallest things, like assignment due dates, quiz open and close settings, and more! Make sure to complete this setting with care and consideration.

Language Packs

Settings > Site Administration > Language > Language packs

In our multicultural world, embracing the languages of all cultures is of extreme importance in the online setting. Within the Language packs area, make sure to enable all language packs that could possibly be needed by students or teachers.

Plugins

Settings > Site Administration > Plugins

The Plugins area controls all types of items. Enabling or disabling Activities, Blocks, Filters, File Repositories, and setting default settings in those Plugins, will really save your teachers time in the long run because they won’t have to ask you to enable items they may need. They will see only the modules you make available to them, which can speed up the building process by only seeing the information that they need when they need it.

AJAX

Settings > Site Administration > Appearance > AJAX and JavaScript

AJAX and JavaScript control some of the most user-friendly abilities in Moodle and joule. Most notably, AJAX controls the ability to use drag and drop functionality. Make sure to enable this in the AJAX and JavaScript area, and also preset teacher accounts to use Advanced web features in their profile!

Support Contacts

Settings > Site Administration > Server > Support contact

Pre-configuring each of the above items is certainly a step in the right direction for supporting and assisting instructors. However, they certainly don’t cover every conceivable scenario, or question that your instructors may have. To this end, it is essential to configure all three items underneath the Support contact settings. This includes the Support contact, Support email, and Support website settings. Completing this information will give your instructors access to help around the clock, depending on the support team structure you have built at your organization.

To continue exploring other ways to configure your site to best help instructors, and for configuration tips and tricks overall, enroll in our online facilitated course Effective Site Administration!

Best,

Laura Lea

Best Practices: Supporting Effective Group Work Using Moodle Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 14:10:00 +0000

Best Practices: Supporting Effective Group Work Using Moodle Tools
By Tara Thompson and April Hayman, Moodlerooms Learning Solutions

Well-designed groups can make a world of difference in the quality of the learning climate. But in order for student group participation to be successful, students and instructors must honor the process of team learning. This article shares ideas for supporting the group learning process using Moodle tools.

Planning
Rather than allowing students to wander through the group learning process on their own, plan for group work ahead of time with consideration for scaffolded learning and organic growth. Also, allowing students to have a say in who they work with or what they work on builds on the precepts of constructivist learning.

Groups need to work as a cohesive whole, creating their own culture, rather than relying on relationships formed outside of the group. The Choice activity is a great tool for assigning group memberships.

When allowing students to self-select into groups, limits can be placed on each option available within the activity. Once that number is reached, students will no longer be able to select that option and your groups will form accordingly.

Another way to use the Choice activity is to gauge pre-existing knowledge and then create groups to maximize learning. For example, in creating the prosecution and defense teams for a mock trial, present a snapshot of the case and ask students to weigh in on guilt or innocence. Then assign them to work for the opposite team to create a more in-depth learning experience.

As a best practice, we encourage you, when either assigning students to groups or allowing them to choose their own groups, to do so blindly by setting the Choice activity’s Publish results option to Show results to students only after the choice is closed.

Setting the Stage
Using both their academic backgrounds and non-academic learning experiences, encourage students to examine their best and worst group experiences in a reflective writing activity using anonymous posting within a General Use forum. Ask students if they have concerns about the group work they will be expected to do, encourage them to post their questions about group roles, and discuss instances in which group work may fall apart. Creating a safe environment for open dialogue focused on these experiences increases accountability with members of the groups.

Focus on the Process
As either small groups or whole class, ask students to discuss the best approaches to handling “difficult” students, e.g. dominant student, silent student, noisy student. The Wiki can capture final consensus and also allow students to grow their social contract as they move on with their project. It also allows you a space for class expectations, like a syllabus, office hours, etc.

“Production for consumption,” or producing work that is publicly displayed, is a great motivator for many students. Consider sharing the final products of group work with the entire class, using a Wiki or a Glossary (depending on the assignment) and teach students how to provide meaningful critique.

Work with students to create a group evaluation form (or adapt one found on the Internet or from a textbook). By including students in the development of the assessment, you increase buy-in and help clarify your expectations. The process is as valuable as the final assessment, therefore consider positive group interactions, cooperation, and constructive critiques of other groups’ products criterion in grading the project.

Making it Work
Now that the plan is in place and the stage is set for success, consider the following tips and best practices:

If you are going to hold students accountable for learning in groups, take the time to teach students how to work in groups.

Don’t try to squeeze group work in to a few weeks. Groups need time develop. If you don’t have time in your course to support groups, don’t use them.

Hold students accountable for their comments, negative or otherwise, and encourage collaboration by creating public feedback opportunities for the group, through a Forum or scheduled Chat session.

Start with positive feedback. Students are hesitant to criticize one another, so in the first round of feedback, ask them to tell each other, (and you), at least one positive contribution that each group member has made to the group. Then, you can ask for constructive criticism, which builds skills and attitudes rather than tearing apart the groups.

