Moodling in 2015

Happy New Year to all Moodlers worldwide! On the first day of this year I thought I would jot down some highlights of my Moodle journey in 2015.

• I gave a talk at iMoot 2015 on how to make peer assessment work in Moodle, which was later featured in Moodle News.
  
  
  
  And who says online conferences are not good for networking? At the iMoot I connected with a local Moodler, Michelle Chawla, who runs Tamarind Tree, an inspiring school for tribal schoolchildren north of Mumbai. Check out Michelle's talk at the iMoot.
  
• In June I set up this blog! Good timing because I had a place to share my thoughts as soon as MoodleCloud was launched in early July. See my post and a related discussion on moodle.org.
• With my colleague Andy Nobes I facilitated two online courses in research writing for a global audience of developing country researchers. One of these courses had 367 participants and the other - INASP's first MOOC - had more than 1700 participants!
• I set up and facilitated a new course on the Moodle site of the organisation I work for (INASP). The course was for librarians in Ghana, and it was about copyright and licensing of research publications. Read a short summary of the course here.
• I wrote a series of 17 lessons on the research communication lifecycle, which are now being used in INASP's research writing and proposal writing courses on INASP Moodle. I developed these lessons with eXeLearning as this is a great tool to develop content that can be made available online and given in exactly the same format as downloadable files. See my comparison of three authoring tools: Moodle Lesson, Moodle Book, and eXeLearning.
• I wrote multiple-choice quiz questions for the above lessons and created quizzes using the Moodle Quiz tool. In our research writing course, learners must pass each weekly quiz by scoring at least 80%. They are however allowed an unlimited number of attempts. I initially thought these "check your understanding" quizzes could be too simple as they only test comprehension of the lesson content, but after seeing that most learners made multiple attempts to pass the quiz I realised they could be a bit challenging - which is a good thing! Moodle Quiz is an amazing tool with a vast array of options to develop engaging quizzes. 
• We started awarding digital badges to successful online course participants on INASP Moodle. Andy Nobes designed the badges and I took care of the settings to automatically award badges based on activity or course completion.
• In August I facilitated a 1-day workshop at Thai Nguyen University in Vietnam on open source educational technology, with an emphasis on Moodle.

  Participants at #inaspVN #edtech workshop setting up a personal Moodle site to supplement their #scicomm workshops pic.twitter.com/37wIN9uyt6

  — Ravi Murugesan (@RaviMurugesan) August 7, 2015

• Near the end of the year, I was invited to give a talk at the first MoodleMoot in India! This is going to take place next month in Delhi and I can't wait! I'm really thankful to Jaswinder Singh and the rest of the organising committee for their hard work.

Hopefully 2016 will be another exciting year of Moodling and contributing in a small way to improving learning experiences.

Restoring grades for a student who accidentally unenrolled from a Moodle course

A couple of weeks back I was contacted by a student in the AuthorAID MOOC who had unenrolled from the course by mistake (although the danger of doing this was explicitly mentioned in the course induction section). She said she had almost completed the course and she was understandably in panic.

Comparison of Moodle Lesson, Moodle Book, eXeLearning

Yesterday I created a spreadsheet at work to compare three content authoring tools: Moodle Lesson, Moodle Book, and eXeLearning. Here it is:

E-learning and other bad words

The "e" in "e-learning" troubles me. As long as it's there, "e-learning" will always seem like something separate from "learning". 

Some other words I don't like:

• E-resource (seemingly anything online can be an e-resource)
• Module (to refer to a lesson or unit)
• Virtual learning environment (does learning occur "virtually" on it and not in reality?)
• Learning management system (Big Brother would certainly like such a system connected through single-sign-on to his Mind Control Management System)

I like words such as...

• Learning platform (I don't think we need to say "online learning platform" anymore. We are in the age of the platform after all.)
• Lesson (with words such as online, interactive, downloadable, etc. to describe it)
• Document, spreadsheet, slide set
• Quiz (with words such as multiple-choice, adaptive, timed, automatically scored, etc. to describe it)
• Assignment
• Forum
• Unit (which may contain content and activities) 
• Course (as long as it's used to refer to a proper course and not just a set of "e-learning modules"--gah!)

How to be a successful learner in a MOOC

MOOCs (massive open online courses) have high dropout rates. It could well be that learners drop out of MOOCs because the content isn't relevant, the teacher is boring, the course is too hard, etc, but in this "age of MOOCs" it's perhaps good to be realistic and accept that teachers can't be responsible for every single student. Whether a MOOC has 100 learners or 100,000, the teacher is not going to be able to attend to learners individually. And who is going to take the biggest hit as a result of this?

Unprepared learners.

Troubleshooting a slow Moodle site at an African university

As part of my work for INASP I've been in touch with a few people at a major open university in Africa to set up an online course on their Moodle site.

But there was one obstacle: their Moodle site was really slow.

Sitting far away in Mumbai with only teacher-level access to their site, I could not tinker with the front-end administrator settings and certainly not the server where their site is hosted. All I could do was count the seconds it took to load a page.

Interactive elements in Moodle Book content

The Book module in Moodle allows you to easily create a series of pages of online content, with text, images, embedded videos, etc.

One major limitation of the Moodle Book is that you can't include any questions to check learners' understanding or to introduce a pause for reflection.

If you want to include a lot of questions, you should consider using the Moodle Lesson module, but what if you're happy with the Book but want to include at least some simple reflection questions? You can indeed do this!

Here's an example. Click the buttons below the question.

What do you understand by the term 'quality'?

Like what you see? Below is the code you have to put in a Moodle Book page (or chapter) in HTML view to create buttons like the ones shown above and the show/hide text. I've highlighted the show/hide text that's the only thing that needs to be customized.

<div id="showtext">
</div>
<script>
function displayResult() {
    document.getElementById("showtext").innerHTML = "'Quality' is a loaded word...<br><br>";
}
</script>

<script>
function reset() {
    document.getElementById("showtext").innerHTML = "";
}
</script>

<button onclick="displayResult()">Reflect and click</button>
<button onclick="reset()">Reset</button>

If you're going to use more than one show/hide feature on the same page, you can reuse the code but you have to remember to change the names of the functions - displayResult() and reset() - as well as the <div> element "showtext" for any new instance of the feature.