University of Canberra moves to Moodle

Allan Christie from Netspot sent me a copy of their "Moodle & Sakai News for Enterprise-Level Education", which has a few interesting items on Australian universities working with e-learning products. They point out that University of Canberra has decided to replace Web CT with Moodle. and USQ is using Wimba with Moodle.

Replacing Web CT with Moodle is a sensible move, but a difficult one (apart from the technical changes, Moodle looks less glossy than Web CT). I am not sure how much integration would be needed, or possible between Wimba and Moodle, as Wimba is a real time audio, video application and Moodle is a mostly text based stored message sort of application. Apart from just having a hypertext link to start up Wimba from within Moodle, I am not sure what other integration would be needed, or possible.

Learning Management System for Government

IP Australia, the Australia Government office responsible for Patents, Trade Marks, Designs, and Plant Breeder's Rights has issued a request for tender for a Learning Management System. This is combines the functions of course scheduling and tracking people's training with that of online course delivery. This does not sound like a good idea to me.

Keeping track of what courses people do and delivering courses to them are two very different functions. The former can be handled in a human resources system and the later in a Course Management System (CMS). IP Australia could start by looking the Australian developed free open source Moodle CMS for the latter function.

IP Australia has identified the need for a new Learning and Management System (LMS) and is inviting Expressions of Interest. In consultation with the various business lines with IP Australia, a set of high level functional and non-functional requirements have been identified for an organisation-wide Learning Management System. The requirements have been developed to meet the needs of the business processes of each business area, and in response to the issues identified for each of those processes.

Functional requirements for the Learning Management System have been categorised under the top level headings: Administration, Employee Self Service, Reporting and Online Learning.

Non-functional requirements of the Learning Management System include: Security, Audit Trail, Performance, Capacity, User Interface and System Integration.

From: Learning Management System, ATM ID IPAC2008/11000, IP Australia, 10-Apr-2008

Making access easier to online forums

In the absence of anything better, I used Moodle to create a web site for the Open 2020 Summit. I used the default Moodle authentication system for people who wanted to take part in online discussion. This lessens the possibility of Spam and inappropoirate comments being posted. Also I set the option to allow Google to index all the public content. But one problem was that once someone found the site with a search engine, or read the address i9n the newspaper, they were contronted with a login screen, even if they wanted to do was just browse, noit post. There is an option on the Moodle login screen for guests to enter without resistering, but this is not prominant and I suspect many people stop at this point. The ACS Moodle does not have this problem and it took me days to remember where the option was I set to let people in.

It turns out that the Moodle option for "Auto-login guests" is at: Stie Administration > Users > Permissions > User Policies". It isn't under "Security", where I would expect it to be. With that button clicked, people can go straight to pages in the site. Those who want to post to a forum will be invited to register and directed to the log in screen.

It will be interesting to see how many more people now visit the site.

There are still some problems with using Moodle for the Summit, such as people in the forums being referred to as "Students" by the system and no easy way to pretty up the format of the pages. But the simple layout has advantages, such as working reasonably well on a handheld device with text only.

How to Create On-line University Courses in Electronic Archiving: Part 9 - Units

In Part 8 I looked at how to repackage traditional lectures, tutorials and labs for flexible learning. Now I am thinking about what are the 12 units for Electronic Document Management. What I have to start with are six one hour lectures, two one hour tutorial/labs and several assignment questions. In fact the lecture notes do not divide up neatly into the six notional lecture slots, but are in eight units:

1. Introduction
   • Searching
   • Getting there
   • Steps for SMEs
   • Documents or databases?
   • XML
   • The Law
2. Metadata
   • Politics
   • Dublin Core
   • AGLS
3. Standards for eCommerce
   • UN/EDIFACT
   • XML/EDI
   • XML E-commerce
4. E-commerce Examples
   • Web Services
   • GST Tax Form
   • Google Advertising
5. Electronic Document Management
   • Introduction
   • Requirements
   • Design Issues
   • Design Responses
   • Records Management
   • VERS
6. Digital Library
   • Dangerous
   • Accessibility
   • Library
   • MARC Format
7. Publishing
   • Petition
   • Markup
   • E-Publishing at ACS
   • ACM Digital Library
   • Xpub
8. Future Use

In addition, the National Archives of Australia recently changed their web site, with a simplified description of records management, similar to the style introduced by AGIMO with their Web Publishing Guide. With this approach there is a short web page with a few key points in non-technical direct language.