Groups that are well-planned and teacher supported make make all the difference in the learning experience. By using a variety of activities in Moodle, you can lay the groundwork for student success. For more information on the tools identified here, visit the Moodlerooms’ Visual Tutorials below.

Happy Moodling!

~ Tara and April

Happy 10th Birthday to Moodle 1.0!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 13:03:00 +0000

Happy Monday to everyone!

The Moodle community has a big milestone to celebrate today. 10 years ago, Moodle version 1.0 was released to the open-source community. Head over to the community's forum to take part in the conversation and see some of the great tributes that have been put together by fellow community members. Here's just one of many:

Congratulations to Martin Dougiamas, Moodle HQ and Moodlers across the world on Moodle 1.0's 10th birthday! Here's to many more.

Have a great week,

Brad

Best Practices: Six Tips for Taking Advantage of joule’s Comparison Reports

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 12:45:00 +0000

Best Practices: Six Tips for Taking Advantage of joule’s Comparison Reports
By: Laura Lea Rand, M.Ed., Instructional Designer and Trainer & Marcelo Mendes, Trainer

If you follow this blog, you already know about the advantages of Moodle core reports and the enhanced joule Reports. Moodlerooms Summer 2012 release included several features to assist instructors and facilitators within joule. One new feature, the Comparison Report, is a tremendous enhancement for those teachers who want to keep a close eye on the performance and engagement of students in their courses.

Comparison Reports is a new joule Report category added to the existing collection of joule Reports. Reports available in this category display data comparing user participation across course activities to overall course performance in a site category. Four types of Comparison Reports are available:

Activities Comparison: Compares the summary data of different activities within a course.
Participants Comparison: Compares the summary data of different users or cohorts within a course.
Course Summaries: Displays summary data for different courses across the site.
Participant Summaries: Displays summary data of users in courses that share a facilitator.

Teachers and site administrators can access all of these reports, but the data displayed in each of them will be slightly different because those roles have different permissions in the system. Below you’ll find a few tips on how each role can take advantage of Comparison Reports.

Teachers

Tip #1: Measure the Success of your Course Activities
By running the Activities Comparison report teachers can see the average grade of each course activity and the average percentage of completion. Teachers enrolled in multiple courses can quickly generate data for other courses just by changing the course name in the drop-down menu.

Tip #2: Monitor Progress from Reports instead of the Gradebook
The Participants Comparison report gives facilitators the ability to find average grades for all activities completed by a student or cohort. The ability to see how much of the course each user already completed, shown in a percentage, is an added bonus. If a teacher has multiple courses, a report for the other courses is easy to generate by changing the course name in the drop-down menu.

Tip #3: Monitor Student Performance across Courses
As a teacher, you can run the Participant Summary report and find a summary of the course achievement of a student in all courses that you are a teacher. There is no longer a need to visit multiple courses to extract the information; everything is displayed in one page in a matter of a few clicks.

Site Administrators

Tip #1: Easily Supervise Course Performance
The Course Summary report allows the usage of a filter to compare data in all the courses present inside a site category. Use the filter to select the courses presents in top level or sub-categories, and the report automatically displays the category, names of the courses, average grade of each enrolled student, average percentage of completion, and how many engagement hits and sample activities exist in each of the courses.

Tip #2: Quickly Determine Overall Student Performance
Creating a report that displays the overall performance of a student in all enrolled courses is a feature now available in joule. When a site administrator enters the name of a participant in the Participant Summary report filter, a list with all courses the participant is enrolled in is displayed. The information rendered contains the course category, the name of the course, the average grade of the activities completed in the course, the percentage of completion, the number of engagement hits, and how many activities the student visited in the course.

Tip #3: Determine Cohort Interaction
The Participant Summary report supports the generation of reports for an entire cohort, in the case that cohorts are being used in the site. Site Administrators enter the name of the cohort as a filter, and a list of courses for all students in that cohort is displayed. Depending on the number of students in the cohort, this list can become quite extensive. An easy way to analyze that list is by exporting the results into a CSV file so it can open in software that allows management of spreadsheets.

Following these tips will lead you on a good path to take advantage of the new Comparison Reports. In order to learn more about these and other joule Reports, we recommend you attend our reports webinar, Making Moodle and joule Reports Work for You. Take some time to explore the joule 2 Product Manuals to find descriptive information on how to use joule reports.

Best,

Laura Lea & Marcelo

Is Flexpage Right for Me? Five Benefits of Flexpage in Moodle 2

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:01:00 +0000

Is Flexpage Right for Me? Five Benefits of Flexpage in Moodle 2
By: Marcelo Mendes, Learning Solutions Trainer

Moodlerooms, Inc. recently made a great contribution the open-source Moodle community by releasing the Flexpage course format for Moodle 2. Flexpage is one of the most versatile course formats created for Moodle 1.x, and its new and improved version is now available for anyone who wants to install the module in their Moodle 2 instance.

I have been working with Flexpage for years, and it is by far my favorite type of course format because it allows instructors to build courses with virtually limitless layouts and navigational design options. This unique course format allows the creation of a flexible set of pages and sub pages where blocks, resources, and activities can reside in any location. Instructors have control over how they want to present course material and assessment to students. You may be asking yourself, “Is Flexpage right for me?” If so, here are five major benefits that Flexpage provides which might help you make up your mind!

#1: Content Arrangement
Using Flexpage, instructors can create courses with multiple navigation options, even allowing content to be displayed in-line for many modules. Course activities, like pages, behave like a block, and can live in any of the four designated areas on a flexpage. Instructors can break down content in many places, and put it where it best serves the end-user. With Flexpage, there is no need to display activities and resources all on one page (like with topics or weekly format). In the image below you can see the areas in which you can place content/ modules in a flexpage, including a top region, left and right columns, and a center panel (denoted by the red boxes with dotted outlines).

#2: Conditional Release in Flexpages
The Flexpage course format allows instructors to create conditional release rules for not only resources and activities, but also for entire flexpages. These settings can be chained together to enable progressive disclosure of flexpages, as desired. Access can be restricted based on time, grade, completion of an activity, or on joule’s Personalized Learning Designer release codes (if you are working from a joule code base).

#3: Optimized Course Building Interface
Flexpage 2 has an action bar allowing instructors to add elements to the course, and change the settings of menus and flexpages, from one quick and convenient location. If you were a Flexpage 1.x user, you will notice that the action bar has replaced the page tabs (Add Page, Manage pages, and Manage Activities). In addition to the easy-to-use action bar, the entire building interface is much improved, making use of AJAX and modal windows, allowing instructors to create course elements without the time consumption of multiple page refreshes. In the image below the action bar is close to the top, and highlighted with an orange box.

#4: Using Templated Flexpages for a Consistent Look and Feel
In the past one of the most time consuming tasks in Flexpage was adding repetitive blocks in every single flexpage of a course to create a consistent look and feel. Flexpage 2 now gives instructors the option to copy existing flexpages, using them as a template. By copying an already created flexpage, instructors can create cohesive courses with increased ease of use for students, since creating a new page from an existing page means it will already have blocks, menus, and content positioned in the same place as the original flexpage!

#5: Flexpage Menus
Menus built by the course designer provide the navigation necessary for users to move through the flexpages in a Flexpage format course. There are now three simple to create menu types for flexpages: Tree, Horizontal Navigation, and Drop-down. Menus allow instructors to create navigational links to four different locations activities in the course: another flexpage, a sub-flexpage, an external URL, or another flexpage menu. Menus can reside in multiple locations in a Flexpage course, meaning that instructors have the ability to design the navigation deemed best for the end-user. The menu you see in the left column on the image below is an example of a Main Menu.

Today’s post only highlights a few of this fascinating new course format’s abilities. If you would like to learn more about Flexpage, sign up for one of Moodlerooms’ webinars, Flexpage 2 and What's New in Flexpage 2. You can also check out the notes provided to the community on Flexpage here: Flexpage on Moodle.org.

Thanks for reading!

Best,

Marcelo

The West Coast Moot: Where Moodlers Unit[ed]

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 16:31:00 +0000

Hope you all are having a great week! The Moodlerooms team is just getting back into the swing of things after last week's 2012 West Coast Moodle Moot in Woodland Hills, CA. We hope everyone enjoyed their time at the Moot, experienced some great keynotes and breakout sessions and most importantly, made some new friends in the process.

You can view a complete run-down of all the twitter conversations, pictures and posts from the event by heading over to our official Moot hashcaster page here.

Attendees have also been recording session recaps, thoughts and ideas over at the event's collaborative Google doc, here.

Lastly, be on the lookout for all of the materials from the Moot's breakout sessions over the next few weeks. We'll be posting them on our homepage, www.moot-us.com as soon as we receive them from our presenters.

A big thanks to our keynotes, presenters and fellow Moodlers in attendance for making the Moot such a great event. Until next time, take care and we'll see you all soon!

All the best,

Brad

Restraint and Demand with Advanced Forums

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 18:44:00 +0000

By: Tom Murdock, Co-Founder and VP of Product Marketing

Someday a researcher could write a book about the careful and deliberate way that Moodle has resisted certain features through time. Knowing that schools take their discussion forums very seriously, core has avoided complicating Moodle’s basic forums for many years.

But then there are those power-users who want more features. Some developers at Humboldt University were the first to begin tweaking Moodle’s forums in 1.x with a Mellon Foundation Grant. Next came Marylhurst College and Idaho State University who continued to envision updates to the Humboldt code by requesting anonymous forums, private replies to posts, views of posters, discussion sorting, individual topic subscriptions, instructor highlighting (teacher marks key posts for students to read), etc.. And born out of these evolving, additional requirements, the developers at Moodlerooms updated and re-designed Advanced Forums for 1.9, then later for 2.x.