Records management

• Check-up tool
  
• Create, capture & describe
• Keep, destroy or transfer
• Secure, store & preserve
• Access
• Publications

The reader is then directed to the detailed technical guides. These guides appear to have been changed from the previous HTML versions to PDF and Microsoft Word documents, which is unfortunate. The HTML documents were easy to read and refer to online. The PDF and DOC versions are a step backwards to a much harder to read and use format.

This change happened just as I was preparing to present the material to ANU students. As a stopgap measure I changed links in the notes to refer to an archived version of the material at the Internet Archive. But I now need to redo all the links to the new version. It is not clear how I am going to point to material which is now somewhere in the middle of hundreds of pages of PDF.

How to Create On-line University Courses in Electronic Archiving: Part 8 - Lectures?

In Part 7 I looked at how provide course notes in a web friendly fashion. Now I am thinking about how to take the one hour lectures and make them into smaller units suitable for small group teaching. The approach at the MIT TEAL flexible learning center has been to use "... 20-minute lectures interspersed with discussion questions, visualizations, and pencil-and-paper exercises ...". This agrees with advice from Flinders University which suggests changing the pace, medium, or importance of the material every fifteen minutes.

The course is 12 hours in total spread over 3 days with 4 teaching hours per day, with 6 hours of lectures, 2 hours of practical classes, 2 hours of tutorials and 2 hours of assessment exercises. So I started to divide this up into units of 15, 20 or 30 minute units. The idea being each unit would be self contained and of the same length. However, this would result in a very large number of units:, if 20 minute units were used:

• 18 lecture units (6 per day)
  
• 6 Practical sessions (2 per day)
  
• 6 tutorials
• 6 assessment exercises

That would make for a timetabling nightmare. My experience of short course plans is has been from courses for local government staff and museum staff in Samoa is that an overly complex plan does not survive more than the first few minutes. Also it would be useful if the units of instruction would fit into the usual university format.

The MIT Teal material is divided into one or two hour blocks, made up of the 20-minute lectures, discussion, exercises and assessment. I was disappointed not to find any guidelines for the instructors on how to prepare and deliver a block, but I did find some criticisms from students of the early versions of the TEAL delivery. From this it would seem to make sense to structure the content more like traditional delivery.. The ANU uses one hour units of instruction, so it would make sense to use either one or two hour blocks, with the content of mini lectures, tutorials and labs. This also makes the timetabling easier.

So now I plan 12 one hour units, each with a 20 minute lecture, plus a discussion/tutorial, practical session, and/or assessment exercise. This format differs from that being used by Peter Christen for his Data Mining and Matching module. That has Six lecture sessions and four practical sessions. This is a more traditional format, also with a change of venue between a small presentation room and computer lab.

How to Create On-line University Courses in Electronic Archiving: Part 7 - Notes?

In Part 6 I looked at Moodle in more detail as an example of a CMS. But one of the practical realities of a course is that you have to tell the students what the course is about. The usual method for doing this would be to provide them a set of printed notes (commonly known as a "brick").

Usually the notes for courses are in the form of some introductory text, printed versions of the Powerpoint slides and some readings. But produing this material for printing can be remarkably difficult. While it is possible to print handouts from Microsoft Powerpoint, there does not seem to be any efficient and easy way to incorporate this with a word processing document. The same seems to apply with the OpenOffice word processor and slide program.

You can insert a whole slide presentation as an object into a word processing document , but then you just see an image of the first slide (or in MS Word one selected slide). If you want all slides to appear in the WP document, you appear to need to insert each slide, one by one.

A better option may be not to. While compound documents are feasible, something always seems to go wrong at the last minute, when the final version is due at the printer, but someone wants to change something on one slide and then the formatting of the whole document goes haywire.

A better approach might be to accept the limitations of the software (and our ability to handle complex arrangements of information) and simply arrange the document as a sequence of pages from different software packages. Usually this would be a word processing document with the introductory text, followed by the slides and then possible a web page with some references. This could be simply done by manually printing each document from the appropriate program, or using some sort of automation and desk top publishing.

But first two other potions should be considered:

1. Don't use printed notes: Use an online course management system
2. Course Content Genrator: Use specialist software for course notes.