Today we are excited to release Advanced Forums for 2.x to the larger Moodle Community. If you host Moodle, we encourage you to visit the Moodle plug-in database and download the Advanced Forums module. Documentation for the feature is available at the Moodle docs site.

Like all the plug-ins that we release, Moodlerooms follows strict Moodle coding guidelines for security, for course backup and restore, and we avoid conflicts with the existing core forums (which are wired pretty tightly into Moodle). Nearly 25% of our clients have been using Advanced Forums over the past three years, and many of these clients have upgraded to the 2.x Advanced Forums as part of their upgrade path.

This is the tension between keeping software simple versus providing cool, advanced features that are hard to live without. We hope that schools that want these extra Moodle features will enjoy this plugin as much as our clients have appreciated them. For tips and tricks for this new feature, check out our recent Best Practices post.

All the best,

Tom

The Genesis of Rubrics

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:49:00 +0000

By: Tom Murdock, Co-Founder and VP of Product Marketing

In the beginning there were no rubrics in Moodle 2.x. And there was great sadness. Moodlerooms introduced two different types of rubrics to clients: a checklist type (where teachers affirmed with checks what criteria students had fulfilled and the score was the aggregate sum), and the standard rubric type (where instructors selected a score within a range of graded criteria). While we looked for clever ways to introduce these rubrics without requiring changes to core code, Moodle didn't offer any plug-in approach to the problem.

Then the very capable David Mudrak (a Moodle HQ developer) began to construct a plug-in system for Moodle 2.2 that could handle rubrics. His solution, Advanced Grading Methods, offered a core framework for new, creative assessment methods. When Moodle 2.2 was released in December of 2011, instructors could easily associate a standard rubric type for Assignment types.

However, Moodlerooms clients missed the checklist type of rubric, so earlier this summer, Moodleooms created much happiness with an Advanced Grading Method called (you got it) “Checklist Advanced Grading Method” which fills that rubric gap.

Enough history? Here’s what it looks like for an instructor!

This simple page provides opportunities to quickly score a submission with checkmarks, as well as offer individual feedback for each grading criteria, or for the overall assignment. The result? Fair feedback that students can anticipate and good tools for rapid instructor grading.

Today, we are pleased to contribute the Checklist Advanced Grading Method to the larger Moodle Community. Special thanks to Moodlerooms developer Sam Chaffee, who implemented a clean, thoughtful solution; David Mudrak who carried the football down the field with an excellent framework; Jason Hardin who navigated the back-and-forth updates between Moodlerooms and the Moodle core team to provide such a workable feature for teachers everywhere; and Kris Stokking who directs our development efforts with patience, wisdom, and a lot of long hours...

If you host Moodle, we encourage you to visit the Moodle plug-in database and download the Checklist rubric plugin now. Documentation for the feature is available at the Moodle docs site. Here also is a video demonstration of the tool recorded by Jason with his dulcet tones... Enjoy!

- Tom

More Flexibility with Folder View: Today's OS Moodle Contribution

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 14:37:00 +0000

More Flexibility with Folder View: Today's OS Moodle Contribution
By Tom Murdock, Co-Founder and VP of Product Marketing

Since the earliest days of Moodle, teachers have been able to organize their courses in different design formats. These were simple organizational frames that helped instructors put their course content in Topics or in Weeks. Through Moodle’s evolution, a few more course formats have been contributed to the community. Some of them complex (think: course as Gantt chart), some of them simpler (think: expandable and collapsible course sections).

Organization Within Folders
Last winter, we introduced “Folder View” to our Moodlerooms clients. Rather than store content in topics, or weeks, instructors organized content into folders. Teachers and students could expand all of the folders at once, or expand and collapse individual folders.

Simpler Tools for Adding/Editing Course Activities
In the instructor’s editing mode, we also removed Moodle’s standard drop-down “add” menus and replaced them with a slicker interface that shows all of the available content types in a single page. Hovering over the content types provides help documentation about them.

After very positive response and high usage-rates of this feature at Moodlerooms, we are happy to share this course format with the wider Moodle Community. Now you can avoid the scroll-of-death-long-course in Moodle by using a familiar course metaphor of folder organization. We believe that your teachers will appreciate the format’s simplified and central editing tools, as well.

If you host Moodle, we encourage you to visit the Moodle plug-in database and download the Folder View course format. Documentation for the feature is available at the Moodle docs site.

Enjoy!

- Tom

Best Practices: Advanced Grading with Checklists

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:04:00 +0000

Best Practices: Advanced Grading with Checklists
By: Rebecca DeSantis, MSIT, Moodlerooms Instructional Designer

Our recent Summer 2012 release of joule included two advanced grading methods: Moode core’s Rubric and our joule Checklist. If you were already using joule marking tables, they were automatically upgraded to Moodle core rubrics. If you were using the joule checklist, they were upgraded to the joule checklist. Both of these advanced grading methods allow you to evaluate performance in any classroom. Currently, instructors can only add advanced grading methods to assignments with Moodle core. However, joule users can use advanced grading methods for assignments and advanced forums!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Moodle rubrics and included videos for creating one from scratch, creating one from a template, and how to grade with them. You can view that post to learn about more about rubrics: “How To” Videos for Creating Moodle Rubrics. In today’s post, I’m going to focus on checklists.

Creating Checklists
Like rubrics, you can create checklists from scratch or by using a predefined template, and you can grade within the checklist itself. Also, the process for creating one and grading is very similar. The checklist method allows instructors to identify items (i.e., criteria) and correlate point values to each. The maximum value of the checklist is equal to the sum of all items. Watch this video to learn how to create a checklist in joule.

When an instructor grades activities using a checklist, they award students with either all or no points for each item. Students will be able to view the checklist after an activity is graded, but they may also view it before completing activities if instructors allow for it. To do this, instructors must check the “Allow users to preview checklist used in the module” settings within the checklist options area when creating it. We recommend that you enable this setting so that students are aware of how they will be evaluated before completing activities. We also recommend that instructors grade using the new joule Grader to save time in grading. To learn about the joule Grader, visit the blog post “Spend Less Time Grading with joule Grader”.

I hope you are enjoying the new features in our latest release. They sure are exciting and can save you time! Don’t forget to check out our Moodlerooms’ training offerings, which have been updated to include all of these great new features.

~Rebecca

Best Practices: Increasing Usability with joule’s Advanced Forums

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 16:41:00 +0000

Increasing Usability with joule’s Advanced Forums
By: Laura Lea Rand, M.Ed., Moodlerooms Instructional Designer and Trainer

The use of forums for communication, content delivery, and collaboration are one of the highlights of online learning. Moodlerooms has taken the Moodle core forum module and enhanced it, bringing more control and flexibility to the teacher and student, with a module called Advanced forums.

With Advanced forums, teachers and students feel empowered to find the posts they want to read quickly, saving valuable time in viewing and responding to posts. Teachers feel confident that the grade they are assigning a student is correct because they can view all of the student's posts in one screen while grading. Students and teachers alike enjoy an increased ease of use with quick, simple views into the forums and their discussions.

Some of the key features of joule’s Advanced forums include the ability to:

Keep up with what’s important to you with the ability to subscribe to only certain discussions within a forum.

Sort posts by the post date, creation date, first name, last name, or the number of replies. Then control the order of that sort in either ascending or descending fashion.

Mark posts that enhance and extend the discussion as “Substantive.”

Bookmark posts that you need to return to later, or that you may want to draw other students attention to in an instructor reply.

Collect sensitive data from course participants by enabling anonymous posting, while retaining the ability to grade those posts.

Grade Advanced forums with Advanced grading methods, like core Moodle Rubrics, or joule Checklists.

Use the joule Grader to quickly and easily grade Advanced forums.

Check out these three videos to see Advanced forums in action!

An Overview of Advanced Forums

Creating Advanced Forums

Grading Advanced Forums with the joule Grader

Thanks for reading and watching!

Best,

- Laura Lea

5 Ways Open-Source Learning Management Can Benefit Your Institution

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 20:16:00 +0000

The West Coast Moodle Moot only a few weeks away! Year after year, the thing we love most about the event is hearing clients share how they're using joule and Moodle in unique ways and how their institutions benefiting from it.

If you're attending and would like to get in touch with us during the event, email us at feedback@moodlerooms.com. In the meantime, take a quick look at some of the benefits that we've heard from clients over the years at the Moot and at other events.

1. Cost Efficiency: In the fall of 2009, Clark College in Washington decided to reevaluate their LMS situation because of rising costs, and formed an e-learning committee to research their options and make a recommendation. Ultimately, the amount of features and instructional tools available with joule made the decision an easy one for them. Read more

2. Faculty Buy-In: Online learning solutions speak the language of students who have grown up in the digital age. But the ingenuity of joule does not mean that usability is sacrificed. While a robust tool, joule remains very user-friendly, which benefits some instructors that are less familiar with e-Learning. When Keystone College migrated over to joule in May 2011, faculty buy-in spread so quickly that 95% of the College’s staff had fully transitioned to joule before the beginning of fall semester. Read more

3. Flexibility means Sustainability: Technology evolves so fast, if a program or tool cannot adapt, it is quickly considered obsolete. Flexibility in software means the product can be customized to fit the users’ changing needs, which keeps it relevant and up to date over time. Louisiana State University, who made the switch to Moodlerooms in 2005, has been able to grow while their LMS evolves to serve their growing needs. Read more

4. Deeper Focus on Learning: Some LMS solutions are not much more than a content management system. In addition to simply storing and transporting files, Moodlerooms and joule have a real commitment to e-learning – as was the case with Linn-Benton Community College In 2008, the school’s administration needed an LMS with a flexible interface and integration of learning tools that demonstrated clear instructional value. joule was able to fulfill these needs among others. Read more

5. Deeper Focus on Teaching: With a diverse and growing set of tools allowing instructors to better deliver their message to students, joule's interface and its superior course design allows teachers to better construct their message. Moodlerooms doesn’t try to replace your tools and thoughts on designing lessons; it integrates with and improves on what you have. After getting a taste of joule in an extensive pilot program, Clackamas Community College made the switch in 2009 to meet the school’s instructional design needs. Read more

Here's looking forward to some new stories of success.