INSERT POWERPOINT SLIDE IN WORD

According to the Microsoft documentation, you should be able to link to each Powerpoint slide from within the word processing document. See: "Insert a linked object or embedded object from a PowerPoint presentation". You would have to do this once for each and every slide, but when done any changes to the slides can be automatically be reflected in the document with "Update linked objects".

Note that you need to use the "linked" option, otherwise you will be creating lots of "embedded" copies of the Powerpoint slides.

As far as I can tell OpenOffice allows similar linked objects, but not selecting a specific slide (you always see the first slide).

USE COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

An option is to not have any printed notes at all. For the course I ran for local government staff, all the notes were online. All that was provided on paper was a one page timetable for the course. The students were able to look at the notes on the screen in the classroom and on the web (using a password) when they got back to the office. I used the Moodle Course Management System, but others, such as Web CT could be used.

INTEGRATED CONTENT ENVIRONMENT

USQ's "ICE" system is specifically designed to prepare content for courses. This allows the slides to be created inside the word processing document, without the need for Powerpoint. But that requires redoing all the slides for an existing course. ANU is working on more general purpose systems based on ICE.

Using Moodle live in the classroom

This week I used Moodle for a one day course on "Writing for the Web" with 24 participants in a training room in Australia. It was only after the event that I realized that this may not be the usual way such online course management systems are used and others may benefit from a description of how I did it.

What

This course was prepared for presentation in a one day in-person workshop. However, it was intended the content could also be adapted for online self paced delivery later. Therefore the Moodle system was used. In addition I needed a web based authoring tool for the students to use for web authoring exercises. While I had planned to use Google Aps for this, it turned out to be easier to use the web editor built into Moodle. This turned out to be useful for use in the classroom. Moodle was used to supplement person to person interaction.

Having been asked to deliver training for local government staff I had to see what content I had available and how it could be delivered. Previously I had run a week long course for 24 museum staff from around the Pacific in Samoa, in 2005.

The course is divided into four sections, each with introductory material, exercises and references. As the participants would not necessarily have access to locally installed software, the emphasis was on the use of tools available via the web.

I adapted material I had prepared for:

• Website Design, For Information Technology Professionals, for "Internet, Intranet, and Document Systems" (COMP3400/COMP6340) students, The Australian National University, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006
• Metadata for E-commerce, first presented for Computing 3410 Students, The Australian National University, 25 July 2000, revised: 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2005 and 2006.
• Professional ethics and the World Wide Web, for "Internet, Intranet, and Document Systems" (COMP3400/COMP6340) students, The Australian National University, 2007
• An unreliable history of the Internet, for Perspectives on Computing (COMP1200), ANU, 6 May 2002, 26 April 2004, 26 April 2005and 1 March 2006

The format for the course came from the course in Samoa.

How

First of all I took the description of what the client had asked for in the course and what materials I had to hand and pasted these into a topic outline of a new Moodle course. I then created each of the four sections of the course, starting with a title. Under each title I then added a paragraph summary and bullet point outline.

Under the outline of each topic I then added a link to an exercise using Moodle's "assignment" resource requiring submission of a text document prepared with the Moodle editor. These were not intended to be assessed, but Moodle system was very useful for me to monitor progress, by seeing how many students had submitted the assignment.

Then I added a set of student notes and set of slides. The notes and slides are edited versions of those I have previously presented. The notes and slides files are actually the same web document, using the Slidy format. I used some web server instructions to tweak the Slidy format so that by default the students would see the detailed notes when they opened the document, not the usual slide format.

With the assignment and notes done, I then added links to some relevant web based resources. Some of these are documents for the student to read. Others were web based tools to be used.

The Classroom

The classroom was arranged with two rows of desks in a "U" shape. Inside the U was a desk for the presenter and a video projector for the class to see presentations on. Each two students shared a desktop PC and undertook exercises together. In Samoa the students each had a computer of their own, but tended to end up working in groups, with useful mutual support, so one PC per two or three people seems to work well.

The format of each section of the course was that I would present the slides suing the projection screen. At the same time the students were encouraged to follow the notes on their PC. They were welcome to read ahead if they got bored. After some questions they were introduced the exercise, to be done in pairs. The students used the Moodle editor to prepare their responses, along with web based tools and documents in multiple windows. I monitored how many students had completed the exercise and answered queries. When it appeared most were finished we had discussion.