See you at the Moot!

- Brad

Best Practices: Spend Less Time Grading with joule Grader

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 16:15:00 +0000

Best Practices: Spend Less Time Grading with joule Grader
By: Rebecca DeSantis, MSIT, Moodlerooms Instructional Designer

A few weeks ago, we launched our joule Summer 2012 Release. Within that release, we made a great new feature available, called "joule Grader." If you are an instructor, you will fall in love this powerful, new grading tool!

Accessing joule Grader is simple! Just navigate to Settings > Course administration > joule Grader. Take a look at some key features of joule Grader:

View submissions inline and score the activity all on the same page. There is no need to download files when using the recommended formats.

Communicate with students in an open dialog by using the comments feature.

Post comments and view ones made by students all in the same interface.

Students can access joule Grader to view graded assignments and comments from teachers.

Speed up the grading process by filtering for only activities that require grading.

Jump quickly to a specific assignment and/or student by using simple drop-down menus.

Enter grades for students one after the other, without having to navigate to different pages. Just view the submission, enter a grade, and click the Save and Next button.

Grade activities using advanced grading methods, including Moodle Rubrics and our joule Checklist method.

Use advanced grading methods with Advanced Forums (Moodlerooms’ enhanced Moodle forums) so that you can use joule Grader to grade forums. When you grade this activity with joule Grader, all student interactions are filter on one page to ease grading.

Check out this video to view a demonstration of joule Grader for grading assignments and advanced forums.

Thanks for reading and watching!

~Rebecca

More on this Week's Flexpage Contribution

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 19:06:00 +0000

By: Tom Murdock, Co-Founder and VP of Product Marketing

When I was teaching full time, I looked forward to summer break as a time to decompress, but also to start re-envisioning the substance and design of my next courses. When constructing an online course, you are engaged in an act of design, whether you think of yourself as a designer or not. Placing a label in a course section in order to reduce confusion, or sequencing activities as if they were songs in a playlist, are course whisperer tasks. The instructor shapes future student outcomes by thinking deeply about the course and then surfacing the content and connections that will improve the student experience.

Today we are happy to announce the release of Flexpage for Moodle 2 to the Moodle Community.

Several years ago, we wanted to find a way that let course designers easily re-organize Moodle. To us, Moodle was like a big house; and like any house, everyone likes to organize their furniture differently. So, as part of a project for Intel, Moodlerooms developed Flexpage as a series of components for Moodle 1.

The purpose of Flexpage was to provide an instructor with even more design tools to shape the student experience within Moodle. For example, we made it possible to place course activities in the left and right columns of the page as inline objects, alongside the blocks. Likewise, we allowed blocks to be moved into the center of the course.

Flexpage also provided a way for a Moodle course to be organized on several different pages. By default, a Moodle course is designed as a single page, composed of topic, weekly, or folder sections. With Flexpage, instead of organizing part of the course in a topic, the instructor can create a whole page in the course devoted to the topic. These various pages can be visible or hidden, based on a student’s performance in the course, and they can be surfaced within topline menu navigations, or side navigation blocks.

The original Flexpage plugin was very popular and we released it to the Moodle community almost five years ago. However, when Moodle 2 was released, we didn’t have an immediate upgrade path for it. Our experience was that while Flexpage offered great flexibility, the creation and management of these pages was overly complicated. So in December of 2011, we released a newly designed Flexpage for Moodle 2 to our clients. We made numerous user experience improvements with our upgrade. Differences between the versions included a streamlined page management interface called the Edit Toolbar; and features like child pages and tabbed navigation menus helped teachers and designers put together beautiful and engaging courses and sites.

Today, after watching the success of our updated Flexpage module for Moodle 2 with our joule customers, Moodlerooms is pleased to announce our release of this component to the larger Moodle community. Flexpage is available for download from the Moodle plugin database. Users around the world can install the components on various Moodle servers; review documentation at the Moodle documentation site, and seek community support for installation, design, or instructional purposes within a discussion thread at Moodle.org’s “Using Moodle” course.

We’re pleased to be able to share this module with the Moodle community and expect to make several additional code contributions this summer and beyond that enhance core Moodle functionality.

Stay tuned,

- Tom

Contributions and Summer Releases

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 21:48:00 +0000

By: Phill Miller, VP of Product Strategy

It’s an exciting time here at Moodlerooms.

Today, we are proud to announce along with our partners, NetSpot, that we have contributed new open-source code to the Moodle community. While NetSpot has contributed of a new Assignment module, which has already been included in June’s global release of Moodle’s core software (Moodle 2.3); Moodlerooms has contributed Flexpage, a tool that helps educators and instructional designers create more engaging and visually appealing courses by streamlining the organization and presentation of their course content.

These contributions are the first of many, so stay tuned for more throughout the summer. For more information on Flexpage, check out our blog tomorrow for a full review by Co-Founder and VP of Product Marketing, Tom Murdock.

In addition to open-source contribution, last week, we launched our joule Summer release, which was a big step forward for our customers and the joule platform. For the release, we identified key areas that are important to instructors and created enhanced features that are simple to use and enable those instructors to get more done in a shorter period of time.

Here’s a quick rundown of the new features in the joule Summer release:

joule Grader: For teachers, grading is a task that was a bit of a hassle when using the LMS. We created joule Grader to make grading a much simpler process, increase a teacher's efficiency and save them substantial amounts of time.

Advanced Forums: Forums have always been a useful activity and communication tool. But in the past, navigating forums was at times difficult. We created Advanced Forums to be easier to organize, navigate and use.

joule Comparison Reports: joule Comparison reports give administrators and teachers access to the kinds of data that helps them track the effectiveness of their course content, improve that content as needed and provide more help to students that require it.

Rubrics Advanced Grading Method: Rubrics enable instructors to be more consistent when grading assignments and makes the assignment grading criteria more transparent..

Checklist Advanced Grading Method: The Checklist Advanced Grading Method gives teachers an easier way to inform students of an assignment’s grading criteria and grade those assignments more quickly.

Webcam: Today, video is more important than ever in the e-Learning environment, not only as a format for learning content, but for more personalized communication. We created Webcam so that teachers and students can easily capture an audio or video recording using their computer’s built-in webcam and post it anywhere in joule that they have typically typed a message.

Over the next few weeks, our Learning Solutions team will be focusing on these new joule features in our weekly “Best Practices” blogs. Stay tuned for the first installment on joule Grader this Thursday.

All the best,

- Phill

Best Practices: Using Database and Wiki to Leverage Science Courses

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 17:32:00 +0000

Best Practices: Using Database and Wiki to Leverage Science Courses
By: Marcelo Mendes, West Coast Trainer

As a teacher, I promoted high–level thinking by placing students in situations where they needed to solve problems within the context of projects, research investigations, laboratory experimentation, etc.

Within Moodle, I encountered activities that could foster project-based learning, allowing me to leverage these inquiry-based projects in my classroom by stimulating critical thinking, developing communication skills and promoting classroom engagement. Students could plan projects, display products, use the tools to properly discourse their findings and receive feedback from their peers and mentors.

In this blog entry, I want to highlight two of the Moodle activities I used to assist in the implementation of inquiry-based learning while teaching High School Science.

Database:
This activity provides a tool for collaborative development of a database within a course. It allows the instructor and/or students to build, display and search a bank of record entries about any conceivable topic. The format and structure of these entries can be almost unlimited, including, among other things, images, files, URLs, numbers and text.

By using Database, Science teachers create an environment for students to manage their scientific projects, store empirical data, collaborate, compare results and share comments about their findings. It allows for the creation of templates, defining the form in which students enter and see the information in the system. For example, a teacher can develop a lab report template creating a structure that students will have to follow. Creating a functional Database requires some planning, and perhaps even manipulation of user permissions. Click here to find tutorials that will guide you through the creation of a Database activity.

Wiki:
A Wiki activity is a collection of collaboratively authored web documents. Basically, a wiki page is a web page everyone in your class can create together, right in the browser, without needing to know HTML. A wiki starts with one front page. Each author can then add other pages to the Wiki by simply creating a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. Wikis are particularly helpful for group work, because the instructor can monitor who is contributing to the overall document. The act of building a Wiki, is by itself, a great exercise to foster science thinking skills because students have to work together to observe, communicate, classify and operate the pages within the activity.

Students can use Wiki to create a series of HTML pages that can host all the documentation regarding a scientific project, or they can use the wiki pages to create a web-enhanced presentation of their finding, data and conclusions. If properly set up, student can navigate through the Wikis made by other groups as well, commenting on what they observed. It gives you tons of possibilities and it allows students to showcase their creativity in multiple ways. Click here to find a tutorial that explains how to create a Wiki activity in Moodle.

These are just two examples of the many types of uses for Database and Wiki. Enroll in our Best Practices in e-Learning online course to learn more creative ways to implement Moodle activities in your courses.

Best,

~ Marcelo

Coming Soon to ISTE 2012!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 17:08:00 +0000

In the coming days, Moodlerooms will be be packing our bags and heading to sunny San Diego, CA, for ISTE 2012! Taking place Sunday, June 24 - Wednesday, June 27, ISTE (now in its 33rd year) is one of the best opportunities for educators and edtech leaders to convene and share their experiences and creative thinking, discover the latest and greatest in edtech and network with peers.