The presenter desk was equipped with a standard keyboard and mouse. To this I added a USB wireless mouse. The mouse was particularly useful as I could hold it in my hand while standing up and use the mouse buttons and scroll wheel to move through a presentation. There are specialist wireless presenter control units, but the wireless mouse is cheap, readily available and easy to work.

The Results

Moodle proved to be reliable and response in the classroom environment. The Moodle system was running on a server remote (several hundred kilometers) from the classroom and worked well. There was one database error during the initial startup, but the students didn't notice.

Enrolling students in the Moodle system turned out to be the most difficult part of the process. Rather than use bulk registration I had each student register individually using a secret key for registration. The students logged into their usual workplace account on their corporate computer system in order to be able to receive the message confirming their identity. The problem was than when they then entered the Moodle system it was difficult to find the link needed to enroll in the course.

Using the Moodle system to obtain course material and enter an assignment did not prove difficult for the students (who were all experienced computer users). The students did have difficulty keeping the course open in one browser window and other material in another. The students needed a practice exercise to avoid loosing what they had typed.

What I would do differently

The entire Moodle course content turned out to be a remarkably small 24kbytes. It would have been feasible to have all the slides and notes on the Moodle system as well. It may also have been useful to run a Moodle server on one of the PCs in the classroom, in case of communications problems.

It would seem quite feasible to create a portable classroom system from one laptop running Moodle and communicating with WiFi to low cost web terminals. The student terminals need only a minimal operating system and web browser.

This approach to teaching would seem to have potential for longer and more formal university courses, combining the benefits of computer based and live teaching.

What also could prove useful would be more web based tools specific to the subject topic. As an example tools which would give feedback as to the quality of writing for the web would be useful.

How to Create On-line University Courses in Electronic Archiving: Part 6 - More on Moodle

In Part 5 I looked at Moodle as an example of a CMS. Some of the issues of pedagogy for an online course are covered in Doherty, C. (2005). Understanding trouble in paradise: Intuitive natives and
screaming aliens. A paper presented to the OLT 2005 Conference, QUT, Brisbane, 71-80.

Heres is more detail on Moodle as an application. I mentioned that Moodle should be usable on small screen and smart phones without many changes . I was able to get it work okay on Opera web browser in small screen mode (this emulates a PDA type device), but on with the Openwave SDK Mobile hone emulator. The web pages displayed on the mobile phone, but each column of text was squashed to fit on the small screen and so was unreadable.

The Moodle team need to install an alternate CSS style sheet for mobile devices, to tell the web browser to use just one column (this is what the Opera browser does for its small screen mode).

Leaving that to one side, a good way to see if the advocates believe what they are saying is to see if they use their own tools. So I tried the Moodle Features Demo Course. The is a Moodle course to show off the features of Moodle.

The course first presents you with a typical three column screen. The screen is a bit too busy for my tastes, but that may be because the designer is trying to show off all the features of Moodle in one place, or perhaps because this the page the student will keep coming back to. I found a box offering to enroll me, so I clicked on it and was then presented with a "Topic outline", equivalent to about one A4 page of text (which is not too big).

What I found disappointing was that the course gets immediately into the details of Site, User and Course management. The stuff about the philosophy has been left behind and there doesn't;seem to be anything about how or why to prepare a course.

Interestingly there were 975 people enrolled in the course, 14 of whom had used it in the last 24 hours and four of who were in Canberra (including me). I noticed that participants had Blog entries to introduce themselves, so I created one. The Blog function uses a web based editor, much the same as ones used for other Blogs. This worked fine, even on my slow (64 kbps) wireless link.

While providing a Blog and user profile is useful in getting the students to get to know each other, there is also a danger they will say too much. Participants in courses need to keep in mind that they cannot entirely trust their fellow students and should not reveal too much.

The demo course has a "news" forum. This had nothing in it, but would be typically used for course announcements. There are also "Learning forums" for group discussions . The forums can have RSS feeds, making it easier for the students to keep up with developments. In the past I have found such on-line forums a bit overwhelming. Moodle has options such as allowing each student only one discussion topic, to stem the flood.

eXe eLearning tool from New Zealand

While a course management system systems like Moodle may help deliver online learning, you still have to create the content. New Zealand is helping with a free open source tool called eXe:

The eXe project is developing a freely available authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup. eXe can export content as self-contained web pages or as SCORM 1.2 or IMS Content Packages.

This project is funded by a grant from the Tertiary Education Commission of New Zealand and is led by the Auckland University of Technology and Tairawhiti Polytechnic.