Moodlerooms will be on-site in booth #2747 and showcasing the newest Moodle tools that help teachers:

Make complex tasks more simple and manageable
Personalize the learning process
Track success
Increase engagement.

If you'd like to setup a meeting with any of our associates at the conference, email feedback@moodlerooms.com.

In addition, conference organizer and Moodlerooms customer , the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), will be celebrating the unique contributions of educational technology initiatives in Latin America. The LatAm Ed Tech Showcase will highlight successful countrywide ed tech initiatives in Costa Rica, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. At these sessions, hear from these countries' Ministries of Education in two panels and discover more about their project implementations in multiple concurrent sessions. To find out more about these sessions, take a look at the conference program.

See you in San Diego!

~Brad

Best Practices: A Case for Rubrics - Four Student Benefits and Teacher Tips for Use

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 15:32:00 +0000

A Case for Rubrics: Four Student Benefits and Teacher Tips for Use
By: Laura Lea Rand, M.Ed., Moodlerooms Instructional Designer and Trainer

As every educator knows, a rubric is a scoring tool typically used for formative assessments. Rubrics can be especially helpful when used for assessments that may be subjective in nature. They allow for standardized scoring according to specified criteria, making grading simpler for teachers and more transparent to the student receiving the grade.

When we think about how well a student completes a specific task, we don’t usually think of the performance as being “right” or “wrong,” like we would an answer to a multiple choice question. Instead, we rate the student’s performance along a continuum of indicators, such as “Excellent, Good, Basic, Poor.” Rubrics assist the teacher in marking specific points of judgment along a continuum, so that students are consistently judged upon how well they have met realistic and suitable expectations.

As teachers, we certainly benefit from the use of rubrics in that they save us time and provide consistency in grading. However, we often forget that our students also see wonderful benefits from the use of rubrics as well. In today’s post, I want to share four reasons to include rubrics as a major course grading method, and how you as a teacher can ensure that rubrics live up to “all the hype.”

#1 - Rubrics guide students in performance and teach them that learning is their responsibility.
Rubrics share with students what is expected of them before they begin a specific task, thus directing them to learn what is necessary to be successful (and most often more what than is needed). In this way, rubrics help students set learning goals and take the responsibility for their learning into their own hands. Knowing what skills make up a desired performance encourage students to strive to achieve it.

Teacher Tip: Allow your students to participate in the design of rubrics you will grade them by, and empower them to become intrinsically motivated learners. Consider using the Moodle Forum activity to ask students what they think they should have learned from a specific topic, and how you can grade their learning fairly and accurately.

#2 – Rubrics encourage students to become self-reflective.
Rubrics created for the purposes of peer- and self-assessment assist students in developing their personal ability to judge excellence, or the lack thereof, in their work and others’. By providing rubrics to students before an assignment is due, they can review their work to see how it measures up against the rubric, and make adjustments if needed.

Teacher Tip: Make sure that rubrics are always accessible to students before they receive actual grading from you. Including all rubrics in the original course syllabus, other than those that may be student-created, is a sure fire way to make sure of this. Consider using the Moodle Workshop activity as a long-term project of some type in your course. This activity has built in areas for self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment, as well as the ability to upload examples for practice assessment.

#3 – Rubrics take away the guessing game.
One of the most common questions asked by students is, “How can I get an ‘A’ in this course?” Rubrics eliminate the guessing game for how to earn an ‘A’ because they outline the grading objectives and guidelines, and how to achieve mastery per criteria. When evaluating students’ work with a rubric, there is little to no room for bias. Rubrics assure students that there is equality in grading and standardized expectations.

Teacher Tip: When writing rubrics for your course, consider first writing a general rubric that includes always assessed items, no matter what the actual goal of the assignment. These may be criteria such as punctuality, professionalism, grammar, and clarity. In this way, students can focus more on task-specific criteria after “mastering” general criteria. Make sure to include well-written general criteria, to make mastery possible. Use Moodle’s Rubrics to create consistent criteria and guidelines, such as in the example above.

#4 – Rubrics praise students’ strengths and support their weaknesses.
As a student, it’s hard to improve upon a specific skill unless you know you are under-performing in that area. Rubrics provide visual representations to students, depicting the exact level they are currently achieving (per criteria). This makes strengths and weaknesses easy to see, allowing students to know what areas they need develop further at a glance. Through rubrics, students are able to monitor their progress on specific criteria over a given period of instruction or time.

Teacher Tip: Rubrics show students the exact performance level they currently fall in, but you as a teacher should make sure to include adequate feedback to help students understand how to increase performance in lower scoring areas. Moodle’s Rubric feature allows for personalized feedback per criteria and overall for each rubric. Use these areas to add information tailored to the student’s specific weakness.

~ Laura Lea